van of which
is led by Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Durer, and the rear by Gherard
Lavresse--as the principles which they detail must be supposed to be
already in the student's possession, or are occasionally interwoven with
the topics of the lectures;" and proceeds "to the historically critical
writers, who consist of all the ancients yet remaining, Pausanias
excepted." Fortunately, there remain a sufficient number of the
monuments of ancient art "to furnish us with their standard of style;"
for the accounts are so contradictory, that we should have little to
rely upon. The works of the ancient artists are all lost: we must be
content with the "hasty compilations of a warrior," Pliny, or the
"incidental remarks of an orator," (rhetorician,) Quintilian. The former
chiefly valuable when he quotes--for then, as Reynolds observed, "he
speaks the language of an artist:" as in his account of the glazing
method of Apelles; the manner in which Protogenes embodied his colours;
and the term of art _circumlitio_, by which Nicias gave "the line of
correctness to the models of Praxiteles;" the foreshortening the bull by
Pausias, and throwing his shade on the crowd--showing a forcible
chiaroscuro. "Of Quintilian, whose information is all relative to style,
the tenth chapter of the XII.th book, a passage on expression in the
XI.th, and scattered fragments of observations analogous to the process
of his own art, is all that we possess; but what he says, though
comparatively small in bulk, with what we have of Pliny, leaves us to
wish for more. His review of the revolutions of style in painting, from
Polygnotus to Apelles, and in sculpture, from Phidias to Lysippus, is
succinct and rapid; but though so rapid and succinct, every word is
poised by characteristic precision, and can only be the result of long
and judicious enquiry, and perhaps even minute examination." Still less
have we scattered in the writings of Cicero, who, "though he seems to
have had little native taste for painting and sculpture, and even less
than he had taste for poetry, had a conception of nature; and with his
usual acumen, comparing the principles of one art with those of another,
frequently scattered useful hints, or made pertinent observations. For
many of these he might probably be indebted to Hortensius, with whom,
though his rival in eloquence, he lived on terms of familiarity, and who
was a man of declared taste, and one of the first collectors of the
tim