st powerful existing
influences of education and sources of pleasure among civilized people.

And this investigation, so far from interrupting, will facilitate our
examination of the history of the nobler arts. You will see in the
preface to my lectures on Greek sculpture that I intend them to be
followed by a course on architecture, and that by one on Florentine
sculpture. But the art of engraving is so manifestly, at Florence,
though not less essentially elsewhere, a basis of style both in
architecture and sculpture, that it is absolutely necessary I should
explain to you in what the skill of the engraver consists, before I can
define with accuracy that of more admired artists. For engraving, though
not altogether in the method of which you see examples in the
print-shops of the High Street, is, indeed, a prior art to that either
of building or sculpture, and is an inseparable part of both, when they
are rightly practiced.

7. And while we thus examine the scope of this first of the arts, it
will be necessary that we learn also the scope of mind of the early
practicers of it, and accordingly acquaint ourselves with the main
events in the biography of the schools of Florence. To understand the
temper and meaning of one great master is to lay the best, if not the
only, foundation for the understanding of all; and I shall therefore
make it the leading aim of this course of lectures to remind you of what
is known, and direct you to what is knowable, of the life and character
of the greatest Florentine master of engraving, Sandro Botticelli; and,
incidentally, to give you some idea of the power of the greatest master
of the German, or any northern, school, Hans Holbein.

8. You must feel, however, that I am using the word "engraving" in a
somewhat different, and, you may imagine, a wider, sense, than that
which you are accustomed to attach to it. So far from being a wider
sense, it is in reality a more accurate and restricted one, while yet it
embraces every conceivable right application of the art. And I wish, in
this first lecture, to make entirely clear to you the proper meaning of
the word, and proper range of the art of, engraving; in my next
following lecture, to show you its place in Italian schools, and then,
in due order, the place it ought to take in our own, and in all schools.

9. First then, to-day, of the Differentia, or essential quality of
Engraving, as distinguished from other arts.

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