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Transcriber’s Note
All footnotes havebeen collected prior to the Index. Consult the Transcriber’sNotes at the end of this text for details.
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TEN LECTURES
ON THE RELATION OF
NATURAL SCIENCE TO ART,
GIVEN BEFORE THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD,
IN LENT TERM, 1872
BY
JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D.,
HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW
OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD.
TWELFTH THOUSAND
LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN, 156, CHARING CROSS ROAD
1900
[All rights reserved]
Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
At the Ballantyne Press
The following Lectures have been written, not with less care, but withless pains, than any in former courses, because no labour could haverendered them exhaustive statements of their subjects, and I wished,therefore, to take from them every appearance of pretending to be so:but the assertions I have made are entirely deliberate, though theirterms are unstudied; and the one which to the general reader will appearmost startling, that the study of anatomy is destructive to art, isinstantly necessary in explanation of the system adopted for thedirection of my Oxford schools.
At the period when engraving might have become to art what printingbecame to literature, the four greatest point-draughtsmen hithertoknown, Mantegna, Sandro Botticelli, Dürer, and Holbein, occupiedthemselves in the new industry. All these four men were as high inintellect and moral sentiment as in art-power; and if they had engravedas Giotto painted, with popular and unscientific simplicity, would haveleft an inexhaustible series of prints, delightful to the most innocentminds, and strengthening to the most noble.
But two of them, Mantegna and Dürer, were so polluted and paralyzed bythe study of anatomy that the former’s best works (the magnificentmythology of the Vices in the Louvre, for instance) are entirelyrevolting to all women and children; while Dürer never could draw onebeautiful female form or face; and, of his important plates, only four,the Melancholia, St. Jerome in his study, St. Hubert, and The Knight andDeath, are of any use for popular instruction, because in these only,the figures being fully draped or armed, he was enabled to think andfeel rightly, being delivered from the ghastly toil of bone-delineation.
Botticelli and Holbein studied the face first, and the limbssecondarily; and the works they have left are therefore (withoutexception)