Lectures on Architecture and Painting
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III. TURNER, AND HIS WORK?. My olject this evening is not so much to gVe you ai.y account of the works or the genius of the great paintei whom we have so lately lost (which it would require rathet a year than an hour to do), as to give you some idea of the position which his works hold with respect to the landscape of other periods, and of the general condition and prospects of the landscape art of the present day. I will not lose time in prefatory remarks, as I have little enough at any rate, but will enter abruptly on my subject. You are all of you well aware that landscape seems hardly to have exercised any strong influence, as such, on any pagan nation, or pagan artist. I have no time to enter into any details on this, of course, most intricate and difficult subject; but I will only ask you to observe, that wherever natural scenery is alluded to by the ancients, it is either agriculturally, with the kind of feeling that a good Scotch farmer has; sensually, in the enjoyment of sun or shade, cool winds or sweet scents; fearfully, in Imere vulgar dread of rocks and desolale places, as compared with the comfort of cities; or, finally, superstitiously in the personification or deification of natural powers generally with much degradation of their impressiveness, as in the paltry fables of Ulysses receiving the winds in bags from Eolus, and of the Cyclops hammering lightning sharp at the ends, on an anvil. Of course you will here and there find feeble evidences of a higher sensibility, chiefly, I think, in Plato, Eschylus, Aristophanes, and Virgil. Homer, though in the epithets he applies to land scape always thoroughly graphic, uses the same epithet fot rocks, seas, and trees, from one end of his poem to the other, evidently without the smallest interest in anythi...