File:The table book of art; a history of art in all countries and ages (1880) (14772445374).jpg

Identifier: tablebookofarthi00sand (find matches)
Title: The table book of art; a history of art in all countries and ages
Year: 1880 (1880s)
Authors: Sandhurst, Phillip T
Subjects: Painting -- History
Publisher: N.Y., Worthington
Contributing Library: New York Public Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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eighth or ninth century. It was restoredand carried on by artists from the East during the tenth, eleventh, and twelfthcenturies, as the rising wealth of cities enabled their rulers to import the techni-cally skilled hands of Byzantium. Art, then, like truth, has never in the darkest night of history been without atorch-bearer; and whether reflected on the broad bosom of the Euphrates or theNile, on the streamlet of the Illissus, or on the yellow waters of the Tiber, its lighthas been borne safely along, till now in Cimabue it meets the approaching dawn ofintellectual life and freedom. Italian art existed in small beginnings, in the gorgeous but quaintly formal orfantastic devices of illuminated missals, and in the stiff spasmodic efforts of here andthere an artist spirit such as the old Florentine Cimabues, when a great manheralded a great epoch. But first we should like to mention the means by which artthen worked. Painting on board and on plastered walls, the second styled painting
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r~ CIMABUE. 23 in fresco, preceded painting on canvas. Colours were mixed with water or with size,egg, or fig-juice—the latter practices termed tempera (in English in distemper) beforeoil was used to mix colours. But painters did not confine themselves then to paintingwith pencil or brush, else they might have attained technical excellence sooner. Ithas been well said that the poems of the middle ages were written in stone; so theearlier painters painted in stone, in that mosaic work which one of them called—referring to its durability—painting for eternity; and in metals. Many of themwere the sons of jewellers or jewellers themselves; they worked in iron as well as ingold and silver, and they were sculptors and architects as well as painters, engineersalso, so far as engineering in the construction of roads, bridges, and canals, wasknown in those days. The Greek knowledge of anatomy was well-nigh lost, so thatdrawing was incorrect and form bad. The idea of showing degrees of di

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