The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Kt. Late President of the Royal Academy;: Containing His Discourses, Papers in the Idler, the Journal of a Tour Through Flanders and Holland, and Also His Commentary on Du Fresnoy's Art of Painting. : Printed from the Author's Revised Copies, with His Last Corrections and Additions. To which is Prefixed, Some Account of the Life of the Author, by Edmond Malone, Esq. One of His Executors..

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T. Cadell and W. Davies, in the Strand, Booksellers to the Royal Academy., 1819 - Art, English

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Page 235 - The Italian, attends only to the invariable, the great and general ; ideas which are fixed and inherent in universal nature; the Dutch, on the contrary, to literal truth and a minute exactness in the detail, as I may say, of nature modified by accident. The attention to these petty peculiarities is the very cause of this naturalness so much admired in the Dutch pictures, which, if we suppose it to be a beauty, is certainly...
Page 94 - Raphael lived but thirty-seven years ; and in that short space carried the art so far beyond what it had before reached, that he appears to stand alone as a model to his successors.
Page 221 - I was much pleased with your ridicule of those shallow criticks, whose judgment, though often right as far as it goes, yet reaches only to inferior beauties, and who, unable to comprehend the whole, judge only by parts, and from thence determine the merit of extensive works.
Page 232 - Such faults may be said to be the ebullitions of genius ; but at least he had this merit, that he never was insipid ; and whatever passion his works may excite, they will always escape contempt. What I have had under consideration is the sublimest style, particularly that of Michael Angelo, the Homer of painting.
Page 119 - It is the lowest style only, of arts, whether of Painting, Poetry, or Musick, that may be said, in the vulgar sense, to be naturally pleasing. The higher efforts of those arts, we know by experience, do not affect minds wholly uncultivated. This refined taste is the consequence of education and habit...
Page 118 - Raffaelle himself, whom our enthusiasm honours with the name of Divine. The same sentiment is adopted by Pope in his epitaph on Sir Godfrey Kneller; and he turns the panegyric solely on imitation, as it is a sort of deception. I shall not think my time misemployed, if by any means I may contribute to confirm your opinion of what ought to be the object of your pursuit; because, though the best...
Page 231 - ... minute exactness in the detail, as I may say, of Nature modified by accident. The attention to these petty peculiarities is the very cause of this naturalness so much admired in the Dutch pictures, which, if we suppose it to be a beauty, is certainly of a lower order, which ought to give place to a beauty of a superior kind, since one cannot be obtained but by departing from the other.
Page 240 - The black and white nations must, in respect of beauty, be considered as of different kinds, at least a different species of the same kind ; from one of which to the other, as I observed, no inference can be drawn. Novelty is said to be one of the causes of beauty : that novelty is a very sufficient reason why we should admire, is not denied ; but, because it is uncommon, is it, therefore, beautiful? The beauty that is produced by...
Page 233 - Maratti, and from thence to the very bathos of insipidity to which they are now sunk; so that there is no need of remarking, that where I mentioned the Italian painters in opposition to the Dutch, I mean not the moderns, but the heads of the old Roman and Bolognian schools ; nor did I mean to include in my idea of an Italian painter, the Venetian school, which may be said to be the Dutch part of the Italian genius.
Page 294 - Rubens, conscious of his powers in painting horses, introduced them in his pictures as often as he could. This part of the work, where the horses are represented, is by far the best in regard to colouring ; it has a freshness which the other two pictures want: but those appear to have suffered by the sun.

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