Belcaro; Being Essays on Sundry Aesthetical Questions

"I am sorry you think so ill of me," he said sadly, "and I dare say I have given you good cause. I dare say I am all the things you say--vain, and womanish, and insolently dissa...

Thus we have seen that the sculptor of the Niobe deliberately refused to embody his complete mental vision of the scene of massacre; that he selected among the attitudes and ges...

Again, the necessity of referring all good art to morality and all bad art to immorality, obliges Ruskin to postulate that every period which has produced bad art has been a per...

We are apt to think of music as of a sort of speech until, on examination, we find it has no defined meaning either for the speaker or for the listener. In reality, music and sp...

In all these cases the artist refused to grapple with the supernatural, and dismissed it with a mere stereotyped symbol, not more artistic than the names which he might have eng...

Such is the work. Let us seek the master. Pietro Vannucci, of Città della Pieve, surnamed Perugino, Petrus de Castro Plebis, as he signed himself, lived, as tradition has it, in...

But no, another version did remain possible: that strange version given by that strange solemn little Spanish singer, after whose singing of "Voi che sapete" we all felt dissati...

The poet, therefore, is the artist into whose work there enters the greatest proportion of his individual nature; if he be flippant in temper his works cannot be earnest; if he...

Hence it is that the child, who will one day become ourselves, rarely cares to return to these sculpture galleries; or, if it care to return to any, it is to mixed galleries lik...

"I can't make it out. You seem to be in the right, Baldwin, and yet I still seem to be justified in sticking to my ideas," said Cyril. "Do you see," he went on, "you have always...

"Why, thus: our modern familiarity with the intellectual work of all times and races has made people perceive that in past days indecency was always part and parcel of literatur...

To appreciate a work of art means, therefore, to appreciate that work of art itself, as distinguished from appreciating something outside it, something accidentally or arbitrari...

Certainly, the group answers very well to the general idea of the massacre of the Niobides: the figures have the attitudes of men and women overtaken by a sudden danger against...

Thus much of the form into which, as the only one which, however imperfectly, suited my liking, I have worked these notes, taken from out of the confusion of my commonplace book...

Cherubino, we say, is not in Mozart's half of the work; he is in the words, not in the music. Is this a fault or a merit? is it impotence in the art or indifference in the artis...

There are in reality two sorts of supernatural, although only one really deserves the name. A great number of beliefs in all mythologies are in reality mere scientific errors--a...

Such was the solution of Ruskin's scruples respecting his right of giving to art the time and energies he might have given to moral improvement; and such the æsthetical creed wh...

This is real passion for a real woman, a woman very different from the splendid semi-vivified statue of Goethe, the Helen with only the cold, bloodless, intellectual life which...

But stop again. Are we quite sure that we know what we mean when we say "a work of art?" Are we quite sure that we may not, without knowing it, be talking of two things under on...

They were slowly driving along the beach, among the stunted pine shoots and the rough grass and the yellow bindweed half buried in the sand, and the heaps of sea-blackened branc...

It is a strange and beautiful fact that whatsoever is touched by genius, no matter how humble in itself, becomes precious and immortal. This wrinkled old woman is merely one of...

I. THE BOOK AND ITS TITLE 1 II. THE CHILD IN THE VATICAN 17 III. ORPHEUS AND EURYDICE 49 IV. FAUSTUS AND HELENA 70 V. CHAPELMASTER KREISLER 106 VI. CHERUBINO 129 VII. IN UMBRIA...

There is another objection which you may make, which (though perhaps unformulated) you certainly will feel, against me and my book. You have an uncomfortable sense that in some...