Category: Art
“The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight awhile, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted, and the mind can only repose on the stability of truth.”
“The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight awhile, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest; the pleasures of sudden wonder a...
2. Part 2We know that the mind receives pleasure through the sense of hearing, not only from the music of nature, but from the euphony of prosaic composition, the rhythm of poetic measur...
3. Part 3It has been remarked, with equal comprehensiveness and truth, by a writer[6] in the _British and Foreign Medical Review_, that “there is harmony of numbers in all nature—in the...
4. Part 4We assume, therefore, that the standard of symmetry, so estimated, is deduced from the simplest law that could have been conceived—the law that the angles of direction must all...
5. Part 5Thus we find that the system here adopted for applying this law of nature to the production of beauty in the abstract forms employed in architectural composition, so far from in...
6. Part 6The beauty derived from proportion, imparted by the system here pointed out, and from a contour of curves derived from the same harmonic angles, is not confined to the human fig...
7. Part 7The generality of mankind are, however, capable of appreciating the harmony of colour which, like that of both sound and form, arises from the simultaneous exhibition of opposit...
8. Part 8“The next name on our list is that of the famous Euphranor (B.C. 362). For the fact that to the practice of sculpture and of painting he added an exposition of the theory, we ar...
9. Part 9“It is time that the scattered computations by which architecture has been analysed—more than enough—be synthetised into those formulæ which, as Mrs Somerville tells us, ‘are em...
10. Part 10“Let us now turn to Dr Zeising’s own theory. It is this—that in every beautiful form lines are divided in extreme and mean ratio; or, that any line considered as a whole, bears...
11. Part 11Mr Hay has studied the subject deeply and scientifically. In this treatise on ornamental design, the student will find a clue to the discovery of the source of an endless variet...