The Sun.
London, England, 1865-01-13 00:00:00

THE B,r(IN, LONDON, FRIDAY EVENING, 'JANUARY 13; 1865.

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Mr. Layard, M,P., on the History of Art,

At a meeting of the Lambeth Society of Arts yes-
terday evening, Mr. Layard, M.P., delivered a most
interesting and comprehensive address on this sub-

ject. After a few preliminary observations as to the
true meaning of the phrase " Fine Arts," which in

the case of nations of any refinement of civilisation
he denied to be the property of any particular class

of the people, instanced the Greeks, who were so
thoroughly permeated with a feeling of art that

everything they constznitted, even to the most ordi-
nary implements, were beautiful. True arthe defined
to consist in a perfect appreciation and combination
of form and colour. Some nations had one, some
the other ; but without a combination of the two no

nation had ever been great in art. The Mexicans,
the Peruvians, and other South American nations,
the Chinese, and the Japanese had a fine appreciation

of colour, but none of forma The Assyrians and the
Egyptians had the earliest appreciation of both forms
of art ; whatever they did contained the elements of
beauty, and everything we possessed now might be
said to be a development of one or other form of
art. Almost at the commencement of his address

Mr. Layard laid down the canon that the arts of a
nation depended on the character of a people, and
represented its characteristics and peculiar circum-
stances, and his first illustration was drawn from

the dissimilarity of Assyrian and Egyptian art.
Egyptian art, in its massive invariable character,
corresponded to the character of an exclusive, un-
changing caste people, possessing unlimited com-
mand of stone materials ; while, on the other hand,
Assyrian art represented a conquering, ambitious
people, given to assimilating the characteristics of
the different peoples with whom they came in con-
tact. From these two peoples the Greeks collected
the chief features of their arts, and developed out

those beautiful forms which were still the admira-
tion of the world. To illustrate this idea Mr.

Layard referred to numerous drawings on the wall
from the remains of Thebes, Nineveh, Selinus,
2Egina, Paestum, and Athens, tracing the form and

•
development of each great architectural idea in its
structural and ornamental details. The great spe-
cimens of Doric art were all clearly drawn from
Egyptian models, and recent discoveries in Assyria
had furnished a remarkable fulfilment of Niebuhr's
prophecy, that lonic art would be found, some day
or other, to have an Asiatic origin. Persia adopted
almost entirely the art of the country which it con-
quered, and the specimens at Persepolis and in the
cities of Asia Minor showed the most manifest traces
of Assyrian origin. With regard to other nations of
antiquity, neither the Jews nor the Phoenicians ap-
peared to have any ideas of art of their own. The
Jewish ideas of art appeared to be entirely Assyrian;
so that the description of the building of the Temple
in the Book of Kings and in " Josephus" appeared
to 'correspond almost entirely with the description
of an Assyrian building. The decay of art in Greece
was contemporaneous with the decay of Greek free-
dom, as was the case in every other country in which
art had flourished. Passing to Italy, Mr. Layard
pointed out that Etruscan and Roman art was
merely a reproduction of Greek art, and that archi-

tecture was the chief art by which the Romans were
distinguished. Nothing gave a greater idea of their
power than the magnificent public buildings which
they had erected in their colonial cities, and which

tide.

far exceeded anything this country had ever pro-
duced. Passing from the fall of the Roman Empire
over the dark ages, Mr. Layard took a rapid survey
of the state of the arts among the Arab and Teuton
nations up to, the time of the Renaissance, when the
Italians took Gothic art in hand and moulded
it to their requirements, still insisting on his
two main theses—that this development of
art was contemporaneous with the rise of political
freedom among the people, and that the art itself
was traceable in its main features to Greek, and
beyond that to Assyrian and Egyptian models. The
first great classic architect of modern Italy was Ni-
cholas Pisano, the first great Christian artist was
Giotto, and the basis of Italian art might almost be
said to be the Church of Assisi, the walls of which
Giotto was called upon to ornament with passages
from the life of St. Francis. (Cheers.) The per-
fection of Christian art was attained almost by
Ghirlandajo, though it could hardly be said ever to
have been brought to perfection, owing to the decay
of freedom which followed the German and French
inroads, and the rise of a false classical taste. This
falling off was shown in the works of Raffaelle,
whose later manner was inferior to his earlier.
Even the great Michael Angelo could not resist the
change. Venice, which preserved her freedom
longest, also preserved the traditions of true art the
longest, but the last stroke given to art in Italy was
by the Jesuits. The churches built by them con-
tained specimens of everything that was false in
art. The eclectic school of which Domenichino and
three Caraccis were the chief glories had lost much
of the repute which they had once enjoyed, since it
had been perceived that they were based upon no
national feeling, and that they were merely speci-
mens of false art. Of modern schools, Mr. Layard
touched chiefly on the English ; and, after criticis-
ing severely our shortcomings in architecture as
evinced in the National Gallery, the British Mu-
seum, and the House of Commons, and in sculp-
ture as shown by our 'public statues, he proceeded
to point out, in illustration of his idea, that the art of a
people corresponds to its characteristics, that the
English pictures most valued abroad were our
Wilkies, Hogarths, Faeds, and Friths, who re-
presented domestic scenes ; and our landscape paint-
ers, Turners, Stanfields, and .Calcotts. Mr. Layard
expressed his dissent from the extreme praise which
has been lavished on Mr. Herbert's fresco, and,
while allowing it to be a great work, lamented the
pervading lack of idealism in it. Moses and Aaron
were simply common Bedouin Arabs, who might be
met about in the East every day. In conclusion,
Mr. Layard drew a hopeful picture of the future
which English art and art schools had before them
in applying the principles of form and colour to the
new materials of iron and glass which had been
brought into use, and to the structures, such as the
railway stations, the great warehouses, and the
Crystal Palace, which the wants of modern civilisa-
tion and commerce were calling up on every side.