Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III ENTER THE GREEK The new factor at work : The movement in Greek archaic art an intellectual movement: The Greek point of view : Intellectual bias of the Greek mind : In what respects sculpture is calculated to express that bias : The Greek instinct for definition : Its restrictions and limitations : Greek religion : The Greek idea of death : Gods and tombs : Greek poetry : Analogy between Myron and Eschylus, Phidias and Sophocles : What Greek art cannot give VERY likely the practice, which has become universal in these specialising days, of treating art as if it could be disjoined from the life out of which it grew, may have its conveniences, but it is responsible none the less for the loss of much of the interest of the subject. We lose, by so treating it, a part of the contents of art. Out of the current criticisms of Florentine, Venetian, Sienese, and other schools of Italian painting, how much do we gather of the inward intellectual and emotional life which found these modes of utterance, and which, through these several yet converging currents, went to make up the Italian Renaissance ? From the many books written by architects on architecture, treating, as they do, that great subject from the technical point of view, as a matter of material and structural law, what do we divine of the national spirit which in the great building eras moulded our cathedrals and abbeys in its own likeness ? Art has a human anddramatic quality. It is the most vivid, the most convincing and eloquent expression of the life of its own age which the past has handed down to us ; and more especially is this true of the great periods of art, the creative epochs as they may be called; for it is the art of such epochs which is fullest of life, and which has the greatest collective impuls...