Lectures on painting, delivered at the Royal Academy of Arts; with a letter on the proposal for a public memorial of the naval glory of Great Britain

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1809 Excerpt: ...had derelictions and deficiencies too great to be overlooked, and too dangerous to be excused; that.he was sometimes capricious and extravagant in his inventions and generally too ostentatious of his anatomical knowledge; that he wanted the vigorous tone of colour, and force of chiaro become an imitator, though he may become a caricaturist, # of Michael Angelo: but let him first make himself master of his science and principles, let him carefully separate his errors from his excellence; arid then, if he possess his boundless imagination, he will probably succeed better than Vasari, Bronzino, Hemskirk, Coxis, Goltzius, Sprangher, and a herd of others, who mistook bombast for grandeur, distortion for grace, and phrensied convulsion for energy Superficial and clumsy mannerists! the style of Michael Angelo, to them, was only the lion's skin on the ass's back, which, instead of rendering him terrible, only exposed him to blows, ridicule, and contempt. Such was not Raffaelle Sanzio, the founder of the Roman school, the master of passion,--the painter of human nature. The genius of Raftaellc was not of that phosphoric kind, that blazes out of itself without foreign help: his manner, at the commencement of his career, was dry, minute, and hard to excess; precisely like that of his master Pietro Perugino, in whose footsteps he appeared, for a time, to be going on, without a conception of his own powers, or those of the art, and without imbibing a ray of inspiration from the miraculous remains of the ancients, by which he was surrounded, or transferring an atom of their grandeur of style into his own woris. A visit to Florence, however, soon enabled him to leave his master at a / ljumble distance. Seizing every opportunity of improvement, as he rolled on, he increase...