'
'Oh, everything is Manicheism with you, Claude!'
'And no wonder, while the world is as full of it now as it was in the
thirteenth century. But let that pass. This craving after so-called
classic art, whether it be Manicheism or not, is certainly a fighting
against God,--a contempt of everything which He has taught us artists
since the introduction of Christianity. I abominate this setting up
of Sculpture above Painting, of the Greeks above the Italians,--as if
all Eastern civilization, all Christian truth, had taught art
nothing,--as if there was not more real beauty in a French cathedral
or a Venetian palazzo than in a dozen Parthenons, and more soul in
one Rafaelle, or Titian either, than in all the Greek statues of the
Tribune or Vatican.'
'You have changed your creed, I see, and, like all converts, are
somewhat fierce and fanatical. You used to believe in Zeuxis and
Parrhasius in old times.'
'Yes, as long as I believed in Fuseli's "Lectures;" but when I saw at
Pompeii the ancient paintings which still remain to us, my faith in
their powers received its first shock; and when I re-read in the
Lectures of Fuseli and his school all their extravagant praises of
the Greek painters, and separated their few facts fairly out from
among the floods of rant on which they floated, I came to the
conclusion that the ancients knew as little of colour or chiaroscuro
as they did of perspective, and as little of spiritual expression as
they did of landscape-painting.
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