Mr. Charles Perkins's _Tuscan Sculptors_, of
which we have reason to be very proud, is already the accepted standard
work everywhere. Kugler's _Handbook of the German and Dutch Schools_,
edited by Sir Edmund Head, has not been superseded, I think. It is with
great hesitation that I name Mr. Ruskin in the catalogue of
guidebooks: he is so arbitrary and paradoxical, lays down the law so
imperiously, and contradicts himself so insolently, that a learner
attempting to follow him in his theories will be hopelessly bewildered.
Yet nowhere are the eternal, underlying truths upon which art rests so
clearly discerned and nobly defined as in _Modern Painters, The Seven
Lamps of Architecture_ and _The Stones of Venice_; and nowhere do we
find such poetical or beautiful descriptions. Yes, one should read
these earlier books of Ruskin's, if it be but for the pleasure they
give. All theories of art are useless for the American student who has
not been abroad: the object is not to make up one's mind respecting the
principles and limits of beauty in painting and sculpture, to form a
code of aesthetics while the great pictures and statues of the world
are still unknown; yet if a natural curiosity impel us to the inquiry,
there are Lessing and Winckelmann, still the first authorities, despite
some slight signs of human fallibility.
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