The Bronze Statue from Cerigotto and the Study of Style

Extract

The article of Mr. Frost in the preceding number of this Journal (pp. 217, seq.) gives me an opportunity to protest against what I consider a dangerous development of archaeological study in our days. I must thank the Editors for having, in spite of the great pressure upon their space, granted me a few pages in the present number to record this protest; while I must defer to a later issue of this Journal the fuller exposition of my views on the Cerigotto Bronze, the statue of Agias from Delphi, on Scopas and Lysippus.

The protest—or, perhaps better, the warning—which I wish to publish concerns the course given in the present day to the study of style in Classical Art. To this study, as practised by the late Heinrich v. Brunn, Archaeology owes its greatest advance; and the serious students of Mediaeval and Renaissance art have borrowed these methods from classical archaeology, thus opening out a vast field of accurate information. I have myself devoted my energies to its cultivation and endeavoured to lay down the principles of its proper application in the first chapter of my Essays on the Art of Pheidias published in 1885. I believe, moreover, that we are only at the beginning of this line of work which promises such great results ia the future. Nor need we remain content with the establishment and amplification of our knowledge of Greek art in the great classical period, as little as in Greek literature study, and especially research, are to be confined to the great classical writers.