The anatomy and philosophy of expression as connected with the fine arts / by Sir Charles Bell.

  • Bell, Charles, Sir, 1774-1842.
Date:
1872
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The anatomy and philosophy of expression as connected with the fine arts / by Sir Charles Bell. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    arose to crush them. Her policy, and the leauiDg of her most vh'tuous citizens, were adverse to the arts. They feared that whilst they refined they should soften away those rugged and sterner qualities of the Roman soldiers which were bestowing on them the empire of the world. But the old \drtues at length declined, and the Romans came to covet the luxuries of conquered nations, whom they could not rival in refinement or the arts ; so that Rome became the centre and the common receptacle of the spoils of Egypt, Greece, and Italy. The inquiry into the history of ancient art were an idle one, if it did not lead to the conviction, that institutions, much more than climate, influence the faculties of man. Indolence steals upon comnmnities as upon individuals. In the same regions, and in the same climate, the inhabitants are at one time overwhelmed in ignorance and superstition, and at another, elevated to the most admired intellectual exertions. When the energies of a people are roused, there is an improvement in the arts of peace, however gloomy and foreboding the struggle may at first appear. The mind excited by public events does not subside into indolence. In Athens the struggle for power, and the desire of inde- pendence, forced the highest talents to the highest station.. It was during the contests of the free states of Italy that the arts revived.* Perhaps we should' attribute the cultivation of literature and the arts in Italy more to the smallness of the states than to the forms of their governments, for these were of every kind. While in Rome the Pope was an absolute sovereign, * See Roscoc's introductory cliaiiler to the Life of Lorenzo di ^redici.