Читать книгу A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools - National Gallery (Great Britain) - Страница 2

So far as I know, there has never yet been compiled, for the illustration of any collection of paintings whatever, a series of notes at once so copious, carefully chosen, and usefully arranged, as this which has been prepared, by the industry and good sense of Mr. Edward T. Cook, to be our companion through the magnificent rooms of our own National Gallery; without question now the most important collection of paintings in Europe for the purposes of the general student. Of course the Florentine School must always be studied in Florence, the Dutch in Holland, and the Roman in Rome; but to obtain a clear knowledge of their relations to each other, and compare with the best advantage the characters in which they severally excel, the thoughtful scholars of any foreign country ought now to become pilgrims to the Dome – (such as it is) – of Trafalgar Square.

We have indeed – be it to our humiliation remembered – small reason to congratulate ourselves on the enlargement of the collection now belonging to the public, by the sale of the former possessions of our nobles. But since the parks and castles which were once the pride, beauty, and political strength of England are doomed by the progress of democracy to be cut up into lots on building leases, and have their libraries and pictures sold at Sotheby's and Christie's, we may at least be thankful that the funds placed by the Government at the disposal of the Trustees for the National Gallery have permitted them to save so much from the wreck of English mansions and Italian monasteries, and enrich the recreations of our metropolis with graceful interludes by Perugino and Raphael.

It will be at once felt by the readers of the following catalogue that it tells them, about every picture and its painter, just the things they wished to know. They may rest satisfied also that it tells them these things on the best historical authorities, and that they have in its concise pages an account of the rise and decline of the arts of the Old Masters, and record of their personal characters and worldly state and fortunes, leaving nothing of authentic tradition, and essential interest, untold.

As a collection of critical remarks by esteemed judges, and of clearly formed opinions by earnest lovers of art, the little book possesses a metaphysical interest quite as great as its historical one. Of course the first persons to be consulted on the merit of a picture are those for whom the artist painted it: with those in after generations who have sympathy with them; one does not ask a Roundhead or a Republican his opinion of the Vandyke at Wilton, nor a Presbyterian minister his impressions of the Sistine Chapel: – but from any one honestly taking pleasure in any sort of painting, it is always worth while to hear the grounds of his admiration, if he can himself analyse them. For those who take no pleasure in painting, or who are offended by its inevitable faults, any form of criticism is insolent. Opinion is only valuable when it

When I last lingered in the Gallery before my old favourites, I thought them more wonderful than ever before; but as I draw towards the close of life, I feel that the real world is more wonderful yet: that Painting has not yet fulfilled half her mission, – she has told us only of the heroism of men and the happiness of angels: she may perhaps record in future the beauty of a world whose mortal inhabitants are happy, and which angels may be glad to visit.

J. Ruskin.

April 1888.