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    Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts
    Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts
    Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts
    Ebook72 pages56 minutes

    Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts

    By John Robert Scott

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 15, 2013
    Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts

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      Book preview

      Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts - John Robert Scott

      The Project Gutenberg eBook, Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts, by John Robert Scott

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

      Title: Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts

      Augustan Reprint Society Publication No. 45, 1954

      Author: John Robert Scott

      Release Date: March 19, 2013 [eBook #42371]

      Language: English

      Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

      ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DISSERTATION ON THE PROGRESS OF THE FINE ARTS***

      E-text prepared by

      Tor Martin Kristiansen, Nicole Henn-Kneif, Joseph Cooper,

      and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team

      (http://www.pgdp.net)

      The Augustan Reprint Society

      JOHN ROBERT SCOTT

      Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts

      With an Introduction by

      Roy Harvey Pearce

      Publication Number 45

      Los Angeles

      William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

      University of California

      1954

      GENERAL EDITORS

      Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan

      Ralph Cohen, University of California, Los Angeles

      Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles

      Lawrence Clark Powell, Clark Memorial Library

      ASSISTANT EDITOR

      W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan

      ADVISORY EDITORS

      Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington

      Benjamin Boyce, Duke University

      Louis Bredvold, University of Michigan

      John Butt, King's College, University of Durham

      James L. Clifford, Columbia University

      Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago

      Edward Niles Hooker, University of California, Los Angeles

      Louis A. Landa, Princeton University

      Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota

      Ernest C. Mossner, University of Texas

      James Sutherland, University College, London

      H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles

      CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

      Edna C. Davis, Clark Memorial Library

      INTRODUCTION

      Scott's Dissertation on the Progress of the Fine Arts embodies what we can now see as a final development in his century's deep concern to understand why what it so often admitted was the greatest art had somehow not been forthcoming in what it as often claimed was the greatest century. The Dissertation is in no way an original work; rather—and this is its primary value for us—its author takes a belief which his culture has given him and, like others before him, tries to clarify one of its implications. The belief is in the idea of a universal progress marred, if it in the end can be said to be marred, only by an esthetic primitivism; the implication is that that esthetic primitivism can be not only comprehended but surmounted. Scott accepts the century's commonplace that art of power and significance has been necessarily produced only in societies markedly simpler than his own; and he accepts too the fact (for such it was when men believed in it and judged according to the principles generated by it) that in all forms of culture excepting art, his own richly complex society has produced something far surpassing anything produced in the simpler society of classical Greece or of the Italian Renaissance. Scott's uniqueness is that, unlike those of his predecessors who had worked with the same belief, he does not try to establish an historical rationale for this status quo. He goes so far as to envisage—perhaps it would be truer to his state of mind to say posit—an enlightened modern society which will at once remain what it is and yet so change itself as to make possible the production of major art.

      The main interest for us in the Dissertation, then, lies in Scott's notions of the kind of society needed to produce major art, and beyond that, in what is entailed in holding fast to that notion, developing it into a doctrine, and even hoping to make it a reality in his own time. He outlines the doctrine in great detail, simply by describing what he takes to be the sociocultural situation of the classical Greek artist (and incidentally, that of the artist of the Italian Renaissance). He chooses to write almost entirely of the fine arts (for him in this case, sculpture), although he conceives, as the student of his age would expect him to, that what holds for the fine arts will also hold for poetry. In the immediacy of appeal of sculpture, he finds a quality which, when its working and expression are analysed, will let him see just how the artist and his work have been ideally related to the society in which they have flourished.

      Scott's description of the artist and his place in Greek society is one which, in general, is familiar to students of eighteenth-century critical theory. Equally familiar is his concern to establish the fact that, as

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