Relation in art : being a suggested scheme of art criticism, with which is incorporated a sketch of a hypothetic philosophy of relation / by Vernon Blake.

  • Vernon Blake
Date:
1925
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Relation in art : being a suggested scheme of art criticism, with which is incorporated a sketch of a hypothetic philosophy of relation / by Vernon Blake. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    But it must not be thought that this work is only an abstract philosophical one. I have devoted but a part of the first nine chapters to the purely philosophical question. These may be omitted by the reader uniquely interested in artistic criticism. The remainder consists entirely of prac¬ tical critical examination of artistic technique classified by the nature of thought and expression, rather than chrono¬ logically or geographically. For example : I examine the nature of the arrangement of planes, of masses, and that of the surface of a Michael-Angelo figure ; I make a similar technical examination of one by Pheidias ; I compare the two and dis¬ cuss the thought differences between the sixteenth Florentine century and the fifth Athenian century, and call attention to the differences of plastic thought rendering that they produce. I have thought it inadvisable to present this mass of analytical work to the reader without first submitting to him the synthetised key to its co-ordination ; though as a matter of fact in my own case the analysis of course pre¬ ceded the synthesis. • •••«••••• The chapters which follow this preface were written during the first year of the war. At that moment, having been for long isolated from the scientific world, I was completely ignorant of the existence of the physico-mathematical move¬ ment which has since thrown into such full light the names of those admirable workmen, Lorentz, Minkowski and Einstein. It was in 1915 that I submitted my manuscript, already completed, to a mathematician who at once drew my attention to the conclusions, then being perfected, which have been drawn from the electro-dynamic work of Lorentz. I at once procured the necessary books and studied the theories advanced in their pages. It was at this time that I intro¬ duced the one or two allusions to the Principle of Relativity to be found in the subsequent pages.
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