HISTORY
OF
ANCIENT ART
BY
DR. FRANZ VON REBER
DIRECTOR OF THE BAVARIAN ROYAL AND STATE GALLERIES OF PAINTINGS
PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY AND POLYTECHNIC OF MUNICH
Revised by the Author
TRANSLATED AND AUGMENTED
BY
JOSEPH THACHER CLARKE
WITH 310 ILLUSTRATIONS AND A GLOSSARY OF TECHNICAL TERMS
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1882, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
All rights reserved.
THE application of the historic method to the study of the Fine Arts,begun with imperfect means by Winckelmann one hundred and twenty yearsago, has been productive of the best results in our own days. It hasintroduced order into a subject previously confused, disclosing thenatural progress of the arts, and the relations of the arts of thedifferent races by whom they have been successively practised. It hasalso had the more important result of securing to the fine arts theirdue place in the history of mankind as the chief record of variousstages of civilization, and as the most trustworthy expression of thefaith, the sentiments, and the emotions of past ages, and often even oftheir institutions and modes of life. The recognition of thesignificance of the fine arts in these respects is, indeed, as yet butpartial, and the historical study of art does not hold the place in thescheme of liberal education which it is certain before long to attain.One reason of this fact lies in the circumstance that few of the generalhistorical treatises on the fine arts that have been produced during thelast fifty years have been works of sufficient learning or judgment togive them authority as satisfactory sources of instruction. Errors ofstatement and vague speculations have abounded in them. The subject,moreover, has been confused, especially in Germany, by the intrusion ofmetaphysics into its domain, in the guise of a professed but spuriousscience of æsthetics.
Under these conditions, a history of the fine arts that should statecorrectly what is known concerning their works, and should treat theirvarious manifestations with intelligence and in just proportion, wouldbe of great value to the student. Such, within its limits as a manualand for the period which it covers, is Dr. Reber’s History of AncientArt. So far as I am aware, there is no compend of information on thesubject in any language so trustworthy and so judicious as this. Itserves equally well as an introduction to the study and as a treatise towhich the advanced student may refer with advantage to refresh hisknowledge of the outlines of any part of the field.
The work was originally published in 1871; but so rapid has been theprogress of discovery during the last ten years that, in order to bringthe book up to the requirements of the present time, a thorough revisionof it was needed, together with the addition of much new matter and manynew illustrations. This labor of revision and addition has been jointlyperformed by the author and the translator, the latter having had theadvantage of doing the greater part of his work with the immediateassistance of Dr. Reber himself, and of bringing to it fresh resourcesof his own, the result of