University of Virginia Library

Modern Art falls into three periods, or ‘moments’:—The strictly ‘mediaeval,’ when the object was almost wholly to aid the religious movement which followed the definite establishment of European civilization after the Norman conquests in France, England, and Italy:—The ‘renaisance,’ when the object was partly to replace the Christian cycle of representations by motives taken from Graeco-Roman life and legend, partly to bring landscape and common life within the range of art:—The ‘modern’ (due mainly to the great English painters of the eighteenth century), when the tentative attempts of the previous age were systematized in the distinct aim to extend painting to all subjects, whether belonging to the sphere of man or of nature, which can be represented by the limited powers of Art. It appears obvious that (however the balance may lie between the relative perfection reached in each period), the latter, modern, or English, idea is the only true conception of Art: which, it will be observed, embraces all the preceding aims, while it refuses to assign an exclusive pre-eminence to any of them. Readers who may be interested in the view here set forth will find it treated with more detail in the Quarterly Review for April, 1870; article upon Sir C. Eastlake.