Studio: international art (56.1912)

Reviews and Notices

pages of his latest publication, finds true master-
pieces of the Renaissance included amongst equally
characteristic examples of the baroque style, the
very name of which is suggestive of the heaviness
of plan and over-redundancy of ornamentation that
marked the decline of Italian architecture after its
brilliant revival. In the introductory essay opinions
are expressed which cannot fail to provoke dissent.
Thus it is claimed that Bernini was “a genius
worthy to rank with Rubens, Rembrandt, and
Velasquez . . . who animated everything he
touched with a spirit of resourcefulness, subtlety,
courage, and audacity.” To the writer it is not
the Forum or the Palatine, the mediaeval or the
Renaissance buildings of the Eternal City that
give to it its abiding charm, but its baroque
art. He admits it is true that “ Michelangelo and
Vignola had laid the grandiose impress of their
work on Rome,” but he adds: “ the decorative
character, the mise en seine, as it were, the per-
spective of the most admired part, are the work of
Bernini and his pupils.” With regard to material as
well as to style, the learned Director is also, it would
appear, somewhat at issue with his fellow critics, for
he gloats over the triumph of stucco in the seven-
teenth century, declaring, as if it were a matter for
congratulation, that “ the baroque artists gave to it
an importance equal to that of sculpture, and the
greatest artists saw nothing derogatory in passing to
it from marble and bronze.”

D. V Cameron. An Illustrated Catalogue of his
Etched Work. With Introductory Essay, &c.
By Frank Rinder. (Glasgow : James Maclehose
and Sons.) £\ 4^. net.—With Mr. Cameron’s
work as an etcher most readers of The Studio are
to some extent familiar, though few probably are
fortunate enough to possess any of his original
prints, most of them very scarce because of the
very restricted number which issue from the artist’s
press. Some of the more important prints have
fetched really phenomenal prices at Christie’s,
where of course rarity is a potent factor when
prints come up for sale. But in Mr. Cameron’s
case the artistic merits of his later work certainly
are beyond dispute, and the homage paid to his
talent in the auction-room will be ungrudgingly
endorsed by all who know anything about it.
Bom in 1865, Mr. Cameron, after gaining a reputa-
tion as an “agreeable illustrator,” began to etch in
1887 ; and the last plate catalogued in this volume
■—a beautiful dry-point of The Queen of Chartres,
not quite finished when the catalogue was sent to
press early this year—is numbered 434. The
actual number catalogued is 439, and all these are
84

presented in photogravure reproductions'which, if
small, leave nothing to be desired in point of
quality; each print, too, is accompanied by"carefully
compiled information as to its size and various states.
The sequence is in the main chronological, and
thus one is able to observe the artist’s progressive
development, technical and aesthetic, and to note
especially that “ever-deepening sense of nature”
which is revealed therein. Mr. Rinder, who does
not shut his eyes to the existence of a good deal of
chaff among the wheat of this prolific harvest, aptly
summarises Mr. Cameron’s evolution as having been
“ along the path which leads away from the mechani-
cal to the vital, away from the outward to the
fundamental. . . . Energetic quest of the externally
arresting, the picturesque, the romantic, or shall
we say pseudo-romantic, has given place to the
immensely true quest of ‘ that something far more
deeply interfused which intuition divines as every-
where the animating principle.”

La Locomotion dans I’Histoire. By Octave
Uzanne. (Paris: Librairie Paul Ollendorff.) 12
francs.—In the preface to his interesting work on
the history of locomotion by land and air, M.
Uzanne points out that developments in modes of
travel and transit have been enormously greater
during the last quarter of a century than through-
out the whole of the previous history of mankind.
So long as locomotion remained, generally speaking,

“ hippomobile,” that is, from times of antiquity up
to the commencement of the nineteenth century,
the only possible developments were as regards the
structure of the vehicles, which gradually became
lighter, stronger, more comfortable, and more
luxurious as time went on. The introduction of
steam-power, the railroad, the bicycle, the motor-car,
of dirigible balloons, and finally of the aeroplane,
rendering that conquest of the air, which up to
quite recent years had seemed but a dream, no
longer a fable but an accomplished fact—all these
inventions have wrought such a change in social
and international intercourse and in the develop-
ment of civilisation generally, that the time is
indeed ripe for a new general survey of the history
of this important factor in the progress of mankind.
To treat exhaustively of “ Locomotion ” would
demand, however, countless bulky volumes, many
hundreds of which are already in existence, forming
an extensive bibliography of the subject; so M.
Uzanne, confining himself to locomotion by land
and air, leaving aside the history of navigation, gives
a very entertaining and comprehensive rlsumi of
the developments of vehicles, from the chariots of
antiquity, through all their multitudinous varieties