Offering cultural, historical and literary readings of the responses to Italian Old Master art by early nineteenth-century writers, McCue illuminates the important role these artworks played in shaping the themes that are central to our understanding of Romanticism. She argues that they informed the writing of Romantic period authors, enabling them to forge often surprising connections between Italian art, the imagination and the period’s political, social and commercial realities.

Excerpt from Old Italian Masters Like all revolutions, this became proscriptive - the Old Mas ters became the derision of every aspirant, and naturalism the only art. This also was excess, and is followed by reaction. Na ture will not teach art, and the exclusive pursuit of her indications can only lead to a simulacrum of art, in which the vital spirit of it can by no chance enter. Art is the expression of all the spiritual faculties of man, passion for beauty, aspiration of the imagination, the manifestation of the individual in his inmost nature. For this nature can only furnish an alphabet, types whose meaning only sympathy can unfold, and which become the language of art. The sense of the insufficiency of the so-called naturalistic art has brought those who craved the real art-influence to look back to the earlier schools, and the result has been that we have found again the springs of art and the true meaning of the desecrated word Ideal, the ivisible expression of which is the mission of art, z'. E., the individual conception of beauty taken in its largest sense, as what is most desirable and attractive in conceivable form - not to be confounded with the actual, and probably-never existing in nature. The Italian Renaissance was in no wise a re turn to nature as model, but a reawakening of the spiritual activity of the race after a torpor of ages, and which demanded the means of expression of itself. As the religious passion was dominant in that phase of Italian development, the religious motive was that which caught the inspiration; but this was incidental - the essen tial fact was that the art was not an appeal to nature but a form of poetic speech, the telling of a spiritual truth, not the rela tion of a natural phenomenon or fact. It was the poet, not the scientist, that appeared. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.