The Transcript of Lecture 9 *

He observed that it is a known and unexplained phenomenon that among the ancients Statuary rose to such a degree of perfection as to leave almost the hope of imitating it baffled, and mingled with despair of excelling it; while Painting, at the same time, notwithstanding the admiration bestowed upon the ancient paintings by Apelles ¹ by Pliny and others, had been proved to be an excellence of much later growth, and to have fallen far short of Statuary. He remembered a man, equally admirable for his talents and his rank, [who,] pointing to a signpost, observed that, had Titian not lived, the richness of representation by colour even there could never have existed. In that mechanical branch of painting, perspective, the ancients were equally deficient, as was proved by the discoveries at Herculaneum and the Palace of Nero, ² in which such blunders were to be found as to render plausible the assertions of those who maintained that the ancients were wholly ignorant of it. That they were not totally destitute of it is proved by Vitruvius ³ in the introduction to his second book.