The Amateur's Guide to Architecture

ISBN: 9781333525965 出版年：2016 页码：195 S Sophia Beale Forgotten Books

The contents of this little book originally formed the substance of some lectures which were delivered to my Art pupils, girls between the ages of twelve and eighteen. Finding in the course of my daily teaching that so many even of the older girls with whom I came in contact knew little or nothing about Architecture, it occurred to me that some addresses, putting the subject simply, and in a very elementary form, might be of use to them. Architecture is, of course, a very wide subject, and to treat it fully I should be quite incapable. But just as every educated person ought to know something of foreign languages, so he ought to have some knowledge of the different schools of Painting, and of the elements of Architecture. A fact which came under my own observation will illustrate the utter ignorance that may exist in a well-educated person's mind upon this Art. During my visit to Venice, I happened to be talking to some newly arrived English girls at the hotel, and, mentioning the glories of San Marco, one of them naively asked, If it were the English Church? Of course, I do not for one moment mean to imply that many girls of eighteen who had passed through a high school, or had been well taught by an educated gover ness, would be in this hapless state of ignorance; but there are different degrees of ignorance as there are different degrees of knowledge, and, although most persons may know a Classic from a Gothic building, they, may not see the difference between the style of the Nave of Westminster Abbey and that of the Chapel of Henry VII.