ITALIAN ART

Evening Star, Issue 21138, 25 June 1932, Page 21

ITALIAN ART

ADDRESS TO TEACHERS The Dunedin sub-branch of the Now Zealand Fducational Institute held its monthly meeting last night, when the president (Miss L. Sullivan) was in the chair. Miss Sullivan referred to the possibility of a public meeting being called to protest against the decision to close the Dunedin Training College. If such a meeting did take place she hoped that as many teachers as possible would attend, and that they would take their friends with them. The main business of the meeting was an address by Professor Adams on ‘ Italian Art.' Professor Adams said that he did not propose to deal with materials or processes, but rather with ideas and emotions, with the spirit rather than the technique of art; it was so easy to find sermons in books and stones in the running brooks. With the aid of a continuous series of lantern slides Professor Adams traced the development of painting from the Roman mosaics. The mosaicist’s art was essentially Roman, and was, apart from vase paintings that had survived in some abundance, their only evidence of the quality of ancient Greek painting, which seemed to have reached as high a standard as Greek sculpture. Roman mosaics had witnessed the birth of Christianity, and had given them an invaluable record of its early ideals, and from the fourth t 6 the sixteenth century art had been developed primarily in the service of the Christian religion.

A number of mosaics wore shown on the screen, beginning with some found at Pompeii, dating therefore from at least as early as the first century, and ending with those on the walls of the twelfth century Norman Cathedral at Monreale, near Palermo, in Sicily. These mosaicists, said the lecturer, had abandoned the interest of the picture for mere splendour of colour and decorative arrangement, and one was glad to turn to Cimabue, who, in the thirteenth century, after beginning as a mosaicist, had ended as a painter. This was the dawn of a new ora in art, which led through Giotto in the fourteenth century and Masaccio in the fifteenth to the supremely groat artists of the sixteenth, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. The place of other important painters like Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Botticelli was also indicated and illustrated, and the lecture ended with a more detailed analysis of Michelangelo’s ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. At the conclusion of his address Professor Adams was accorded a hearty vote of thanks.