File:American art and American art collections; essays on artistic subjects (1889) (14782778902).jpg

Identifier: americanartamer01mont (find matches)
Title: American art and American art collections; essays on artistic subjects
Year: 1889 (1880s)
Authors: Montgomery, Walter
Subjects: Art Artists Art
Publisher: Boston, E.W. Walker & co
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Smithsonian Libraries

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of Diana at Ephesus, the greatest templeof antiquity, or than the order of St. Peters at Rome, the greatest temple of modern times —was so dwarfed by the prodigious mass of masonry around which it was placed, that no one canpossibly realize its true proportions. No work of art would suffer one part so to degrade andneutralize the other. Never was there a waste of treasure and material so barbaric. A centraldome might have been so arranged as to excuse the circular portico; a grouping of mightypylons about the base of the shaft might have tended to justify its enormous blankness. But no AMERICAN ART 357 attempt was made either in the colonnade or in the shaft to reconcile the perpetual and funda-mental incompatibility which must have prevailed between them in every respect of line, detail,and proportion. In the eloquent eulogy of Washington delivered by Mr. Winthrop on the laying of thecorner-stone of this pile, he said: Build it to the skies, — you cannot outreach the loftiness of
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Design for Washington Monument, by H. R. Searle, of Washington, D. C.Reproduced by Permission from the American Architect. his principles; found it upon the massive and eternal rock, — you cannot make it more endur-ing than his fame; construct it of the purest Parian marble, — you cannot make it purer thanhis life. He might have added, Build it as you propose, and you cannot make it in anyrespect significant of Washington, or in any way worthy of the great civilization which hefounded, — you cannot make it other than a misquotation barbarously misapplied. 358 AMERICAN ART The quality of simplicity and plainness is not undervalued as an element of grandeur in a mon-umental composition of this sort. Repose and size are essential to such an expression. But ifa mountain cliff, or even a work of engineering, is sublime because of its vast unoccupied spaces,a monument which is expressly devised to convey such a sentiment as this must be somethingbetter than a colossal cairn or a might

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