写给学生的艺术史：A CHILD’S HISTORY OF ART(英文版)(txt+pdf+epub+mobi电子书下载)

作者：维吉尔·Ｍ·希利尔

出版社：天津人民出版社

格式: AZW3, DOCX, EPUB, MOBI, PDF, TXT

写给学生的艺术史：A CHILD’S HISTORY OF ART(英文版)试读：

The next day I made a nose and a mouth to go with the eye and spectacles.

The next day I finished the face and added ears and some hair.

The next day I added a hat.

The next day I added a body, with arms, legs, and feet.

The next day I went over the drawing again, bearing heavily on my pencil. Over and over again I followed the lines till they became deep grooves in my desk lid.

The next day my teacher caught me and I caught it!

The next day my father got a bill for a new desk and I got — Well, never mind what I got.

“Perhaps he’s going to be an artist,” said my mother.

“Heaven forbid!” said my father. “That would cost me much more than a new desk.” And heaven did forbid.

I know of a school that has a large wooden tablet in the hall for its pupils to draw upon. At the top of the tablet is printed:

IF YOU JUST MUST DRAW, DON’T DRAW ON YOUR DESK,

DRAW ON THIS TABLET.

If you put a pencil in any one’s hand, he just must draw something. Whether he is listening to a lesson or telephoning, he draws circles and faces or triangles and squares over the pad — if there is a pad. Otherwise he draws on the desk top or the wall, for he just must draw something. Have you ever seen any telephone pad that was not scribbled upon? We say that’s human nature. It shows you are a human being.

Now, animals can learn to do a good many things that human beings can do, but one thing an animal can’t learn is to draw. Dogs can learn to walk on two legs and fetch the newspaper. Bears can learn to dance. Horses can learn to count. Monkeys can learn to drink out of a cup. Parrots can learn to speak. But human beings are the only animals that can learn to draw.

Every boy and girl who has ever lived has drawn something at some time. Haven’t you? You have drawn, perhaps, a horse or a house, a ship or an automobile, a dog or a cat. The dog may have looked just like a cat or a cat-erpillar, but even this is more than any animal can do.

Even wild men who lived so long ago that there were no houses. only caves, to live in — men who were almost like wild animals, with long hair all over their bodies — could draw. There were no paper or pencils then. Men drew pictures on the walls of their caves. The pictures were not framed and hung on the walls. They were drawn right on the walls of the cave and on the ceiling too.

Sometimes the pictures were just scratched or cut into the wall and sometimes they were painted in afterward. The paints those men used were made of a colored clay mixed with grease, usually simply red or yellow. Or perhaps the paint was just blood, which was red at first and then turned almost black. Some of the pictures look as if they had been made with the end of a burned stick as you might make a black mark with the end of a burned match. Other pictures were cut into bone — on the horns of deer or on ivory tusks.

Now, what do you suppose these cave men drew pictures of? Suppose I asked you to draw a picture of anything — just anything. Try it. What you have drawn is probably one of five things. A cat is my first guess, a sail-boat or an automobile is my second, a house is my third guess, a tree or a flower is my fourth, and a person is my fifth. Are there any other kinds?no.1-1 charging mammoth

Well, the cave men drew pictures of only one kind of thing. Not men or women or trees or flowers or scenery. They drew chiefly pictures of animals. And what kind of animals, do you suppose? Dogs? No, not dogs. Horses? No, not horses. Lions? No, not lions. They were usually big animals and strange animals. But they were pretty well drawn, so that we know what the animals looked like. Here is a picture a cave man drew thousands of years ago.

You know it’s a picture of some animal, and it’s not a cat or a caterpillar. It is some animal of the kind they had in those days. It looks like an elephant and it was a kind of elephant — a huge elephant. But its ears were not big like our elephants’ ears and it had long hair. Elephants now have skin or hide, but hardly any hair. This animal we call a mammoth. It had long hair because the country was cold in those days and the hair kept the animal warm. And it was much, much bigger even than our elephants.

There are no mammoths alive now, but men have found their bones and they have put these bones together to form huge skeletons. We still call any very big thing “mammoth.” You’ve probably heard of Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. It was called Mammoth, not because mammoths lived in it, because they didn’t, but just because it is such a huge cave.

The cave men drew other animals besides the mammoth. One was the bison, a kind of buffalo. You can see a picture of a buffalo on our five-cent piece. It looks something like a bull. A little girl had gone to a cave in Spain with her father, who was searching for arrow-heads. While he was looking on the ground, she was looking at the ceiling of the cave and she saw what she thought was a herd of bulls painted there. She called out, “See the bulls!” and her father, thinking she had seen real bulls, cried: “Where? Where?”

Other animals they drew were like those we have now — reindeer, deer with big antlers, and bears and wolves.NO.1-2 STANDING BISON

It was quite dark in the caves where the cave men drew these pictures, for of course there were no windows, and the only light was a smoky flame from a kind of lamp. Why, then, did they make pictures at all? Such pictures couldn’t have been just for wall decorations, like those you have on your walls, because it was so dark in the cave. We think the pictures were made just for good luck, as some people put a horseshoe over the door for good luck. Or perhaps they were to tell a story or make a record of some animal the cave man had killed. But perhaps the cave man just had to draw something, as boys and girls nowadays draw pictures on the walls of a shed or even sometimes on the walls of their own houses or, worse yet, on their desk tops.

The pictures made by these wild men — bearded and hairy cave men — are the oldest pictures in the world, and the artists who made them have been dead thousands of years. Can you think of anything you might ever make that would last as long as that?02WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE cave men made pictures on the walls and ceilings of their caves. The old Egyptians didn’t live in caves. They lived in Thehouses, where they didn’t draw pictures on the walls or ceilings. Their houses were usually mud huts, not much better than the caves that the cave men lived in, but the Egyptians were not interested in the houses they lived in. They were interested only in the houses they were dead in (tombs, we call them) or in the houses they made for their gods (temples, we call them).

Most dead people are buried in the ground nowadays, but the Egyptians thought the ground was no place for the dead. Besides, much of the ground of Egypt was under water for almost half of each year, for the River Nile flooded the country regularly every summer, and that would have been bad for graves.

The Egyptians believed their bodies would come to life again after thousands of years, and so kings and rich people, who could afford it, built tombs to be buried in. And they built them to last — never out of wood or anything like that, but of solid stone or brick. They wanted to put their bodies in a safe place, something like a safe-deposit vault. When they died, their bodies were preserved in a way we call embalming, so as not to decay.

These embalmed bodies were called mummies and the mummies were put in coffins that were shaped something like the bodies. On the coffins, or mummy cases, and on the plaster walls of their tombs and temples, the Egyptians drew and painted pictures — thousands of them, to cover every bit of space. And these pictures were made while the people were still alive.

These pictures that the Egyptians made on the mummy cases and on the walls of tombs and temples were not pictures of wild animals such as the cave men made. Some were of animals, though not the kind of animals the cave men drew. Most of the pictures were of people — men and women, kings and queens, gods and goddesses.

There is a way of finding out how old boys and girls are, without asking their age. We show them drawings of three faces from each of which something has been left out. The first face has no eyes, the second face has no mouth, the third face has no nose. Then we ask who can tell what is left out. Now, you might think any one could tell what was wrong with these pictures, but until boys and girls are about six years old, they can’t see that anything at all is left out, so if they can’t see what is wrong, we know they are not six years old.

Here is an Egyptian picture that has something wrong with it. It’s the picture of a seated man making a lance — a lance maker. I wonder if you are old enough to see what’s wrong with this picture.

See if you can find out what’s wrong, before I tell you. If you can’t see what’s wrong, you may be even sixty years old, for some quite old people can’t see what it is. It’s a sort of puzzle. See if you’ve guessed right.NO.2-1 EGYPTIANS BRINGING PRESENTS TO THE KING

It’s this : the eye is the shape an eye has when we see it from the front, but the face is a side face. So it is a front eye in a side face.

Another peculiar thing about this picture is that the body is twisted. The shoulders are full front, but the hips, legs, and foot are sideways.

In old Egyptian times all the artists drew certain things in a certain way. The artists were taught to draw that way, and they had to draw that way such things as I have mentioned — the front eye in the side face, the front shoulders with a side view of legs and feet.

Have you ever noticed the pictures on magazine covers? Some are just pictures of pretty women or pretty flowers. But some of the pictures tell a story or part of a story. Some of these story-telling pictures have words underneath to tell what the picture means, but some don’t need any words underneath. The picture tells the story without any words. We call such pictures that tell a story illustrations.NO.2-2 LANCE MAKER

Egyptian pictures are chiefly illustrations. They tell a story either with or without words — a story of the life of some dead king or queen, their battles, their hunting parties, their parades. And above, below, or at the side, there are often words, in Egyptian writing, that describe the pictures. These words look very much like pictures, themselves, for the Egyptian writing is a kind of picture writing. It is called hieroglyphics.

When Egyptian artists drew a king with common people around him, they made the king very large and the other people very small. The king was made to be a giant — two or three times as large as the common people — just to show he was really a great man.

When the Egyptian artists drew pictures of crowds, they didn’t know how to show men farther back in the picture, as we should do, by drawing them smaller and raising them a little bit. They made those farther back the same size as those in front, and to show that they were farther back they put those in the back above those in front.NO.2-3 AN EGYPTIAN PICTURE WITH HIEROGLYPHICS

We have hundreds of colors and shades nowadays, but the Egyptians had only four bright colors — red, yellow, green, blue. Besides these they had black, white, and brown. And their colors lasted. You know how hard it is to find any color nowadays that doesn’t fade. Window curtains, couch covers, even the colors of dresses, fade unless they are sunfast. But these pictures the Egyptians made are almost as fresh and bright as when first done, thousands of years ago. That’s because the colors used were “fast”, and also because the pictures were hidden away in the dark where the sun could not fade them. They were drawn and painted on the plaster walls and the colors were very bright — not like nature. It didn’t matter whether something really had any color, or what the particular color should be. They painted it the way they thought looked well. They might paint a man’s face bright red or even green!

When you think of all these old pictures that were not meant to be seen by the eye of any man, you may wonder: Why did the Egyptians make them? What was the idea? And yet to-day when we build a great building such as a church, a house of God, a Christian temple, we put into a hollow stone in the foundation — a corner-stone, we call it — the daily paper, photographs of people alive at the time, and so on. Why? The building is expected to last for ages and the corner-stone will never be opened until the building comes down. Why? Our idea may be something like the old Egyptians’ idea, after all!03PALACE PICTURE PUZZLES away from Egypt on my map, but a thousand miles away on the ground, was another old An inchcountry called — well, there were several countries there with hard names. Egypt was a One River Country. These other countries, a thousand miles off to the east, had Two Rivers, so let’s bunch them together and call them, for short, the Two River Country. If you want to know the real names of these countries, they were Mesopotamia, Chaldea, Babylonia, and Assyria.

This part of the world is where the Garden of Eden was supposed to be. The One River Country and the Two River Country are the two oldest countries in the world. We don’t know which is older.

Here in this Two River Country, once, were the largest and most important cities of the ancient world — cities bigger, perhaps, than New York or London — and here ruled mighty but cruel kings. Yet there isn’t a building of these old cities left. The reason for this is that the buildings weren’t built of stone as the buildings of Egypt were, for there was very little stone in the Two River Country. They were built of bricks made of mud, of which there was plenty, but the bricks were only dried in the sun, not baked by fire as the Egyptian bricks were. You know how mud pies dried in the sun soon crumble to pieces. Well, these buildings made of sun-dried bricks have all crumbled away and where once were magnificent cities, there are now only mounds of brick dust which look like natural hills.

You may wonder why the people of these countries didn’t bake their bricks in fire, for fire-baked bricks last longer than almost anything else. The reason is that they didn’t have much wood or much other fuel to make fire with. On some bricks, however, they painted pictures and decorations and these they covered with a glass-like substance (glaze, we call it), then baked them in the fire so that they became colored tiles. These tiles have lasted and have been found by men digging down in the mounds which once were cities of brick buildings.

In Egypt, as I told you, the artists painted pictures chiefly for the dead to see. In the Two River Country artists didn’t care about the dead people. They painted pictures for live people to see.

The kings didn’t build tombs. They weren’t interested in what was to become of them after they were dead. Instead, they built great palaces for themselves and great temples for their gods. These palaces and temples were built of brick, but a mud palace or temple was not very beautiful, so the artists covered the walls with pictures made on slabs of alabaster and with tiles.

Alabaster is a stone, usually white, so soft that it can be cut easily. So the artists cut pictures on slabs of alabaster and painted them in much the same way as the Egyptians painted their pictures.

Each tile had on it a different part of a picture, and then a great many tiles were put together to form a large picture, as picture puzzles are put together from separate pieces. There is a kind of picture, which you may not have seen, that is made of many tiny pieces of different colored stones. A picture made of colored stones is called a mosaic, and these people who lived in the Two River Country were the first to use a kind of mosaic work.

The Egyptian pictures on the inside walls of the tombs or temples are still there, but those on the mummy cases have been put in museums. The alabaster and tile pictures of the Two River people were dug up from under the mounds that once were buildings and they too have been put in museums.

These alabaster and tile pictures made in the Two River Country told stories about the king and his courtiers doing something. The two chief things the king and his courtiers liked to do, and did, was to hunt wild animals and to fight battles, so there were many pictures of battles and hunting parties.

The pictures found in the Two River Country are like the Egyptian pictures in some ways. As in Egypt, the eye is a front eye in a side face, but the shoulders are drawn side view. When an artist wished to show men back of those in front, he drew the figures above those in front as the Egyptian artists did. But in some of their pictures the Two River artists did try to show the men behind by raising them only a little in the picture and making them smaller, and by partly covering those behind with those in front. This effect, showing distance in a picture, is called perspective.

But the kind of men the Two River artists drew were different from those the Egyptians drew. The Two River artists admired strength and strong men, and they thought all strong men had long hair and beards. So they made the pictures of kings very muscular, with bulging muscles in their arms and legs, and with long hair and long beards every lock of which was carefully curled. The curls were regular corkscrew curls, as if freshly done with a curling iron!

The pictures of animals these people made are much more natural than those the Egyptians drew. The ones they liked best to paint were the lion and the bull, because these animals are so strong.

The Two River people were especially good at making designs and decorations for borders. One was called the rosette. It is a dot with a little wheel-like arrangement around it and we are still using it. Another design they made was called the guilloche — which we pronounce gee-lōsh. We use some of the same designs to-day in tiles for bathroom floors and for the halls of public buildings.NO.3 THE TREE OF LIFE

One picture the Two River people made has been copied by the artists of many other countries. This was the picture of a peculiar tree called the Tree of Life. It is a tree like no tree that grows. It has many different kinds of leaves and flowers and fruits all on the same tree at the same time. It is often used in designs on rugs and in embroidery. We don’t know what it meant or why it was called the Tree of Life, so you’ll just have to guess why.04APRIL FOOL PICTURES had a cat whom I used to tease by holding her up to a mirror. When she saw what she thought was I onceanother cat, she would arch her back and spit. I thought it very funny. But this is a strange thing — if you showed her the picture of a cat, she didn’t seem to see it at all. Dogs are the same. They will growl when they see themselves in a mirror, but if you show them a picture of another dog or even a cat, they will pay no attention to it at all. Animals, though they have eyes to see, do not see pictures.

Some people are like that. They may look at pictures but not see them. So there is a difference between looking and seeing. That’s what the Bible means when it says there are those that “have eyes, and see not.”

When I was a boy, there used to be a candy shop on the corner. On the counter was painted a silver dollar. It was painted so naturally that every one tried to pick it up. I thought it wonderful and that the artist who had done it must be a wonderful artist, too.

I remember also being taken to an art gallery where there was one picture that I liked best. To me it was a marvel. It was the picture of a door half open, with a lady peeking out from behind it. When you first looked at it, you were startled. The picture was so lifelike you could hardly believe it was not a real person looking out from behind a real door. I thought that must be the greatest kind of art — to paint something so natural and lifelike that a person would be fooled into thinking it real.

Well, the old Greek painters seemed to feel the same way about pictures. Greece, as you know, is across the Mediterranean Sea from Egypt. You may not know, however, that the Greeks were the greatest sculptors that have ever lived and were also great architects. But their pictures were not so great, for many of them were of this kind of April Fool painting that I’ve described. They tried to paint pictures that would fool people into believing they were real.

In Egypt and Assyria we know the paintings but not the names of the painters who did them. In Greece we know the names of the painters but not the paintings they did. Here is the name of the first painter whose name we do know. He was a Greek. It is a hard name, not easy like Smith or Jones, for most Greek names sound strange to

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