Bernard Smith Collection

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Bernard Smith was an Australian art historian, art critic and academic, including at the University of Melbourne. He has been described as the founder of Australian Art History, and his presence and influence in Australian cultural life immense. This is one of many of his lectures given in the Fine Arts Department of the University of Melbourne between 1956 and 1966 and at a time when it was the only art history department in an Australian university. They are lectures in the history of art that range from Palaeolithic to the Romantic Movement. These lectures are presented as originally written and are archival in nature with no attempt to bring them up-to-date. They belong to their time

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    Goya
    Smith, Bernard (1963)
    Lecture
    During the eighteenth century the Spanish Colonial Empire lost ground rapidly to France and England, and the Spanish Monarchy, unlike many European monarchies, did not respond to the ideas of the Enlightenment. But eighteenth century Spain inherited a great tradition of painting from such masters as El Greco (Fear in the House of Simon), Velasquez (Pope Innocent X), Zurbaran (St Jerome) and Murillo. It was a painterly tradition, and it was this painterly tradition which Francisco Goya inherited. In his work, the painterly fluency of the Baroque, the Rococo and of the Venetians, survived the neo-classical attack upon painterly painting. Goya has often been called the last of the old masters and the first of the new.