Bernard Smith Collection

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http://hdl.handle.net/11343/56257
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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    The Gothic
    Smith, Bernard (1956-1966)
    Lecture
    In our early tutorials some of us have discussed the value, if any, of studying the history of art and I have suggested to you that the reason why we study history is really quite simple. Knowledge inhabits the past and only the past. There is no acceptable way of having knowledge of the future, though it's how we may anticipate future events by guessing from past experience. But only prophets and Soothsayers profess to foretell the future accurately, and they haven't yet succeeded in producing reliable results. When they do we shall have no doubt Chairs in Soothsaying. But the soothsayers who possess an insight into the future are not half as dangerous as the soothsayers and mythologies who believe they possess an insight into the past. Because human life is such that we must have some account of the past in order to face the present. So there will always be people who will want to tell you what happened. In other words, if you don't get good history you will get bad history: myth, misconceptions, and deceit. History is no divining rod; it has no superior way of knowing the past; but it is at least a self-correcting discipline, surviving, like science, by the correction of its mistakes. And it makes progress. Anyone who would claim that we know less of the past today than we did five, twenty-five, a hundred years ago, is not so much a sceptic as a fool. These preliminary remarks are appropriate to our approach to the study of gothic art because it is one of the great subjects of art history, about which there still rages controversy, and much remains to be settled. But at least we know far more about it now than when men first began to study gothic architecture.
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    Thirteenth century Gothic in Italy
    Smith, Bernard (1956-1966)
    Lecture
    In my last lecture we considered the development of Gothic sculpture up to the high point of its achievement in the sculpture of the west portals of Rheims Cathedral which are dated to 1225; that is to the second quarter of the thirteenth century. Let us look at the Visitation group again. We know that this sculpture was inspired in part by classical models. Rheims itself originally a Roman city, Durocortorum, and the centre of a Roman vine growing and wine producing region. But the importance of the Rheims sculpture does not consist simply in the fact that it was in part inspired by classical models. More important is the fact that within the Gothic style a distinctly classical feeling has been captured without destroying or overwhelming the Gothic quality so that here we can reasonably talk about a Gothic classicism, a classical feeling at the high point of the style itself, which is not dependent upon individual models it is inherent in the development of the style itself. Panofsky calls the classicism of Rheims sculpture an 'intrinsic classicism'.