102 



Regular Meeting, Monday, Mat 18, 1874. 



Meeting this evening at 7.30 o'clock. The Presi- 

 dent in the chair. 



Charles C. Perkins, Esq., of Boston, after an intro- 

 duction by the President, said that he cheerfully responded 

 to an invitation from the Essex Institute to give 



a talk upon art. 



He was glad that the society had entered into this field, 

 and that exhibitions were in prospect and that an art 

 museum was contemplated. After a few introductory 

 remarks, he contrasted the technically perfect, but priest 

 controlled and conventional art of Egj r pt, with the free, 

 outspoken, ideally beautiful art of Greece; pointed out 

 the undoubted influence of the east upon early Greek art, 

 and traced its history from rude beginnings to the per- 

 fect-conclusions of the Periclean period. After Greece 

 was enslaved and despoiled by the Roman generals, art 

 took up its abode on the banks of the Tiber, and height- 

 ened the splendors of the imperial city. A Greco-Roman 

 school flourished there for a time, and after gradual decay 

 died out altogether in the fourth century, when Constan- 

 tine transplanted the seat of the empire to the shores of 

 the Bosphorus, taking with him the best artists, artificers 

 and builders to embellish his new Capitol. Oriental in- 

 fluences, working at Constantinople upon Greco-Roman 

 traditions, brought thither by the followers of Constan- 

 tino, produced the Byzantine school. This reacted upon 

 Italy through Ravenna, the capital of the Exarchs, and 

 through the Greek artists who took refuse there from the 

 rigors of the Iconoclastic war in the eighth century, and 

 those who followed them in the twelfth. 



The successive invasion of the Italian peninsula by the 



