Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Place of Shakspeare in Elizabethan Drama: Being the Annual Lecture Delivered Under the Auspices of the Melbourne Shakespeare Society, July, 1914
For those who think him the greatest-brained, the most divinely gifted man that ever lived, I shall not institute any comparison with a man of action like Caesar, or with philosopher-scientists like Aristotle or Newton or Descartes. Rather let me compare him with one who was, like himself, a creative genius in the region of the fine arts. Let me take Leonardo da Vinci, who came into the world about a century earlier. Let me say Shakspeare was the greatest poet and the greatest dramatist the world has ever seen; Leonardo is not quite pre - eminent in painting, though Pierre Prud'hon, the one artist who ?ourished under Napoleon w'hom inconsiderate Time has not robbed of his glory, called him the inimitable, the father, the prince, the first of all painters; but he is admittedly one of the world's six or eight greatest, and he showed the way to all the others - a fact which gives him, let us say, approximately such importance in painting as Shakspeare has in drama. Against Shakspeare's poetic gift let us set these artistic qualifications of Leonardo: he was the founder of the Italian pro cess of painting in oil, and author of a famous treatise on the art; an unsurpassed draughtsman; the first to base art on nature and to recognise the artistic value of light and shade; a skilful modeller in clay; a great sculptor; a mighty statuary in bronze.
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