Art Lecture.

Professor Van Dyke delivered the fourth lecture of his course last evening in the Jefferson Physical Laboratory on "The High Renaissance-Leonardo da Vinci, Andrea del Sarto, and Correggio."

The three great motives in Italian painting, the classical, the religious, and the natural, reached their consummation in the High Renaiseance. The classical and religious motives need not be further taken up, but about the motive of nature there is still much to be said. The reformers in art tried hard to study and imitate nature, but more to raise the standard of art as regards correctness,than for the pure and simple love of the beautiful. But gradually painters began to study nature for itself, and to be less and less bound down by the wishes of the church.

Leonardo da Vinci was the first of the great Venetian painters. He has been called an idealist, a realist, a dreamer and a scientist. A scientist he certainly was, and it is to be greatly lamented, for it caused him to attempt much, and to finish little. His many and various tastes urged him different ways. He looked too deeply into the "well spring of truth," and in striving after the unobtainable, he left behind him a life of singular incompleteness, but of vast promise. He was neither religionist nor classicist, and looked at things coldly and scientifically. For the blending of light and shade, harmony, and grace of contour, he was almost unsurpassed.

Andrea del Sarto was of the Florentine type, pure and simple. His subjects were always given to him by the church and were ill chosen to express his skill. He was a materialist in his work, and lacking in loftiness of view. If Leonardo da Vinci looked too deep, Andrea hardly looked deep enough, and we find a lack of spirit and feeling in his pictures. As a craftsman, however, he was faultless. The best painter and colorist of them all.

In Correggio we find the consummation of the period. The beauty of the classic and religious motives appear to perfection in his paintings. His characters were sensuous but never sensual. Correggio was litte affected by the great movements of his time. He was one of the very greatest of the Renaissance painters, and it is a singular thing that he painted and died almost in obscurity.