The Bloomsbury critic’s manifesto that the essence of visual art is “significant form” — the arrangement of lines and colours that stirs a special aesthetic emotion, independent of subject. It gave English-language formalism and modernist abstraction its rallying cry.
Sources for Clive Bell — Art
Clive Bell — Art in Visual Art
Held in the Visual Art chamber of the Babel Nexus Index.
- Vitruvius — De Architectura (c. 15 BCE)
- Cennino Cennini — Il Libro dell’Arte (c. 1400)
- Albrecht Dürer — Of the Just Shaping of Letters (1525)
- Giorgio Vasari — Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (1550)
- Leonardo da Vinci — A Treatise on Painting (1651)
- Giovanni Pietro Bellori — Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1672)
- Edmund Burke — A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)
- Denis Diderot — Salons (1765)
- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing — Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766)
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Theory of Colours (1810)
- M. E. Chevreul — The Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours (1839)
- John Ruskin — Modern Painters (1843)
- John Ruskin — The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849)
- John Ruskin — The Stones of Venice (1851)
- John Ruskin — The Elements of Drawing (1857)
- Eugène Viollet-le-Duc — Discourses on Architecture (1863)
- Émile Zola — Mon Salon (1866)
- Charles Blanc — The Grammar of Painting and Engraving (1867)
- Walter Pater — The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873)
- Leonardo da Vinci — The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883)
- Bernard Berenson — The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (1896)
- Vincent van Gogh — Letters (1913)
- Louis Sullivan — The Autobiography of an Idea (1924)