SIGNOR MONTI' S LECTURES.
The third lecture of Signor Monti's series—the second having dealt with Indian art—was delivered on Wednesday. Egypt, Assyria, Persia, and India, having fallen under the speaker's review, he now came to Greece ; of whose art he defined the intellectual sublime and beauty of form as the characteristics. Grecitui sculpture is the complete develop- ment of the popular, or, as Signor Monti terms it, the demotic fbrm of art, as opposed to the hieratic system exemplified in her own earliest stages, and in- the works of her predecessors. The course which its em- bodiment of beauty took from the Phidian works, where it is the glorious means and not the paramount end, throughthe-positive material beauty of the next period; and the subjects of vivid and even agitated action which it affected when later seated in Asia Minor, after which it degenerated into excess and exaggerationrwere clearly traced, with a considerable amount of incidental illustration and critical remark ; and the lecture closed. with comments on a selection of designs-after famous monuments of the art dia. cussed. Of these the greater number are to pass under more detailed examination in the next lecture. The perfect art of the ParthenoaThe- sena, and the divine loveliness of the Venus of Milo,. accompanied, by casts from other celebrated works, spoke their own eloquent message to the eye, with a force which no words can rival, or strengthen.
Signor Monti has an attentive audience ; whose interest in his intelli- gent and well-digested comments cannot but be sensibly heightened by the evident feeling for his art with which the sculptor speaks.
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