The Art of Archaeology by Oscar Wilde — Read

Indeed archaeology is only really delightful when transfused into some / form of art. I have no desire to underrate the services of laborious / scholars, but I feel that the use Keats made of Lempriere's Dictionary is / of far more value to us than Professor Max Muller's treatment of the same / mythology as a disease of language. Better _Endymion_ than any theory, / however sound, or, as in the present instance, unsound, of an epidemic / among adjectives! And who does not feel that the chief glory of / Piranesi's book on Vases is that it gave Keats the suggestion for his / 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'? Art, and art only, can make archaeology / beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most / vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of / actual life with the wonder of the unreal world. But the sixteenth / century was not merely the age of Vitruvius; it was the age of Vecellio / also. Every nation seems suddenly to have become interested in the dress / of its neighbours. Europe began to investigate its own clothes, and the / amount of books published on national costumes is quite extraordinary. At / the beginning of the century the _Nuremberg Chronicle_, with its two / thousand illustrations, reached its fifth edition, and before the century / was over seventeen editions were published of Munster's _Cosmography_. / Besides these two books there were also the works of Michael Colyns, of / Hans Weigel, of Amman, and of Vecellio himself, all of them well / illustrated, some of the drawings in Vecellio being probably from the / hand of Titian.

Nor was it merely from books and treatises that they acquired their / knowledge. The development of the habit of foreign travel, the increased / commercial intercourse between countries, and the frequency of diplomatic / missions, gave every nation many opportunities of studying the various / forms of contemporary dress. After the departure from England, for / instance, of the ambassadors from the Czar, the Sultan and the Prince of / Morocco, Henry the Eighth and his friends gave several masques in the / strange attire of their visitors. Later on London saw, perhaps too / often, the sombre splendour of the Spanish Court, and to Elizabeth came / envoys from all lands, whose dress, Shakespeare tells us, had an / important influence on English costume. -- _The Truth of Masks_.