An Historical Inquiry into the True Principles of Beauty in Art: More Especially with Reference to Architecture

Born in Scotland, James Fergusson (1808-86) spent ten years as an indigo planter in India before embarking upon a second career as an architectural historian. Despite his lack of formal training, he became an expert in the field of Indian architecture, publishing Cave Temples of India and a History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, as well as The Holy Sepulchre and the Temple at Jerusalem, all reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection. In this illustrated work of 1849, he considers beauty in art, expressed chiefly by the architectural styles of different civilisations, beginning with ancient Egypt, and finishing with ancient Rome. (This book is named ‘Part the First’, but no subsequent volumes were written.) The first section is theoretical, tracing the intellectual development of man and his aesthetic sense, while the second considers the surviving evidence of the ideas of beauty held in the ancient world.