Page:Life in Mexico vol 1.djvu/215

Rh gratis, and not limited to landscapes and figures, one of the principal objects being to propagate amongst the artists a general taste for elegance and beauty of form, and to enliven the national industry. Plastercasts, to the amount of forty thousand dollars, were sent out by the king of Spain, and as they possess in the Academy various colossal statues of basalt and porphyry, covered with Aztec hieroglyphics, it would have been curious, as the same learned traveller remarks, to have collected these monuments in the court-yard of the Academy, and compared the remains of Mexican sculpture, monuments of a semibarbarous people, with the graceful creations of Greece and Rome.

Let no one visit the Academy with these recollections or anticipations in his mind. . . . That the simple and noble taste which distinguishes the Mexican buildings, their perfection in the cutting and working of their stones, the chaste ornaments of the capitals and relievos, are owing to the progress they made in this very Academy, is no doubt the case. The remains of these beautiful but mutilated plaster-casts, the splendid engravings which still exist, would alone make it probable; but the present disorder, the abandoned state of the building, the non-existence of these excellent classes of sculpture and painting, and above all, the low state of the fine arts in Mexico, at the present day, are amongst the sad proofs, if any were wanting, of the melancholy effects produced by years of civil war and of unsettled government. . ..

The Holy Week is now approaching, and already