Abstract

What we had in common was the desire for research, a boundless curiosity and a passion for all art.The few words of the above quotation identify the ingredients that were to form the basis of what we now call scholarship and art: curiosity, desire and longing, boundlessness, research, and passion. They were written by a Dutch philosopher and draughtsman some five years before the French Revolution and an unknown number of years before we in the West began increasingly referring to art and scholarship as separate entities. During the course of the nineteenth century, both singular concepts were to represent two independent domains of human culture, which we distinguish between to this very day. Despite all the...