Horatio Greenough, Archibald Alison

Abstract

In his recently published book, Origins of Functionalist Theory, Edward R. DeZurco traces the varying concepts of the theory of form as function to about the year 1850 and speculates on writers who may have influenced the similar theories of Horatio Greenough. But although he includes several—most notably Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edward R. Garbett—with whose work Greenough was familiar,1 he leaves out of consideration one late eighteenth-century aesthetician—Archibald Alison—whose views in at least two areas are remarkably parallel to Greenough's own. DeZurco does indeed summarize the fundamental points of Alison's theories as they are presented in his Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste and places them properly in the chronological development of the functionalist concept. He does not, however, consider the possibility of a specific influence of the Scotch rhetorician on the American sculptor.