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While the British creative genius has contributed;

Architecture does indeed offer a great many splendid buildings and monuments;

Today the visual and pictorial arts;

About styles;

Schools of portrait and landscape painting.

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T The Arts. While the British creative genius has contributed so much to literature, philosophy, politics, economics, science, technology, and other fields, its productions in the visual (figurative) arts and music have been far less considerable, at least in comparison with Greece, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, and the Low Countries.

A Architecture does indeed offer a great many splendid buildings and monuments (churches and cathedrals, castels and palaces, villas, gardens, etc.), in a variety of styles, i.e. Saxon, Norman (or Romanesque = Romanico), Early English (Gothic), Decorated and Perpendicular (later varieties of Gothic), Tudor, Jacobean (or Stuart, i.e. Baroque) (¹), Georgian (or Neoclassical, called Colonial in America), Regency (corresponding to Rococò on the Continent) Victorian (or Liberty), and modern; on the other hand, sculpture, painting, the decorative arts, and music, after a splendid beginning in the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance period, have lagged (sono rimaste) far behind, for several reasons, such as the iconoclastic tendencies of the Protestant Reformation, and the Puritans' austerity; for a long time England had to invite foreign artists (Holbein, Van Dyck, Händel, and many others, among whom several Italians) to its shores, and only in the 18th and 19th centuries it developed its own schools of portrait and landscape painting. (²)

T Today, however, the visual and pictorial arts, as well as music and the performing (teatrali) arts, are flourishing splendidly in all their contemporary forms, from the skyscraper (grattacielo) to abstract, non-objective painting and sculpture, and from opera to atonal music and ballet, both in Great Britain and in America (where artists from many different countries often immigrate), and the names of the best architects, painters, sculptors, and composers (besides actors and performers of all kinds) are deservedly (meritamente) world-famous: suffice it (basti) to mention F. L. Wright, H. Moore, B. Britten, G. Menotti, C. Chaplin.

F Famous architects baroque were I. Jones and C. Wren, author of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. It is an Anglican cathedral on Ludgate Hill, in the City of London. The present building dates from the 17th century, and is generally reckoned to be London's fifth St Paul's Cathedral, although the number is higher if every major medieval reconstruction is counted as a new cathedral. The cathedral is one of London's most visited sites.

F Famous the names of British W. Hogarth, J. Reynolds, G. Romney, T. Gainsborough, T. Lawrence, J. Constable, J. M. W. Turner, W. Blake, E. Burne-Jones, D. G. Rossetti, of Scottish J. Raeburn, and of the Americans J. A. McN. Whistler and J. S. Sargent.

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