The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times

--is the power to compose separate studies into a whole and imbue that with an artistic idea. It was therefore impossible among people like the Hebrews,[1] whose eyes were always fixed

depends directly upon the degree of the artist's feeling for her Literature and painting are equal witnesses to the feeling for Nature, and so long as scenery was only background in po

s gave place to healthy individuality and realism; how man and the world were discovered anew; and further, how among the other Romanic natio

t of enthusiastic study. By a very long process of development the Hellenic feeling for Nature was reached again in the Renaissance; but it always remained, despite its sentimental and pantheistic elements, sensual, superficial, an

etherlands, we see how steady and orderly is the development of the huma

a dome of sky. In the sixteenth century, Giorgione shewed the value of effects of light, and Correggio's backgrounds were in harmony with his tender, cheerful scenes. Titian loved to paint autumn; the sunny days of October with blue grapes, golden oranges, and melons; and evening with deep harmonies of colour over the sleeping earth. He wa

ous arabesques for their Madonnas and Holy Families. But, as Lübke says,[4] one soon sees that Dürer

for Nature so strongly expressed in it, that it has a special value of its o

g her facts up to their source.'[6] It is interesting to see how these qualities overcame his theoretical views on Nature and art.[7] Dürer's deep respect for Nature proved him a child of the new era.

the animate and the inanimate, living creatures as well as scenery, and it is interesting to observe that hi

bility which her Creator has given her. Therefore no man can ever make a picture which excels Nature's; and when, through much copying, he has seized her spirit, it cannot be called original work, it is rather som

nd he repeatedly remarks upon the superabundant beauty of all livi

nds. Quiet, absorbed musing on the external world was characteristic of the nation; they

s about these masters of genre painting[9]: 'Through the emphasis laid upon single objects, they not only revealed the national characteristics, but penetrated far into the soul of Nature and mirrored their own feelings there, so produci

c Nature was the essential element. The greatest Dutch masters did not turn their attention to the extraordinary and stupendous, the splendour of the high Alps or their horrible crevasses, or sunny Italian mountains reflected in their lakes or tropical luxuriance, but to common objects of e

heen, which add such freshness and brilliance to the colouring, influenced the development of the colour sense, as much

ern feeling for Nature in illustrations of the seasons in the calendar pictures of religious manuscripts. Beginnings of landscape can be clearly seen in that threshold picture of Netherland art, the altar-piece at Ghent by the brothers Van Eyck, which was finished in 1432. It shews the most ac

m of landscape has daw

ld like to paint all the leaves and fruit on the trees, all the flowers on the grass, even all the dewdrops. The effect of distance too has been discovered, for there are blue hill-tops beyond the nearer green ones, and a foreground scene opens back on a distant plain (in the Ghent altar-piece, the scene wi

ackground of one colour, generally gilded. But now the great discovery was made that Nature was a distinct entity, a revelation and reflection of the divine in herself. And Jan van Eyck introduced a great variety of landscapes behind his Madonnas. One looks, for instance, through an open win

nly before him, though he increased the significance of landscape painting and shewed knowledge of aerial perspective and gradations of tone. Landscape was a distinct entity to him, and could excite the mood that

rees, and meadows bright with sappy green--is clearly the result of direct Nature study; it has a uniform transpar

ure, 'The Marriage of St Catherine,' did not allow space for an unbroken landscape, but the lin

t size, enlarged his landscape, and handled it with extreme care. He was very far from grasping it as a whole, but his method was synthetical; h

e rest of the sixteenth-century painters of Brabant and Fl

pe by embellishing its lines, while the Dutch gave its spirit, but adhered simply and strictly to Nature. The landscapes of Peter Brueghel the elder, with their dancing peasants surrounded by rocks, mills, groups of trees, are

and his followers, with all their patience and industry, their blue-green landscape with imaginary trees, boundless distance and endless detail, were very far from a true grasp of Nature. It was Rubens and his school who really made landscape a legitimate independent branch

he flowers for it from Nature when they came out, and did not grudge a journey to Brussels now and then to paint flowe

s have never been painted before nor so industriously. It will give a beautiful effect in winter; some of the colours almost equal Nature. I have painted an ornament unde

ory, sunny valleys with leafage, golden cornfields, meadows

his backgrounds from his native land, from parts round Antwerp, Mechlin, and Brussels. Foliage, water, and undulating

t, to descend into the depths of her soul, and then reflect what he found there--in short, he fully understood the task of the landscape painter. The fifty landscapes of his which we possess, contain the whole scale from a state of idyllic repose to one of dramatic excitement and tension. Take, for instance, the evening scene with

al poetry of Corneille and Racine. There were idyllic features in Fénelon's Telemachus, and Ronsard borrowe

herds and his landscape were artificial, and the perfume of courts a

e of Nature. Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) painted serious stately subjects, such as a group of trees in the foreground, a hill with a classic building in the middle, and a chain of mountains in the distance, and laid more stress o

that was ugly, painful, and confused was purified and transfigured in his hands. There is no sadness or dejection in his pictures, but a spirit of serene beauty, free from ostentation, far-fetched contrast, or artificia

ature became a worship

ture's phases in noble emulatio

r in producing effect with very small means, with a few trees reflected in water, or a sand-heap--the art in which Ruysdael excelled all others. The whole poetry of Nature--that secret magic which lies like a spell over quiet wood, murmuring sea, still pool, and lonely pasture--took form and colour under his hands; so little sufficed

morning hymn, and his picture of a swollen torrent forcing its way between graves which catch the last rays of the su

from mere backgrounds and single traits of Nature--even a flower stem or a blade

in the pictures of his school--in the wooded hill or peasant's courtyard by Hobbema, the Norwegian mountain scene of Albert van Everdin

ed years later before mountain and sea found their painter in words, and a complete l