wardly. Of the rest
the rank is to be estimated rather by the purity of their metal than the
coined value of it.

Sec. 9. Religious landscape of Italy. The admirableness of its completion.

Keeping these principles in view, let us endeavor to obtain something
like a general view of the assistance which has been rendered to our
study of nature by the various occurrences of landscape in elder art,
and by the more exclusively directed labors of modern schools.

To the ideal landscape of the early religious painters of Italy I have
alluded in the concluding chapter of the second volume. It is absolutely
right and beautiful in its peculiar application; but its grasp of nature
is narrow and its treatment in most respects too severe and conventional
to form a profitable example when the landscape is to be alone the
subject of thought. The great virtue of it is its entire, exquisite, and
humble realization of those objects it selects; in this respect
differing from such German imitations of it as I have met with, that
there is no effort of any fanciful or ornamental modifications, but
loving fidelity to the thing studied. The foreground plants are usually
neither exaggerated nor stiffened; they do not form arches or frames or
borders; their grace is unconfined, their simplicity undestroyed. Cima
da Conegliano, in his picture in the church of the Madonna dell' Orto at
Venice, has given us the oak, the fig, the beautiful "Erba della
Madonna" on the wall, precisely such a bunch of it as may be seen
growing at this day on the marble steps of that very church; ivy and
other creepers, and a strawberry plant in the foreground, with a blossom
and a berry just set, and one half ripe and one ripe, all patiently and
innocently painted from the real thing, and therefore most divine. Fra
Angelico's use of the oxalis acetosella is as faithful in representation
as touching in feeling.[7] The ferns that grow on the walls of Fiesole
may be seen in their simple verity on the architecture of Ghirlandajo.
The rose, the myrtle, and the lily, the olive and orange, pomegranate
and vine, have received their fairest portraiture where they bear a
sacred character; even the common plantains and mallows of the waysides
are touched with deep reverence by Raffaelle; and indeed for the perfect
treatment of details of this kind, treatment as delicate and
affectionate as it is elevated and manly, it is to the works of these
schools alone that we can refer.