of
landscape conception. He took no cognizance even of the materials and
motives, so singularly rich in color, which were forever around him in
his own Venice. All portions of Venetian scenery introduced by him are
treated conventionally and carelessly; the architectural characters lost
altogether, the sea distinguished from the sky only by a darker green,
while of the sky itself only those forms were employed by him which had
been repeated again and again for centuries, though in less tangibility
and completion. Of mountain scenery he has left, I believe, no example
so far carried as that of John Bellini above instanced.

Sec. 13. Schools of Florence, Milan, and Bologna.

The Florentine and Ambrian schools supply us with no examples of
landscape, except that introduced by their earliest masters, gradually
overwhelmed under renaissance architecture.

Leonardo's landscape has been of unfortunate effect on art, so far as it
has had effect at all. In realization of detail he verges on the
ornamental, in his rock outlines he has all the deficiencies and little
of the feeling of the earlier men. Behind the "Sacrifice for the
Friends" of Giotto at Pisa, there is a sweet piece of rock incident, a
little fountain breaking out at the mountain foot, and trickling away,
its course marked by branches of reeds, the latter formal enough
certainly, and always in triplets, but still with a sense of nature
pervading the whole which is utterly wanting to the rocks of Leonardo in
the Holy Family in the Louvre. The latter are grotesque without being
ideal, and extraordinary without being impressive. The sketch in the
Uffizii of Florence has some fine foliage, and there is of course a
certain virtue in all the work of a man like Leonardo which I would not
depreciate, but our admiration of it in this particular field must be
qualified, and our following cautious.

No advances were made in landscape, so far as I know, after the time of
Tintoret; the power of art ebbed gradually away from the derivative
schools; various degrees of cleverness or feeling being manifested in
more or less brilliant conventionalism. I once supposed there was some
life in the landscape of Domenichino, but in this I must have been
wrong. The man who painted the Madonna del Rosario and Martyrdom of St.
Agnes in the gallery of Bologna, is palpably incapable of doing anything
good, great, or right in any field, way, or kind, whatsoever.[8]

Sec. 14. Claude, Sa