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hase is exhibited by Italian painting at its period of maturity. The great Florentines drew their figures against a background of decorative line, the great Venetians against a background of decorative color. But even in the work of the greatest of them the background exists usually to fulfil a purpose merely decorative,--a purpose with immediate reference to art but without immediate reference to life. There is no real reason, with reference to life itself, why the Mona Lisa of Leonardo should smile inscrutably upon us before a background of jagged rocks and cloudy sky; and the curtains in Raphael's Sistine Madonna are introduced merely as a detail of composition, and are not intended as a literal statement that curtains hung upon a rod exist in heaven. In the third stage, which is exhibited by later painting, the background is brought into living relation with the figures of the foreground,--a relation suggested not merely by the exigencies of art but rather by the conditions of life itself. Thus the great Dutch _genre_ painters, like the younger Teniers, show their characters in immediate human relation to a carefully detailed interior; or if, like Adrian van Ostade, they take them out of doors, it is to show them entirely at home in an accustomed landscape. This stage, in its most modern development, exhibits an absolutely essential relation between the foreground and the background--the figures and the setting--so that neither could be imagined exactly as it is without the presence of the other. Such an essential harmony is shown in the "Angelus" of Jean-Francois Millet. The people exist for the sake of giving meaning to the landscape; and the landscape exists for the sake of giving meaning to the people. The "Angelus" is neither figure painting nor landscape painting merely; it is both. In the history of fiction we may note a similar evolution in the element of setting. The earliest folk-tales of every nation happen "once upon a time," and without any definite localization. In the "Gesta Romanorum," that medieval repository of accumulated narratives, the element of setting is nearly as non-existent as the element of background in the frescoes of Pompeii. Even in the "Decameron" of Boccaccio the stories are seldom localized: they happen almost anywhere at almost any time. The interest in Boccaccio's narrative, like the interest in Giotto's painting, is centered first of all in the element of action, and seco
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