e, and so long as scenery was only background in poetry, it had
no greater importance in painting. Landscape painting could only
arise in the period which produced complete pictures of scenery in
poetry--the sentimental idyllic period.

We have seen how in the Italian Renaissance the fetters of dogma,
tradition, and mediaeval custom were removed, and servility and
visionariness gave place to healthy individuality and realism; how
man and the world were discovered anew; and further, how among the
other Romanic nations a lively feeling for Nature grew up, partly
idyllic, partly mystic; and finally, how this feeling found dramatic
expression in Shakespeare.

Natural philosophy also, in the course of its search for truth, as it
threw off both one-sided Christian ideas and ancient traditions, came
gradually to feel an interest in Nature; not only her laws, but her
beauty, became an object 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, and
naive, in comparison with Christian feeling, which a warmer heart and
a mind trained in scholastic wisdom had rendered more profound and
abstract. Hence Nature was sometimes an object of attention in
detail, sometimes in mass.[2]

As we come to the first landscape painters and their birthplace in
the Netherlands, we see how steady and orderly is the development of
the human mind, and how factors that seem isolated are really links
in one chain.

In the Middle Ages, landscape was only background with more or less
fitness to the subject. By the fifteenth century it was richer in
detail, as we see in Pisanello and the Florentines Gozzoli and
Mantegna. The poetry of earth had been discovered; the gold grounds
gave way to field, wood, hill, and dale, and the blue behind the
heads became 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 was a great pioneer in the realm of landscape.
With Michael Angelo not a blade of grass grew; his problem was man
alone. Raphael's backgrounds, on the other hand, are life-like in
detail: his littl