our greatest _Painters_, that is to
say, managers of color, whom the world has seen; namely, Tintoret, Paul
Veronese, Titian, and Correggio. I need not say more to justify my
calling it the age of _Painting_.

84. This, then, being the state of things respecting art in general, let
us next trace the career of landscape through these centuries.

It was only towards the close of the thirteenth century that figure
painting began to assume so perfect a condition as to require some
elaborate suggestion of landscape background. Up to that time, if any
natural object had to be represented, it was done in an entirely
conventional way, as you see it upon Greek vases, or in a Chinese
porcelain pattern; an independent tree or flower being set upon the
white ground, or ground of any color, wherever there was a vacant space
for it, without the smallest attempt to imitate the real colors and
relations of the earth and sky about it. But at the close of the
thirteenth century, Giotto, and in the course of the fourteenth,
Orcagna, sought, for the first time, to give some resemblance to nature
in their backgrounds, and introduced behind their figures pieces of true
landscape, formal enough still, but complete in intention, having
foregrounds and distances, sky and water, forests and mountains,
carefully delineated, not exactly in their true color, but yet in color
approximating to the truth. The system which they introduced (for though
in many points enriched above the work of earlier ages, the Orcagna and
Giotto landscape was a very complete piece of recipe) was observed for a
long period by their pupils, and may be thus briefly described:--The sky
is always pure blue, paler at the horizon, and with a few streaky white
clouds in it, the ground is green even to the extreme distance, with
brown rocks projecting from it; water is blue streaked with white. The
trees are nearly always composed of clusters of their proper leaves
relieved on a black or dark ground, thus (_fig._ 20).[31] And observe
carefully, with respect to the complete drawing of the leaves on this
tree, and the smallness of their number, the real distinction between
noble conventionalism and false conventionalism. You will often hear
modern architects defending their monstrous ornamentation on the ground
that it is "conventional," and that architectural ornament ought to be
conventionalized. Remember, when you hear this, that noble
conventionalism is not an agreement betwe