h forms were found much too unpolished
and irregular to be considered beautiful at all. Even old historical
painters of the Netherlands, who had perhaps never in their lives seen
such deeply fissured masses of rock, liked to make use of them in their
backgrounds. The rugged mountain-tops in many of the pictures of Memling
and Van Eyck certainly never grew in the vicinity of Bruges. This type
of natural beauty was therefore established by custom even in countries
where it was not indigenous. In a picture by a Low-German artist which
depicts the legend of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, the city of Cologne
is to be seen in the background surrounded by jagged clusters of rocks.
A portrayal, true to nature, of the flat country did not satisfy the
sense of beauty of the artist, who surely knew well enough that Cologne
does not lie at the foot of the Alps. On the contrary, if an historical
painter of the pigtail age had been obliged to paint the real Alps in
the background of an historical painting, he would have rounded them
off, leveled them, and smoothed them down as much as possible.

Is it a mere accident that, in the whole long period of landscape
painting from Ruysdael almost up to recent times, high mountains have so
very seldom formed the subject of important landscape compositions? The
eye for natural scenery at that period had turned away from the
conceptions of the Middle Ages, and satiated itself with the milder
forms of the hills and the plain. Even when an artist like Everdingen
presents to us the rocky chasms and waterfalls of Norway he moderates
the fantastic forms, and, as far as possible, tries to lend to the
northern Alpine world the character of the hills of middle Germany.
Joseph Koch, although he was a native of the high Tyrolese Mountains,
could not get along half so well with the portrayal of the Alpine world
as with that of the classicly proportioned regions of Italy which lay
within closer range of the eye for natural scenery of the age; and
Ludwig Hess would hardly have come upon his characteristic conception of
the Swiss mountains by studying Claude Lorraine and Poussin, if he had
not been obliged to climb up to the mountain pastures in order to
purchase the cattle to be killed in his father's shambles. On these
occasions he reckoned up on one page of his account-book the oxen
bought, and on the other side sketched them, together with the meadows,
mountains, and glaciers. It was also at this same time