when the Romantic
School began to pave the way for itself with the historical painters in
Munich, that Johann Jakob Dorner abandoned the "heroic" style of
landscape, as it was then called, and went over to the "romantic." That
is to say, Dorner and his companions, who up to that time had imitated
the forms of Claude Lorraine[14] as the best possible model, now went
off into the high mountains of Bavaria and were the first to reveal once
more this wild magnificent nature to the eye for natural scenery of
their time, thus preparing the way gradually for a new canon of natural
scenic beauty which approached that of the Middle Ages, just as
everywhere the modern Romantic School went back to the Middle Ages for
inspiration. The Genevese Calame in his Alpine wildernesses typifies so
completely the eye for natural scenery of the present day that it is
impossible to imagine that these pictures belong to a former age. In the
startling contrasts of powerful, often rough, forms and extreme tones, a
species of natural beauty is created that has equally little in common
with the plastic dignity of a mountain prospect by Poussin or with the
quiet peacefulness of a forest thicket by Ruysdael. In what a very
different manner from that of Calame was this same Swiss scenery treated
by the numerous artists who painted Alpine views at the beginning of
this century! They tried almost everywhere to depress the high mountains
into hilly country, and they furnish a lanscape commentary to Gessner's
Idyls rather than to the gigantic scenery of the Alps as we conceive it
at present. Nature, however, has remained the same, and also the outer
eye of man; it is the inner eye which has changed.

The older masters, as well as those of today, liked to place themselves
below the landscape which they wished to construct, where all the
outlines stand out most clearly defined. It had almost grown to be a
rule that the foreground should be placed sharply in profile and often
so deep in shadow that it contrasted like a silhouette with the more
distant grounds. On the other hand, it is a favorite whim of the genuine
pigtail age to draw bird's-eye landscapes and views of cities, in which
every elevation of the earth seems flattened out as much as possible,
every distinct division of the separate grounds as much as possible
obliterated.

When Goethe was on his return trip from Messina to Naples he wrote at
the sight of Scylla and Charybdis: "These two natural