icture out of the same scene. The very trees of the
old Italians, on which the leaves are numbered, may serve to exemplify
this comparison. The scenery of the landscapes of Van Eyck and his
pupils is quite often painted as though the artist had looked at the
background through a perspective glass and the foreground through a
magnifying one. Jan Breughel paints his charming little landscapes with
such detailed precision of outline, especially as regards foliage, he
draws in his swarming little figures with such sharp lines, that the
whole seems reflected in the eye of an eagle rather than in that of a
man. On the other hand we miss the unity and the differentiation of the
combined effect--the concentration of large groups, an eye for the
landscape as an organic whole. Claude Lorraine and Ruysdael are the
first who may be called epoch-making along these lines; they are also,
in this sense, the ancestors of modern landscape painting. Where the old
masters still counted the leaves, flowers, and blades of grass and
laboriously imitated them, we have now adopted broad, general, and, to a
certain extent, conventional forms of foliage, meadowland, and the like.

Taken separately, these are far less true to nature than the miniature
imitation of detail. Taken collectively, on the other hand, they are far
more profoundly true to nature and to art. Do we not at present
sometimes see artists who almost seem to consider it their whole life's
mission to paint landscapes which have scarcely any definite plastic
forms, pure mood-pictures, as, for example, Zwengauer, who is never
tired of portraying barren moorlands with some water in the foreground,
a shapeless tract of land in the centre, and above the fiery glow of the
sunset, which, with a considerable portion of atmosphere growing ever
darker and darker, fills up the largest part of the whole picture. It is
as though fire, water, air and earth, the four elements as such, were
demonstrated before us on the Dachauer moor and combined to form a
landscape harmony. For such pictures of mood, pure and simple, the old
masters had absolutely no eye. If a painter of the fifteenth or
sixteenth century should rise from his grave and gaze upon even our best
landscape paintings he would certainly take very little pleasure in
them; he would consider them daubs executed after a recipe according to
which one can obtain the most beautiful foliage by throwing a sponge
dipped in green paint against th