spare-ribs and swards are appetizingly painted
with brilliant technique; and they too are conceived like mood-pictures,
since that soft melancholy mist, with which our landscape painters are
so fond of coquetting, spreads likewise over these sausages and hams,
almost making them look as though they had all grown moldy. That is
another indication of the eye for natural scenery of our time.

Change of styles that great masters had made conventional, the
degeneration and progress of technique, etc., play a large part, to be
sure, in all these things, with and beside the changing eye. How much,
however, essentially depends upon the latter we can notice very plainly
when the question is one of architectural landscapes and, in general,
of the portrayal of old works of sculpture and architecture, which men
have seen very differently in different ages and represented
accordingly, while the originals have, in truth, remained the same
throughout the centuries.

The purest Gothic architecture portrayed in the pigtail age nearly
always has a pigtail look. The ornamentation of leaves and vines,
executed in accordance with the laws of organic necessity, becomes,
without the draughtsman being aware of it, an arbitrarily curved rococo
scroll; the proportions, which in reality soar upward, spread out in
width, so that one might think it possible for the eyesight to change
also, and yet in the building itself perhaps not a stone has been
disturbed since its erection; the pigtail surely did not transport
itself into the original--it existed only in the eye of the copyist. The
views of cities and buildings furnish the most striking examples of
this, for in them we can see how these additions have been made, in
woodcut, to the numerous topographical works of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Almost every medieval tower here bears the stamp
of the Renaissance, every pointed arch is, if possible, compressed into
a Roman arch, so firmly implanted were these new forms in the eye and
hand of the people of that time. For even in an external sense men no
longer possessed an organ for the old lines. Peter Neefs, the celebrated
architectural painter of this age, did indeed stand on such a high plane
of art and technique that he reproduced the perspectives of his Gothic
churches absolutely correctly. He had in this particular preserved the
objectivity of the artistic eye which is absolutely lacking in the
mechanical works mentioned above; nev