ertheless, even here, he shows
himself to be the child of his age. For example, he almost always paints
the interiors of his Gothic cathedrals on broad canvases of
insignificant height, which causes the pointed arches and vaulted
structures of the foreground to be cut off at the top. In spite of the
mathematically correct drawing the general plan of the picture
therefore reveals that the age of Peter Neefs no longer had a correct
eye for the principle, for the spirit, of the Gothic, otherwise the
master would not have cut off precisely the characteristic terminations
of the columns and vaultings by the arbitrary horizontal line of the
frame. Thus, in very truth, Neefs paints rigid Gothic, but in his
pictures we can recognize the seventeenth century which, at the most,
could see the medieval forms correctly with the outer but not with the
inner eye.

All the outlines of the ancient statues swell up under the pencil of the
draughtsman of that day, every muscle becomes coarser, fuller, more
fleshy, although the draughtsman undoubtedly believed he had reproduced
it with mathematical exactitude. The Grecian goddess no longer looks so
demure. She has grown to be a coquette; the Virgin has become a wife,
because the age lacked the virgin eye, because Rubens' full-bosomed
women's figures and Buonarotti's swelling play of the muscles obtruded
themselves everywhere, not only before the creative vision but also
before the inner receptive vision. Mignon, at that time, painted flowers
preferably in the stage of their most fully developed splendor, and
fruits succulently ripe to bursting; he despised closed buds. This is
something more than a mere fancy of this particular master; it is a
token of the eye of the whole generation, which was dull as regards the
beauty of buds, not only in the flower-piece but in all subjects of the
plastic arts.

This changing play of "vision" takes place everywhere that beauty meets
the gaze, but principally in the case of the beautiful in nature,
because this, as such, must first be conceived by the vision. The eye
for the beautiful in art remains more constant in comparison.

In youth one has a totally different eye for natural scenery than in old
age. This is the reason why we often feel greatly disappointed when we
behold a familiar region after a long time. There is no more thankless
task than to try to convince another of the beauty of natural scenery.

One tries, as it were, to implant in hi