The indispensable condition of landscape-painting—­painting, that is, which raises the representation of Nature to the level of its main subject and paints her entirely for her own sake—­is the power to compose separate studies into a whole and imbue that with an artistic idea.  It was therefore impossible among people like the Hebrews,[1] whose eyes were always fixed on distance and only noted what lay between in a cursory way, and among those who considered detail without relation to a whole, as we have seen in mediaeval poetry until the Renaissance.  But just as study of the laws of aerial and linear perspective demands a trained and keen eye, and therefore implies interest in Nature, so the artistic idea, the soul of the picture, depends directly upon the degree of the artist’s feeling for her Literature and painting are equal witnesses to the feeling for Nature, and so long as scenery was only background in poetry, it had no greater importance in painting.  Landscape painting could only arise in the period which produced complete pictures of scenery in poetry—­the sentimental idyllic period.

We have seen how in the Italian Renaissance the fetters of dogma, tradition, and mediaeval custom were removed, and servility and visionariness gave place to healthy individuality and realism; how man and the world were discovered anew; and further, how among the other Romanic nations a lively feeling for Nature grew up, partly idyllic, partly mystic; and finally, how this feeling found dramatic expression in Shakespeare.

Natural philosophy also, in the course of its search for truth, as it threw off both one-sided Christian ideas and ancient traditions, came gradually to feel an interest in Nature; not only her laws, but her beauty, became an object of enthusiastic study.  By a very long process of development the Hellenic feeling for Nature was reached again in the Renaissance; but it always remained, despite its sentimental and pantheistic elements, sensual, superficial, and naive, in comparison with Christian feeling, which a warmer heart and a mind trained in scholastic wisdom had rendered more profound and abstract.  Hence Nature was sometimes an object of attention in detail, sometimes in mass.[2]

As we come to the first landscape painters and their birthplace in the Netherlands, we see how steady and orderly is the development of the human mind, and how factors that seem isolated are really links in one chain.

In the Middle Ages, landscape was only background with more or less fitness to the subject.  By the fifteenth century it was richer in detail, as we see in Pisanello and the Florentines Gozzoli and Mantegna.  The poetry of earth had been discovered; the gold grounds gave way to field, wood, hill, and dale, and the blue behind the heads became a dome of sky.  In the sixteenth century, Giorgione shewed the value of effects of light, and Correggio’s backgrounds were in harmony with his tender, cheerful