scenes.  Titian loved to paint autumn; the sunny days of October with blue grapes, golden oranges, and melons; and evening with deep harmonies of colour over the sleeping earth.  He was a great pioneer in the realm of landscape.  With Michael Angelo not a blade of grass grew; his problem was man alone.  Raphael’s backgrounds, on the other hand, are life-like in detail:  his little birds could fly out of the picture, the stems of his plants seem to curve and bend towards us, and we look deep into the flower they hold out.[3]

In the German Renaissance too, the great masters limited themselves to charming framework and ingenious arabesques for their Madonnas and Holy Families.  But, as Luebke says,[4] one soon sees that Duerer depended on architecture for borders and backgrounds far less than Holbein; he preferred landscape.

’The charm of this background is so great, the inwardness of German feeling for Nature so strongly expressed in it, that it has a special value of its own, and the master through it has become the father of landscape painting.’[5]

This must be taken with a grain of salt; but, at all events, it is true that Duerer combined ’keen and devoted study of Nature (in the widest sense of the word) with a penetration which aimed at tracing her facts up to their source.’[6] It is interesting to see how these qualities overcame his theoretical views on Nature and art.[7] Duerer’s deep respect for Nature proved him a child of the new era.  Melanchthon relates that he often regretted that he had been too much attracted in his younger days by variety and the fantastic, and had only understood Nature’s simple truth and beauty later in life.

His riper judgment preferred her to all other models.  Nature, in his remarks on the theory of art, includes the animate and the inanimate, living creatures as well as scenery, and it is interesting to observe that his admiration of her as a divine thing was due to deep religious feeling.  In his work on Proportion[8] he says: 

’Certainly art is hidden in Nature, and he who is able to separate it by force from Nature, he possesses it.  Never imagine that you can or will surpass Nature’s achievements; human effort cannot compare with the ability which her Creator has given her.  Therefore no man can ever make a picture which excels Nature’s; and when, through much copying, he has seized her spirit, it cannot be called original work, it is rather something received and learnt, whose seeds grow and bear fruit of their own kind.  Thereby the gathered treasure of the heart, and the new creature which takes shape and form there, comes to light in the artist’s work.’

Elsewhere Duerer says ‘a good painter’s mind is full of figures,’ and he repeatedly remarks upon the superabundant beauty of all living things which human intelligence rarely succeeds in reproducing.

The first modern landscapes in which man was only accessory were produced in the Netherlands.  Quiet, absorbed musing on the external world was characteristic of the nation; they studied the smallest and most trifling objects with care, and set a high value on minutiae.