Today, on
the contrary, Schlangenbad is considered one of the mast beautifully
situated baths in Germany; the "dreariness" and "desolation" we now call
romantic and picturesque, and the fact that in this spot nothing grows
but "grass and leaves"--that is to say, that the fragrant meadow-land
starts right before the door, and that the green boughs of the forest
peep in everywhere at the windows--this perhaps attracts as many guests
at present as the efficacy of the mineral spring.
The artists of the Middle Ages thought that they could give no more
beautiful background to their historical paintings and half-length
portraits than by introducing mountains and rocks of as fantastic and
jagged a form as possible, although the latter often contrast strangely
enough beside a mild, calmly serene Madonna face, or even beside the
likeness of a prosaically respectable commonplace citizen of some free
Imperial town. At that time, therefore, savagely broken-up, barren
mountain scenery was considered the ideal type of natural scenic beauty,
while, a few centuries later, such forms were found much too unpolished
and irregular to be considered beautiful at all. Even old historical
painters of the Netherlands, who had perhaps never in their lives seen
such deeply fissured masses of rock, liked to make use of them in their
backgrounds. The rugged mountain-tops in many of the pictures of Memling
and Van Eyck certainly never grew in the vicinity of Bruges.
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