On these
occasions he reckoned up on one page of his account-book the oxen
bought, and on the other side sketched them, together with the meadows,
mountains, and glaciers. It was also at this same time when the Romantic
School began to pave the way for itself with the historical painters in
Munich, that Johann Jakob Dorner abandoned the "heroic" style of
landscape, as it was then called, and went over to the "romantic." That
is to say, Dorner and his companions, who up to that time had imitated
the forms of Claude Lorraine[14] as the best possible model, now went
off into the high mountains of Bavaria and were the first to reveal once
more this wild magnificent nature to the eye for natural scenery of
their time, thus preparing the way gradually for a new canon of natural
scenic beauty which approached that of the Middle Ages, just as
everywhere the modern Romantic School went back to the Middle Ages for
inspiration. The Genevese Calame in his Alpine wildernesses typifies so
completely the eye for natural scenery of the present day that it is
impossible to imagine that these pictures belong to a former age. In the
startling contrasts of powerful, often rough, forms and extreme tones, a
species of natural beauty is created that has equally little in common
with the plastic dignity of a mountain prospect by Poussin or with the
quiet peacefulness of a forest thicket by Ruysdael.
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