I have heard complaints, a thousand times, that an
object known only from description no longer satisfies us when we come
face to face with it. The cause of this is always the same. Imagination
and reality bear the same relation to each other as poetry and prose:
The former conceives objects to be huge and precipitous, the latter
always thinks that they flatten themselves out. The landscape painters
of the sixteenth century, compared with those of our own day, furnish
the most striking example of this."
A number of the most pertinent aphorisms might be developed from this
short remark. For us this one will suffice: On account of their whole
fantastic-romantic ideal of art the medieval painters were forced to
make their landscapes steep and rugged and to crowd them within narrow
confines. The backgrounds of their landscapes--in the sense of the above
remark of Goethe--are composed like poetry rather than like a painting.
It is not the portrayal of the earthly, but an imaginary sacred
landscape, which stood everywhere so alpine-like before their spirit.
This, however, straightway became identified with the actual picture of
nature, and determined the eye for natural scenery of the age.
From the biblical poetry of the Hebrews the Christian world (and not
only the Germanic) had acquired an enthusiasm for the beauties of nature
which could never have been kindled by ancient art.
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