With the deeper
Christian knowledge of God comes also deeper poetic perception of His
beautiful earth, and not until man felt with intense pain the
transitoriness of this beautiful earth did he begin to love it so
ardently. It is therefore a transparent anti-realistic lanscape
painting, like that of the Psalmist, which those pious painters give us;
it strives after elevated forms for the outer senses also, strives
upward, and seeks to gain an insight into an entire world, into a cosmos
of concentrated, natural life, the archetype of which--in spite of all
childish naturalism--it has seen in the paradise of fancy rather than in
reality. The tall luminous mountain peaks, attainable only by the eye,
not by the foot, of themselves half belong to heaven. The landscapes of
the seventeenth century, on the contrary, which are inspired by earthly
beauty pure and simple, have a tendency to flatness, just as in reality
all landscapes lie spread out in length and breadth before us. Classical
antiquity had just as uncultivated an eye for the beauty of the Alps as
the age of Renaissance and the Rococo which emulated it so ardently.
Humboldt mentions that not a single Roman author ever alludes to the
Alps from a descriptive point of view except to complain of their
impassableness and like qualities, and that Julius Caesar employed the
leisure hours of an Alpine journey to complete a dry grammatical
treatise, _De Analogia_.
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