The most lively
activity of men and animals, ships and rafts, and all sorts of land
conveyances, formed the principal ornament; there had to be a sort of
antlike swarming to and fro on a river Rhine of this description if it
was to be considered really beautiful. In Saftleewen's views of the
Rhine this fondness is already discernible. Although in his pictures
there is still evidence of a very clear eye for mountainous formation
and the architectonic adornment of the region, yet the monotonous,
unnaturally tender and misty coloring indicates the effort to soften and
equalize the contrast of forms, while life is introduced into the
landscape only by means of the immeasurably rich accessories which make
every rock, every valley, and especially the entire river, swarm with
people. These are, in truth, cultural landscapes, in which we perceive
the greatest charm of the region to lie in the pathway of human work,
just as the whole age in which they were painted longed to get away from
the devastation of the Thirty Years' War into the crowded activity of
work and festive pleasures, which, however, were far less apt to be
found on the real Rhine than on the painted "Rhine rivers" of the
seventeenth century. Johannes Griffier affords us an even clearer idea
than Saftleewen of the model pictures of the mechanical old "Rhine
rivers." Griffier paints from imagination an idyllic river valley,
adorned with Roman ruins such as never stood on the Rhine, animated by
all kinds of jolly people, such as it would have been hard, in that day,
to find gathered in our devastated provinces.
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