The masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries looked at natural
scenery in a very much more objective manner than we do. Wherever there
is bright springtime or summer, wherever all the trees are green and the
flowers blooming, wherever the cloudless sky is glittering in deepest
blue, and all forms stand out detached from one another in the luminous
clearness of the full, joyous, midday sunlight--there for them is
genuinely beautiful natural scenery. It was not lack of technique that
prevented the artists of that period from painting faded yellow autumn
pictures, or thunder-storms and rain landscapes as we do. With regard to
more difficult points they were technically so far advanced that they
could surely have produced a gray sky instead of a blue, and yellow-red
trees instead of green, if they had seriously tried to do so. But with
their far brighter eyes they saw the landscape far brighter than we do,
and therefore, of necessity, they painted it so. Whoever compares
medieval lyrics, where the same sunny, springlike tone plays through all
the verses, with modern lyrics, will become more deeply conscious of
this necessity.
And as those men found their calm nature reflected in the midday
clearness of the most peaceful of spring days, so it is necessary for us
to seek the mirror of our own passionate agitation in the pathos of the
stormy, mournful, autumnally decaying, desolate, savage landscape.
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