CHAPTER VIII
[1]: Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland.
[2]: Renaissance und Humanismus in Italien und Deutschland.
[3]: Zoeckler.
[4]: Comp. Hase, Sebastian Frank von Woerd der Schwarmgeist.
[5]: Comp. Hubert, Kleine Schriften.
[6]: Zoeckler, etc.
[7]: Comp. Uhland, Schriften zur Geschichte der Dichtung und Sage. Alte hoch und nieder deutsche Volkslieder, where plants, ivy, holly, box, and willow, represent summer and winter.
[8]: Uhland.
[9]: Uhland.
[10]: Wunderhorn.
[11]: Biese, op. cit.
[12]: Fred Cohn, 'Die Gärten in alter und neuer Zeit,' D. Rundschau 18, 1879. In Italy in the sixteenth century there was a change to this extent, that greenery was no longer clipt, but allowed to grow naturally, and the garden represented the transition from palace to landscape, from bare architectural forms to the free creations of Nature. The passion for flowers--the art of the pleasure garden, flourished in Holland and Germany. (Falke.)
[13]: W.H. Riehl states (Kulturstudien aus drei Jahrhunderten) that Berlin, Augsburg, Leipzig, Darmstadt, and Mannheim were described in the seventeenth century as having 'very fine and delightful positions'; and the finest parts of the Black Forest, Harz and Thuringian mountains as 'very desolate,' deserted, and monotonous, or, at best, as not particularly pleasant scenery. If only a region were flat and treeless, a delicious landscape could be charmed out of it. Welcker, Court physician at Hesse Cassel, describing Schlangenbad in 1721, said that it lay in a desolate, unpleasing district, where nothing grew but foliage and grass, but that through ingenious planting of clipt trees in lines and cross lines, some sort of artistic effect had been produced. Clearly the principles of French garden-craft had become a widely accepted dogma of taste. Riehl contrasts the periwig period with the mediæval, and concludes that the mediæval backgrounds of pictures implied feeling for the wild and romantic. He says: 'In the Middle Ages the painters chose romantic jagged forms of mountains and rocks for backgrounds, hence the wild, bare, and arid counted as a prototype of beautiful scenery, while some centuries later such forms were held to be too rustic and irregular for beauty.' One cannot entirely agree with this. He weakens it himself in what follows. 'It was not a real scene which rose Alp-like before their mind's eye, but an imaginary and sacred one; their fantastic, romantic ideal called for rough and rugged environment': and adds, arguing in a circle, 'Their minds passed then to real portraiture of Nature, and decided the landscape eye of the period.' My own opinion is that the loftiness of the 'heroic' mountain backgrounds seemed suitable for the sacred subjects which loomed so large and sublime in their own minds, and that these backgrounds did not reveal their ideal of landscape beauty, nor 'a romantic feeling for Nature,' nor 'a taste for the romantic,' nor yet a wondrous change of view in the periwig period.
[14]: In his Harburg Program of 1883 (Beiträge zur Geschichte des Naturgefühls), after an incomplete survey of ancient and modern writings on the subject, Winter sketches the development of modern feeling for Nature in Germany from Opitz to 1770, as shewn in the literature of that period, basing his information chiefly upon Goedeke's Deutsche Dichtung.
[15]: Comp. Chovelius Die bedeutendsten deutschen Romanz des 17 Jahrhunderts. Leipzig, 1866.
[16]: Chovelius.
[17]: Daniel Lohenstein's Blumen. Breslau, 1689.