THE EYE FOR NATURAL SCENERY[13]
By WILHELM HEINRICH RIEHL
TRANSLATED BY FRANCES H. KING
In topographical books of the pigtail age one may read that cities like Berlin, Leipzig, Augsburg, Darmstadt, Mannheim are situated in "an exceedingly pretty and agreeable region," whereas the most picturesque parts of the Black Forest, the Harz Mountains, and the Thuringian Forest are described as being "exceedingly melancholy," desolate and monotonous, or, at least, "not especially pleasing." That was by no means merely the private opinion of the individual topographer but the opinion of the age; for each century has not only its own peculiar theory of life—it has also its own peculiar theory o£ natural scenery.
Numberless country-seats were built a hundred years ago in barren tedious plains, and the builders thought that by so doing they had chosen the most beautiful situation imaginable; whereas the old baronial castles, in the most charming mountainous regions, were allowed to decay and go to ruin because they were not situated "delectably enough." The Bavarian Electors at that time not only laid out splendid summer residences and state gardens in the dreary woody and marshy plains of Nymphenburg and Schleissheim, but Max Emanuel even went so far as to have another artificial desert expressly constructed in the middle of one of these gardens—whose walls are already surrounded by the natural desert. Karl Theodor of the Palatinate built his Schwetzinger garden two hours away from the magnificent dales of Heidelberg, in the midst of the most monotonous kind of plain. Only let a region be fairly level and treeless, and immediately men were bold enough to imagine that it would be possible to conjure up there, the most delightful of landscapes.
Even fifty years ago the upper Rhine valley—which is by no means without charm but is nevertheless monotonous in its flatness—was considered a real paradise of natural scenic beauty, while the middle course of the river from Ruedesheim to Coblenz, with its rich splendor of gorges, rocks, castles and forests, was appreciated rather by way of contrast. In the upper Rheingau at that time they strung out one villa after another; these are now for the most part deserted, while on the formerly neglected tracts of country confined between the mountains a new summer castle is being stuck again on the summit of every rock, or at least the ruins already, hanging there are being made habitable once more. Our fathers, who thought the upper Rheingau the most beautiful corner of Germany, decorated their rooms with engravings so much in vogue at that time, similar to Claude Lorraine's broad, open landscapes of far reaching perspective filled with peace and charm. From this classical ideal of landscape we have come back again to the romantic, and the cupolas of the high mountains have supplanted the leafy temples of Claude's sacred groves with their background of the infinite sea sparkling in the sunshine.
In the seventeenth century the watering-places situated in the narrow, steep mountain valleys—many of which have now fallen into decay—were considered, for the greater part, the most frequented and most beautiful; in the eighteenth century the preference was given to those lying more toward the plain; while in our day the watering-places in the steepest mountains, as in the Black Forest, the Bohemian Mountains, and the Alps, are being sought out on account of their situation. The court physician of Hesse-Cassel, Weleker, in his description of Schlangenbad, which appeared in 1721, describes the place as situated in a dreary, desolate, forbidding region, in which nothing grows but "leaves and grass," but he adds that by ingeniously planting straight rows and circles of trees carefully pruned with the shears they had at least imparted to the spot some sort of artistic raison d'être. Today, on the contrary, Schlangenbad is considered one of the mast beautifully situated baths in Germany; the "dreariness" and "desolation" we now call romantic and picturesque, and the fact that in this spot nothing grows but "grass and leaves"—that is to say, that the fragrant meadow-land starts right before the door, and that the green boughs of the forest peep in everywhere at the windows—this perhaps attracts as many guests at present as the efficacy of the mineral spring.
The artists of the Middle Ages thought that they could give no more beautiful background to their historical paintings and half-length portraits than by introducing mountains and rocks of as fantastic and jagged a form as possible, although the latter often contrast strangely enough beside a mild, calmly serene Madonna face, or even beside the likeness of a prosaically respectable commonplace citizen of some free Imperial town. At that time, therefore, savagely broken-up, barren mountain scenery was considered the ideal type of natural scenic beauty, while, a few centuries later, such forms were found much too unpolished and irregular to be considered beautiful at all. Even old historical painters of the Netherlands, who had perhaps never in their lives seen such deeply fissured masses of rock, liked to make use of them in their backgrounds. The rugged mountain-tops in many of the pictures of Memling and Van Eyck certainly never grew in the vicinity of Bruges. This type of natural beauty was therefore established by custom even in countries where it was not indigenous. In a picture by a Low-German artist which depicts the legend of the Eleven Thousand Virgins, the city of Cologne is to be seen in the background surrounded by jagged clusters of rocks. A portrayal, true to nature, of the flat country did not satisfy the sense of beauty of the artist, who surely knew well enough that Cologne does not lie at the foot of the Alps. On the contrary, if an historical painter of the pigtail age had been obliged to paint the real Alps in the background of an historical painting, he would have rounded them off, leveled them, and smoothed them down as much as possible.
Is it a mere accident that, in the whole long period of landscape painting from Ruysdael almost up to recent times, high mountains have so very seldom formed the subject of important landscape compositions? The eye for natural scenery at that period had turned away from the conceptions of the Middle Ages, and satiated itself with the milder forms of the hills and the plain. Even when an artist like Everdingen presents to us the rocky chasms and waterfalls of Norway he moderates the fantastic forms, and, as far as possible, tries to lend to the northern Alpine world the character of the hills of middle Germany. Joseph Koch, although he was a native of the high Tyrolese Mountains, could not get along half so well with the portrayal of the Alpine world as with that of the classicly proportioned regions of Italy which lay within closer range of the eye for natural scenery of the age; and Ludwig Hess would hardly have come upon his characteristic conception of the Swiss mountains by studying Claude Lorraine and Poussin, if he had not been obliged to climb up to the mountain pastures in order to purchase the cattle to be killed in his father's shambles. On these occasions he reckoned up on one page of his account-book the oxen bought, and on the other side sketched them, together with the meadows, mountains, and glaciers. It was also at this same time when the Romantic School began to pave the way for itself with the historical painters in Munich, that Johann Jakob Dorner abandoned the "heroic" style of landscape, as it was then called, and went over to the "romantic." That is to say, Dorner and his companions, who up to that time had imitated the forms of Claude Lorraine[14] as the best possible model, now went off into the high mountains of Bavaria and were the first to reveal once more this wild magnificent nature to the eye for natural scenery of their time, thus preparing the way gradually for a new canon of natural scenic beauty which approached that of the Middle Ages, just as everywhere the modern Romantic School went back to the Middle Ages for inspiration. The Genevese Calame in his Alpine wildernesses typifies so completely the eye for natural scenery of the present day that it is impossible to imagine that these pictures belong to a former age. In the startling contrasts of powerful, often rough, forms and extreme tones, a species of natural beauty is created that has equally little in common with the plastic dignity of a mountain prospect by Poussin or with the quiet peacefulness of a forest thicket by Ruysdael. In what a very different manner from that of Calame was this same Swiss scenery treated by the numerous artists who painted Alpine views at the beginning of this century! They tried almost everywhere to depress the high mountains into hilly country, and they furnish a lanscape commentary to Gessner's Idyls rather than to the gigantic scenery of the Alps as we conceive it at present. Nature, however, has remained the same, and also the outer eye of man; it is the inner eye which has changed.
The older masters, as well as those of today, liked to place themselves below the landscape which they wished to construct, where all the outlines stand out most clearly defined. It had almost grown to be a rule that the foreground should be placed sharply in profile and often so deep in shadow that it contrasted like a silhouette with the more distant grounds. On the other hand, it is a favorite whim of the genuine pigtail age to draw bird's-eye landscapes and views of cities, in which every elevation of the earth seems flattened out as much as possible, every distinct division of the separate grounds as much as possible obliterated.
When Goethe was on his return trip from Messina to Naples he wrote at the sight of Scylla and Charybdis: "These two natural curiosities, standing so far apart in reality and placed so close together by the poet, have furnished men with an opportunity to abuse the fables of the bards, not remembering that the human imaginative faculty when it would represent objects as important always imagines them to be higher than they are broad, and thus lends more character, seriousness, and dignity to the picture. 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. 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.
In Bible vignettes of the eighteenth century, Paradise—which is the archetype of the virgin splendor of nature—is depicted as a flat tiresome garden entirely without elevations of any kind, in which the dear God has already begun to correct his own handiwork, and with the shears of a French gardener has carved out from the clumps of trees, straight avenues, pyramids, and the like. In older wood-carvings, on the other hand, Paradise is represented as a gradually rising wilderness where Adam's path is blocked by overhanging masses of rock which contrast strangely with the conception of natural life devoid of all labor and danger. Our fathers often saw in a charming, rich, and fertile region a picture of Paradise, whereas we are far more likely in a primeval wilderness to exclaim with the medieval masters:
"The lofty works, uncomprehended,
Are bright as on the earliest day."
In the landscapes of medieval pictures one scarcely ever sees the woods painted. Can the thin foliage of the trees of the old Italians, which look as though the leaves on them had been counted, be entirely explained by lack of technique? The generation of those days surely had a very different archetype of the intact, uncontaminated splendor of the forest than is possessed by us, for whom there remains scarcely anything but a cultivated forest ravaged by the axe and inclosed within boundaries fixed by rule and measure. The medieval poets felt deeply enough the poetic beauty of the forest, but men saw it with the appreciative eye of the artist only when they had gone away from the forest, when they had become more unfamiliar with it, and the woods themselves had begun to disappear. Thus the peasant in the folk-song knows how to reveal poetically many a tender charm of the beauty of nature; but, on the other hand, he very seldom has an eye for the picturesque beauty of natural scenery. As regards the latter it is with him as with the late Pastor Schmidt of Werneuchen who when describing in hexameters the spectacle of a barley field to the Berliners, called it "a marvelous view." When the forest was still the rule in Germany and the field the exception, the uprooted parts of the forest, the oases of cleared land, the free open spaces, undoubtedly passed for the most attractive landscapes; whereas we, who have acquired too much of the open, are more attracted by the oases of the forest shade.
Only he who takes this into consideration can understand for example, how it is possible that the palace of Charlemagne at Ingelheim could have passed for a perfect country-seat, situated in what must have been considered in those days an extremely charming and picturesque spot. Seen through modern eyes these plains of the left bank of the Rhine with their fields, vineyards, sandy wastes and stunted pine-woods are intensely uninteresting, and one fails to comprehend why an emperor should have chosen Ingelheim as a country-seat, when he needed only to cross the river, or to proceed down stream for a few hours in order to build his palace in a region of imperishable natural beauty. If, however, one takes one's stand on the ruined walls of the imperial abode and looks out over the broad plains of the Rhine valley, which at that time were already cleared land, while the chain of hills along the left bank, which are so monotonous at present, were still covered with woods, then one can estimate to some extent the delight caused by the view spreading before the gaze of the emperor. His castle at the edge of the wood, as it were on the borders of night and old barbarity, looked out upon the open, and under the windows stretched the broad agricultural land of the Rheingau, from whose virgin soil the first vines were just beginning to sprout, adorned with new settlements and roads—surely a royal spectacle for the eye of those days. It was, so to speak, the symbol of the universal historical mission, not only of the emperor but of the entire age—namely, to root up, to clear, to procure light. And thus the same landscape which today is considered, if not exactly commonplace, yet at the most idyllic, may have appeared imposing and imperial to the people of a thousand years ago.
It is because of this varying eye for natural scenery—which is the eye of generations succeeding one another in the course of history—that landscape painting, which conveys to us the most trustworthy information of this variation of vision, does not belong solely to the sphere of the esthetician; the historian of civilization must also study this most subjective of all plastic representations.
It is well known that even the most beautiful region is not in itself a real work of art. Man alone creates artistically; nature does not. A landscape such as meets our gaze out of doors is not beautiful in itself, it only possesses, possibly, the capability of being spiritualized and refined into beauty in the eye of the spectator. Only in so far is it a work of art as Nature has furnished the raw material for such, while each beholder first fashions it artistically and endows it with a soul in the mirror of his eye. Nature is made beautiful only by the self-deception of the spectator.
Therefore does the peasant ridicule the city man who deceives himself to the extent of becoming enthusiastic over the beauties of a region which leaves the other quite cool. For he who has not something of the artist about him, who cannot paint beautiful landscapes in his head, will never see any outside. Beautiful nature, this most subjective of all works of art, which is painted on the retina of the eye instead of on wood or canvas, will differ every time according to the mental viewpoint of the onlooker; and as it is with individuals so it is with whole generations. The comprehension of the artistically beautiful is not half so dependent upon great cultural presuppositions as the comprehension of the naturally beautiful. With every great evolution of civilization a new "vision" is engendered for a different kind of natural beauty.
This goes so far that one might even be deceived into thinking that the different ages had gazed upon the beauty of nature not only with differing mental eyes but also with a different faculty of seeing. Most of the old masters have painted their landscapes with the eyes of a far-sighted person; we think, as a rule, that we can attain far greater natural truth if we paint our pictures, as it were, from the angle of vision of a near-sighted person. A far-sighted painter will usually be more inclined to paint a plastic landscape, while a near-sighted one would make a mood-picture out of the same scene. The very trees of the old Italians, on which the leaves are numbered, may serve to exemplify this comparison. The scenery of the landscapes of Van Eyck and his pupils is quite often painted as though the artist had looked at the background through a perspective glass and the foreground through a magnifying one. Jan Breughel paints his charming little landscapes with such detailed precision of outline, especially as regards foliage, he draws in his swarming little figures with such sharp lines, that the whole seems reflected in the eye of an eagle rather than in that of a man. On the other hand we miss the unity and the differentiation of the combined effect—the concentration of large groups, an eye for the landscape as an organic whole. Claude Lorraine and Ruysdael are the first who may be called epoch-making along these lines; they are also, in this sense, the ancestors of modern landscape painting. Where the old masters still counted the leaves, flowers, and blades of grass and laboriously imitated them, we have now adopted broad, general, and, to a certain extent, conventional forms of foliage, meadowland, and the like.
Taken separately, these are far less true to nature than the miniature imitation of detail. Taken collectively, on the other hand, they are far more profoundly true to nature and to art. Do we not at present sometimes see artists who almost seem to consider it their whole life's mission to paint landscapes which have scarcely any definite plastic forms, pure mood-pictures, as, for example, Zwengauer, who is never tired of portraying barren moorlands with some water in the foreground, a shapeless tract of land in the centre, and above the fiery glow of the sunset, which, with a considerable portion of atmosphere growing ever darker and darker, fills up the largest part of the whole picture. It is as though fire, water, air and earth, the four elements as such, were demonstrated before us on the Dachauer moor and combined to form a landscape harmony. For such pictures of mood, pure and simple, the old masters had absolutely no eye. If a painter of the fifteenth or sixteenth century should rise from his grave and gaze upon even our best landscape paintings he would certainly take very little pleasure in them; he would consider them daubs executed after a recipe according to which one can obtain the most beautiful foliage by throwing a sponge dipped in green paint against the wall.
It is not only the eye for natural scenery which has thus advanced in the last three centuries from the perception of the individual parts to the perception of the whole. We find the same phenomena in the case of historical painters, and no less in that of the poets, musicians, and scholars. A Bach suite, just like a Breughel landscape, has been, as it were, worked out under the microscope, and nowadays it is easier to find a hundred philosophers of history who are capable of constructing history as a "work of art"—exceedingly well on the whole—than one individual chronicler who would lose himself, with the dead leaf-counting diligence of bygone centuries, in endless detail-work. We look not only at landscapes but at the entire world more from the viewpoint of the harmony of the whole than from that of the divergence of the individual parts.
In helping us to gauge the eye for natural scenery of an age, the really artistic portrayals are often far less accurate than the fashionable articles manufactured, as it were, by the artistic handicraftsman, for the latter best disclose to us the eye of the entire public. Hence, for example, the popular passion for Rhine landscapes, Swiss pictures, Italian views, etc., mechanically executed after a fixed model—which periodically breaks forth only to vanish again—is more important for us in this respect than the conception of many a leader of genius in the art of landscape-painting, who may perhaps set the tone for the future but seldom for the present. There exist special directions for making a Rhine landscape and for infallibly bestowing upon it the genuine coloring of the Rhine, which appeared in the book-market about a hundred and fifty years ago, side by side with directions for preparing the best vinegar, the best sealing-wax, etc.—I do not know whether it was also sealed up as a secret recipe, as they were. By genuine Rhine coloring was meant that sentimental, mistily indistinct tone in the dullest possible half tints formerly so much in vogue. The fact that such a booklet could be written and sold with profit affords us instructive hints regarding the eye of the multitude for natural scenery in those days, and the tone of that infallible Rhine coloring is, in its way, also a color-tone of the age. Nowadays, when Alpine landscapes are painted even on the rough stones from the Alpine rivers (for paper-weights), it would be very easy to write out a recipe for genuine mountain coloring. Mountain peaks, rugged as possible, painted in thick Venetian white, must detach themselves from a sky of almost pure Berlin blue; with these again contrasts a centre-ground partly composed of clumps of dark green fir-trees and partly of a poisonous yellow-green meadow; finally the rocks of the foreground must be painted in glaring ochre tones, just as they are squeezed out of the paint tube. Such factory goods are, for the historian of culture, just as necessary a supplement to Zimmermann and Schirmer and Calame as that "genuine Rhine coloring" is to Koch and Rheinhard, to Schuetz and Reinermann.
Let us linger a moment longer in the region of the Rhine, which was in Germany, for nearly two centuries, the subject of the most salable landscape fancy articles. In the seventeenth century it was already a sort of industry to turn out mechanically so-called "Rhine rivers." In the same way that we now reproduce Rhine scenes on plates, cups, tin-ware and pocket-handkerchiefs, in those days folding-screens, fire-places, bay-windows, even door-cases, but more especially the space over the doorway (though the latter were executed in the fresco style of the cooper), were decorated with "Rhine rivers." But these "Rhine rivers" are totally unlike those which the manufacturers of views of the Rhine furnish us with today. The eye revealed by the one is very different from that which we find in the other; at the most they have the water in common.
[Illustration: AT THE SICK BED actually a painting by BENJAMIN VAUTIER]
In the old "Rhine rivers" there are, for the most part, rounded-off mountainous formations, whereas we now make the angularity of the real Rhine mountains still more angular if possible; the castles, as indicative of a too barbaric taste, are often omitted or changed into a sort of Roman ruin; the portrayal is so free that it ceases to be a portrait, and yet they believed that they had adhered all the more strictly to the peculiar motive of Rhine scenery. 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. That was then dubbed a river Rhine. Griffier, however, certainly believed that he had beheld the genuine scenery of the Rhine; he did not laboriously evolve his pictures shut up in a room, but painted his imaginative pieces in a skiff, direct from nature. And it really was the actual Rhine that he saw, only he looked at it with the idealistic eye of the seventeenth century.
If one confronts productions of this kind with the later works of a Schuetz or Reinermann which treat of the same subject, and then again compares both with our modern views of the Rhine, one can often scarcely comprehend how even the same character of scenery is supposed to be reproduced in these widely differing conceptions, much less the identically same landscape. While in Saftleewen, for example, we always see the Rhine country veiled in a soft mist, seventy years ago it was accounted as a merit of the elder Schuetz that he always gave his pictures of the Rhine and the Main the clearest possible air, and that there was never a trace of mist in the atmosphere! Let us now compare both of these conceptions with the Rhine views executed in the modern style of a steel engraving, with their heavy, tropically stormy sky, dark masses of clouds, between which thick dazzling streams of light break forth, and similar violent light-effects. One might think that sun, air, and clouds, water and mountains and trees and rocks, had altered in the course of the centuries, that nature itself had been transformed, if we did not know only too well that it is the eye of man alone which has altered in the mean time, that every generation sees in a different style.
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. They therefore really painted pictures of mood just as we do. Only they strove, as it were, to preserve the most general elemental mood of natural beauty, while we strain ourselves in depicting individual changeable moods. Do we not actually see at present stage-scenery painted like sentimental mood-pictures, trees in the foreground, for example, on whose deformed greenish-brown foliage an elegiac late-autumnal tinge rests? And these are shoved into position regularly each evening for every dialogue scene, and every light comic situation—a satire on the inner eye of our time. In a German metropolis of art one can even see sign-boards of sausage manufacturers on which sausages, hams, salted spare-ribs and swards are appetizingly painted with brilliant technique; and they too are conceived like mood-pictures, since that soft melancholy mist, with which our landscape painters are so fond of coquetting, spreads likewise over these sausages and hams, almost making them look as though they had all grown moldy. That is another indication of the eye for natural scenery of our time.
Change of styles that great masters had made conventional, the degeneration and progress of technique, etc., play a large part, to be sure, in all these things, with and beside the changing eye. How much, however, essentially depends upon the latter we can notice very plainly when the question is one of architectural landscapes and, in general, of the portrayal of old works of sculpture and architecture, which men have seen very differently in different ages and represented accordingly, while the originals have, in truth, remained the same throughout the centuries.
The purest Gothic architecture portrayed in the pigtail age nearly always has a pigtail look. The ornamentation of leaves and vines, executed in accordance with the laws of organic necessity, becomes, without the draughtsman being aware of it, an arbitrarily curved rococo scroll; the proportions, which in reality soar upward, spread out in width, so that one might think it possible for the eyesight to change also, and yet in the building itself perhaps not a stone has been disturbed since its erection; the pigtail surely did not transport itself into the original—it existed only in the eye of the copyist. The views of cities and buildings furnish the most striking examples of this, for in them we can see how these additions have been made, in woodcut, to the numerous topographical works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Almost every medieval tower here bears the stamp of the Renaissance, every pointed arch is, if possible, compressed into a Roman arch, so firmly implanted were these new forms in the eye and hand of the people of that time. For even in an external sense men no longer possessed an organ for the old lines. Peter Neefs, the celebrated architectural painter of this age, did indeed stand on such a high plane of art and technique that he reproduced the perspectives of his Gothic churches absolutely correctly. He had in this particular preserved the objectivity of the artistic eye which is absolutely lacking in the mechanical works mentioned above; nevertheless, even here, he shows himself to be the child of his age. For example, he almost always paints the interiors of his Gothic cathedrals on broad canvases of insignificant height, which causes the pointed arches and vaulted structures of the foreground to be cut off at the top. In spite of the mathematically correct drawing the general plan of the picture therefore reveals that the age of Peter Neefs no longer had a correct eye for the principle, for the spirit, of the Gothic, otherwise the master would not have cut off precisely the characteristic terminations of the columns and vaultings by the arbitrary horizontal line of the frame. Thus, in very truth, Neefs paints rigid Gothic, but in his pictures we can recognize the seventeenth century which, at the most, could see the medieval forms correctly with the outer but not with the inner eye.
All the outlines of the ancient statues swell up under the pencil of the draughtsman of that day, every muscle becomes coarser, fuller, more fleshy, although the draughtsman undoubtedly believed he had reproduced it with mathematical exactitude. The Grecian goddess no longer looks so demure. She has grown to be a coquette; the Virgin has become a wife, because the age lacked the virgin eye, because Rubens' full-bosomed women's figures and Buonarotti's swelling play of the muscles obtruded themselves everywhere, not only before the creative vision but also before the inner receptive vision. Mignon, at that time, painted flowers preferably in the stage of their most fully developed splendor, and fruits succulently ripe to bursting; he despised closed buds. This is something more than a mere fancy of this particular master; it is a token of the eye of the whole generation, which was dull as regards the beauty of buds, not only in the flower-piece but in all subjects of the plastic arts.
This changing play of "vision" takes place everywhere that beauty meets the gaze, but principally in the case of the beautiful in nature, because this, as such, must first be conceived by the vision. The eye for the beautiful in art remains more constant in comparison.
In youth one has a totally different eye for natural scenery than in old age. This is the reason why we often feel greatly disappointed when we behold a familiar region after a long time. There is no more thankless task than to try to convince another of the beauty of natural scenery.
One tries, as it were, to implant in him one's own eye—an effort which rarely succeeds. So it is, furthermore, the business of the landscape painter to implant his own eye for natural scenery in every one who looks upon his pictures, in such a manner that the latter shall get out of the landscape the same beauties which the eye of the artist put into it. If he succeeds in this, one must at least concede that he has worked clearly, logically, and conscious of his effects.
The eye for natural scenery is never an absolute one, and if out of ten generations each one finds the primitive canon of natural beauty in something different, then none is entirely right and none entirely wrong. This uncertainty of the eye for natural scenery might drive a painter crazy if he should insist upon knowing definitely, once for all, whether the succeeding century would not perhaps have just as good a right to laugh at his ideal of the beautiful in nature as we have to laugh at the preferences for natural scenery of the two preceding generations. He might then, in consideration of the tremendous fluctuations in the conception of the beautiful in nature, lose confidence in his own eyes to such an extent that at last he would no longer have any guarantee to assure him that the mountain which he is drawing as a rounded knoll is not perhaps, in reality, pointed and jagged, while the roundish outline merely holds his eyes captive, as it did those of the painters of the pigtail.
If, however, the eye for natural scenery only sees bona fide, as the jurists say, then it follows that it saw correctly for its age.
Whether our grandchildren will laugh at us because we saw thus and not otherwise need not disturb our peace of mind, for no present has any kind of guarantee that it will not be laughed at by the immediate future.
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