In the German Renaissance too, the great masters limited themselves to charming framework and ingenious arabesques for their Madonnas and Holy Families. But, as Lübke says,[[4]] one soon sees that Dürer depended on architecture for borders and backgrounds far less than Holbein; he preferred landscape.
'The charm of this background is so great, the inwardness of German feeling for Nature so strongly expressed in it, that it has a special value of its own, and the master through it has become the father of landscape painting.'[[5]]
This must be taken with a grain of salt; but, at all events, it is true that Dürer combined 'keen and devoted study of Nature (in the widest sense of the word) with a penetration which aimed at tracing her facts up to their source.'[[6]] It is interesting to see how these qualities overcame his theoretical views on Nature and art.[[7]] Dürer's deep respect for Nature proved him a child of the new era. Melanchthon relates that he often regretted that he had been too much attracted in his younger days by variety and the fantastic, and had only understood Nature's simple truth and beauty later in life.
His riper judgment preferred her to all other models. Nature, in his remarks on the theory of art, includes the animate and the inanimate, living creatures as well as scenery, and it is interesting to observe that his admiration of her as a divine thing was due to deep religious feeling. In his work on Proportion[[8]] he says:
'Certainly art is hidden in Nature, and he who is able to separate it by force from Nature, he possesses it. Never imagine that you can or will surpass Nature's achievements; human effort cannot compare with the ability which her Creator has given her. Therefore no man can ever make a picture which excels Nature's; and when, through much copying, he has seized her spirit, it cannot be called original work, it is rather something received and learnt, whose seeds grow and bear fruit of their own kind. Thereby the gathered treasure of the heart, and the new creature which takes shape and form there, comes to light in the artist's work.'
Elsewhere Dürer says 'a good painter's mind is full of figures,' and he repeatedly remarks upon the superabundant beauty of all living things which human intelligence rarely succeeds in reproducing.
The first modern landscapes in which man was only accessory were produced in the Netherlands. Quiet, absorbed musing on the external world was characteristic of the nation; they studied the smallest and most trifling objects with care, and set a high value on minutiæ.
The still-life work of their prime was only possible to such an easy-going, life-loving people; the delightful animal pictures of Paul Potter and Adrian van de Velde could only have been painted in the land of Reineke Fuchs. Carrière says about these masters of genre painting[[9]]: 'Through the emphasis laid upon single objects, they not only revealed the national characteristics, but penetrated far into the soul of Nature and mirrored their own feelings there, so producing works of art of a kind unknown to antiquity. That divine element, which the Greek saw in the human form, the Germanic race divined in all the visible forms of Nature, and so felt at one with them and able to reveal itself through them.
'Nature was studied more for her own sake than in her relation to man, and scenery became no longer mere background, but the actual object of the picture. Animals, and even men, whether bathing in the river, lying under trees, or hunting in the forest, were nothing but accessories; inorganic Nature was the essential element. The greatest Dutch masters did not turn their attention to the extraordinary and stupendous, the splendour of the high Alps or their horrible crevasses, or sunny Italian mountains reflected in their lakes or tropical luxuriance, but to common objects of everyday life. But these they grasped with a precision and depth of feeling which gave charm to the most trifling--it was the life of the universe divined in its minutiæ. In its treatment of landscape their genre painting displayed the very characteristics which had brought it into being.'[[10]]
The physical characters of the country favoured landscape painting too. No doubt the moist atmosphere and its silvery sheen, which add such freshness and brilliance to the colouring, influenced the development of the colour sense, as much as the absence of sharp contrasts in contour, the suggestive skies, and abundance of streams, woods, meadows, and dales.