ned to artistic expression in
his lyrics, where his own feelings chimed with Nature.

For the rest, the Minnesingers' descriptions were all alike. The
charm of Nature apart from other considerations, delight in her for
her own sake alone, was unknown to the time.

Hitherto we have only spoken of literature.

Feeling for Nature reveals itself in plastic art also, especially in
painting; and since the mind of a people is one united organism, the
relation between poetry and painting is not one of opposition and
mutual exclusion--they rather enlarge and explain, or condition each
other.

As concerns feeling for Nature, it may be taken as a universal rule
that landscape-painting only develops when Nature is sought for her
own sake, and that so long as scenery merely serves the purpose of
ornament in literature, so long it merely serves as accessory and
background in painting; whereas, when Nature takes a wider space in
prose and poetry, and becomes an end of representation in herself,
the moment for the birth of landscape-painting has come. We will
follow the stages of the development of painting very briefly, from
Woltmann and Woermann's excellent book,[9] which, if it throws no
fresh light upon our subject, illustrates what has just been said in
a striking manner.

In the first centuries _Anno Domini_, painting was wholly proscribed
by Christendom. Its technique did not differ from that of antiquity;
but Christendom took up an attitude of antagonism. The picture
worship of the old religions was opposed to its very origin and
essence, and was only gradually introduced into the Christian cult
through heathen influences. It is a fact too, easy to explain,
especially through its Jewish origin, that Christianity at first felt
no need of art, and that this one-sidedness only ceased when the
specifically Jewish element in it had died out, and Christendom
passed to cultivated Greeks and Romans. In the cemeteries and
catacombs of the first three centuries, we find purely decorative
work, light vines with Cupids, but also remains of landscapes; for
instance, in the oldest part of the cemetery of Domitilla at Rome,
where the ceiling decoration consists of shepherds, fishers, and
biblical scenes. The ceiling picture in St Lucina (second century)
has apparently the Good Shepherd in the middle, and round it
alternate pictures of Him and of the praying Madonna; whilst in the
middle it has also charming divisions with fields, branc