. The fourteenth-century miniatures shew the
first signs of the northern feeling for Nature in illustrations of
the seasons in the calendar pictures of religious manuscripts.
Beginnings of landscape can be clearly seen in that threshold picture
of Netherland art, the altar-piece at Ghent by the brothers Van Eyck,
which was finished in 1432. It shews the most accurate observation:
all the plants, grasses, flowers, rose bushes, vines, and palms, are
correctly drawn; and the luxuriant valley in which the Christian
soldiers and the knights are riding, with its rocky walls covered by
undergrowth jutting stiffly forward, is very like the valley of the
Maas.

One sees that the charm of landscape has dawned upon the painters.

Their skies are no longer golden, but blue, and flecked with
cloudlets and alive with birds; wood and meadow shine in sappy green;
fantastic rocks lie about, and the plains are bounded by low hills.
They are drinking deep draughts from a newly-opened spring, and they
can scarcely have enough of it. They would like to paint all the
leaves and fruit on the trees, all the flowers on the grass, even all
the dewdrops. The effect of distance too has been discovered, for
there are blue hill-tops beyond the nearer green ones, and a
foreground scene opens back on a distant plain (in the Ghent
altar-piece, the scene with the pilgrims); but they still possess
very few tones, and their overcrowded detail is almost all, from
foreground to furthest distance, painted in the same luminous strong
dark-green, as if in insatiable delight at the beauty of their own
colour. The progress made by Jan van Eyck in landscape was immense.

To the old masters Nature had been an unintelligible chaos of detail,
but beauty, through ecclesiastical tradition, an abstract attribute
of the Holy Family and the Saints, and they had used their best
powers of imagination in accordance with this view. Hence they placed
the Madonna upon a background of one colour, generally gilded. But
now the great discovery was made that Nature was a distinct entity, a
revelation and reflection of the divine in herself. And Jan van Eyck
introduced a great variety of landscapes behind his Madonnas. One
looks, for instance, through an open window to a wide stretch of
country with fields and fortresses, and towns with streets full of
people, all backed by mountains. And whether the scene itself, or
only its background, lies in the open, the landscape is of the