days of landscape art.

[Illustration: PLATE XIV. (Fig. 22.)]

86. Now from the landscape of these two men to the landscape of Raphael,
Leonardo, and Perugino, the advance consists principally in two great
steps: The first, that distant objects were more or less invested with a
blue color,--the second, that trees were no longer painted with a black
ground, but with a rich dark brown, or deep green. From Giotto's old
age, to the youth of Raphael, the advance in, and knowledge of,
landscape, consisted of no more than these two simple steps; but the
_execution_ of landscape became infinitely more perfect and elaborate.
All the flowers and leaves in the foreground were worked out with the
same perfection as the features of the figures; in the middle distance
the brown trees were most delicately defined against the sky; the blue
mountains in the extreme distance were exquisitely thrown into aerial
gradations, and the sky and clouds were perfect in transparency and
softness. But still there is no real advance in knowledge of natural
objects. The leaves and flowers are, indeed, admirably painted, and
thrown into various intricate groupings, such as Giotto could not have
attempted, but the rocks and water are still as conventional and
imperfect as ever, except only in color: the forms of rock in Leonardo's
celebrated "Vierge aux Rochers" are literally no better than those on a
china plate. _Fig._ 22 shows a portion of them in mere outline, with one
cluster of the leaves above, and the distant "ideal" mountains. On the
whole, the most satisfactory work of the period is that which most
resembles missal painting, that is to say, which is fullest of beautiful
flowers and animals scattered among the landscape, in the old
independent way, like the birds upon a screen. The landscape of Benozzo
Gozzoli is exquisitely rich in incident of this kind.

87. The first man who entirely broke through the conventionality of his
time, and painted pure landscape, was Masaccio, but he died too young to
effect the revolution of which his genius was capable. It was left for
other men to accomplish, namely, for Correggio and Titian. These two
painters were the first who relieved the foregrounds of their landscape
from the grotesque, quaint, and crowded formalism of the early painters;
and gave a close approximation to the forms of nature in all things;
retaining, however, thus much of the old system, that the distances were
for the most part paint