Together with this peculiar formality

§18. Together with this peculiar formality, we find an infinite delight in drawing pleasant flowers, always articulating and outlining them completely; the sky is always blue, having only a few delicate white clouds in it, and in the distance are blue mountains, very far away, if the landscape is to be simply delightful; but brought near, and divided into quaint over hanging rocks, if it is intended to be meditative, or a place of saintly seclusion. But the whole of it always,—flowers, castles, brooks, clouds, and rocks,—subordinate to the human figures in the foreground, and painted for no other end than that of explaining their adventures and occupations. oil paintings for sale

7. Botany of 13^th Century.
(Apple-tree and Cyclamen)

§ 19. Before the idea of landscape had been thus far developed, the representations of it had been purely typical; the objects which had to be shown in order to explain the scene of the event, being firmly outlined, usually on a pure golden or chequered color background, not on sky. The change from the golden background, (characteristic of the finest thirteenth century work) and the colored chequer (which in like manner belongs to the finest fourteenth) to the blue sky, gradated to the horizon,oil paintings online, takes place early in the fifteenth century, and is thecrisis of change in the spirit of mediæval art. Strictly speaking, we might divide the art of Christian times into two great masses—Symbolic and Imitative;—the symbolic, reaching from the earliest periods down to the close of the fourteenth century, and the imitative from that close to the present time; and, then, the most important circumstance indicative of the culminating point, or turn of tide, would be this of the change from chequered background to sky background. The uppermost figure in Plate 7. opposite, representing the tree of knowledge, taken from a somewhat late thirteenth century Hebrew manuscript (Additional 11,639) in the British Museum, will at once illustrate Mr. Macaulay's "serpent turned round the tree," and the mode of introducing the chequer background, will enable the reader better to understand the peculiar feeling of the period, which no more intended the formal walls or streams for an imitative representation of the Garden of Eden, than these chequers for an imitation of sky. oil painted portraits