90 COSMOS. 



served as the representativ^e of tropical vegetation, as, in like 

 manner, Pinus pinea is even still very generally supposed to 

 famish an exclusive characteristic of the vegetable forms ol 

 Italy. The contour of high mountain chains was but little 

 studied, and snow-covered peaks, which projected beyond the 

 green Alpine meadows, were, at that period, still regarded by 

 naturalists and landscape painters as inaccessible. The phys- 

 iognomy of rocky masses seems scarcely to have excited any 

 attempt at accurate representation, excepting where a water- 

 fall broke in foam over the mountain side. We may here re- 

 mark another instance of the diversity of comprehension man- 

 ifested by a free and artistic spirit in its intimate communion 

 with nature. Rubens, who, in his great hunting pieces, had 

 depicted the fierce movements of wild animals with inimita- 

 ble animation, succeeded, as the delineator of historical events, 

 in representing, with equal truth and vividness, the form of 

 the landscape in the waste and rocky elevated plain surround- 

 ing the Escurial.* 



The dehneation of natural objects included in the branch of 

 art at present under consideration could not have gained in 

 diversity and exactness until the geographical field of view 

 became extended, the means of traveling in foreign countries 

 facilitated, and the appreciation of the beauty and configura- 

 tion of vegetable forms, and their arrangement in groups of 

 natural families, excited. The discoveries of Columbus, Vasco 

 de Gama, and Alvarez Cabral, in Central America, Southern 

 Asia, and the Brazils ; the extensive trade in spices and drugs 

 carried on by the Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, and Flem- 

 ings, and the establishment of botanical gardens at Pisa, Pad- 

 ua, and Bologna, between 1544 and 1568, although not yet 

 furnished with hot-houses properly so called, certainly made 

 artists acquainted with many remarkable forms of exotic prod- 

 ucts, including even some that belong to a tropical vegeta- 

 tion. Single fruits, flowers, and branches were painted with 

 much natural truth and grace by Johann Breughel, whose 

 reputation had been already established before the close of the 

 sixteenth century ; but it is not until the middle of the seven- 

 teenth century that we meet with landscapes which reproduce 

 the individual character of the torrid zone, as impressed upon 

 the artist's mind by actual observation. The merit of the 

 earliest attempt at such a mode of representation belongs prob- 

 ably, as I find from Waagen, to the Flemish painter Franz 



tnre of Cima da Couegliano, of ihe school of Belliiio (Dresden Gallery 

 1835. No. 40) * Dresden Gallery, No. 917. 



