Si COSMOS. 



Delphi. Among the paintings described by the elder Philos- 

 tvatus, mention is made of a landscape in which smoke was 

 seen to rise from the summit of a volcano, and lava streams 

 to flow into the neighboring sea. In this very complicated 

 composition of a view of seven islands, the most receiit com- 

 mentators* think they can recognize the actual representation 

 of the volcanic district of the iEolian or Lipari Islands north 

 of Sicily. The perspective scenic decorations, which were 

 made to heighten the effect of the representation of the mas- 

 ter-works of ^Eschylus and Sophocles, gradually enlarged this 

 branch of artt by increasing the demand for an illusive imita- 

 tion of inanimate objects, as buildings, woods, and rocks. 



In consequence of the greater perfection to which scenog- 

 raphy had attained, landscape painting passed among the 

 Greeks and their imitators, the Romans, from the stage to 

 their halls, adorned with columns, where the long ranges of 

 wall Avere covered at first with more circumscribed views,$ 

 but shortly afterward with extensive pictures of cities, sea- 

 shores, and wide tracts of pasture land, on which flocks were 

 grazing. ^^ Although the Roman painter Ludius, who lived 

 in the Augustan age, can not be said to have invented these 

 graceful decorations, he yet made them generally popular, || 

 animating them by the addition of small figures.^ Almost at 

 the same period, and probably even half a century earlier, we 

 find landscape painting mentioned as a much-practiced art 

 among the Indians during the brilliant epoch of Vikramaditya. 



* Philostratorum Imagines, ed. Jacobs et Welcker, 1825, p. 79 and 

 485. Both the learned editors defend, against former suspicions, the 

 authenticity of the description of the paintings contained in the ancient 

 Neapolitan Pinacothek (Jacobs, p. xvii. and xlvi. ; Welcker, p. Iv. and 

 xlvi.). Otfried Miiller conjectures that Philostratus's picture of the 

 islands (ii., 17), as well as that of the marshy district of the Bosporus 

 (i., 9), and of the fishermen (i., 12 and 13), bore much resemblance, in 

 their mode of representation, to the mosaic of Palestrina. Plato speaks, 

 in the introductory part of Critias (p. 107), of landscape painting as 

 the art of pictorially representing mountafns, rivers, and forests. 



t Particularly through Agatharcus, or, at least, according to the rules 

 he established. Aristot., Poet., iv., 16 ; Vitruv., lib. v., cap. 7 ; lib. vii. 

 in Praef. (ed. Alois Maxinius, 1836, t. i., p. 292 ; t. ii., p. 56). Com- 

 pare, also, Letronne's woi-k, op. cit., p. 271-280. 



X On Objects of Rhopographia, see Welcker adPhilostr. Imag., p. 397. 



$ Vitruv., lib. vii., cap. 5 (t. ii., p. 91). 



II Hirt., Gesch. der bildenden Kicnste bei den Alten, 1833, s. 332 ; Le> 

 tronne, p. 262 and 468. 



H Ludius qui primus (?) instituit amcenissimam parietum picturam 

 (Plin., XXXV., 10). The topiaria opera of Pliny, and the varietates topi- 

 orum of Vitruvius. were small decoi'ative landscape paintings. The 

 passage quoted in the text of Kalidasa occurs in the Sakuntala. act vj 



