LANDSCAPE PAINTING. 44 i 



scene, or in some sea or garden view. The separation af these 

 two species historical and landscape painting has been 

 thus effected by gradual stages, which have tended to favour 

 the advance of art through all the various phases of its de- 

 velopment. It has been justly remarked, that painting 

 generally remained subordinate to sculpture among the an- 

 cients, and that the feeling for the picturesque beauty of 

 scenery which the artist endeavours to reproduce from his 

 canvass, was unknown to antiquity and is exclusively of 

 modern origin. 



Graphic indications of the peculiar characteristics of a 

 locality must, however, have been discernible in the most an- 

 cient paintings of the Greeks, as instances of which we may 

 mention (if the testimony of Herodotus be correct),* that 

 Mandrocles of Samos caused a large painting of the passage 

 of the army over the Bosphorus to be executed for the Persian 

 King,f and that Polygnotus painted the fall of Troy in the 

 Lesche at Delphi. Amongst the paintings described by the 

 elder Philostratus, 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 neighbouring sea. In this very 

 complicated composition of a view of seven islands, the most 

 recent commentators^: think they can recognise the actual re- 

 presentation of the volcanic district of the ^Eolian or Lipari 

 islands north of Sicily. The perspective scenic decorations 

 which were made to heighten the effect of the representation 



* Herod., iv. 88. 



t A portion of the works of Polygnotus and Mikon (the painting of 

 the battle of Marathon in the Pokile at Athens) was, according to 

 the testimony of Himerius, still to be seen, at the end of the fourth 

 century (of our era), consequently when they had been executed 850 

 years. (Letronne, Lettrea sur la Peinture historique murale, 1835, pp. 

 202 and 453.) 



t Philostratorum Imagines, ed. Jacobs et Welcker, 1825, pp. 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 (J acobs, pp. xvii. and xlvi. ; Welcker, pp. 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 Bosphorus (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 intro- 

 ductory part of Critias (p. 107), of landscape painting as the art o 

 pictorially representing mountains, rivers, and forests. 



