1ANDSCAPE PAINTING. 75 



landscape painting long served merely as a background to 

 historical composition, or as an accidental ornament in the 

 decoration of painted walls. The epic poet, in a similar 

 manner, sometimes marked the locality of particular events 

 by a picturesque description of the landscape, or, as I might 

 again term it, of the background, in front of which the 

 acting personages were moving. The history of art teaches 

 how the subordinate auxiliary gradually became itself a 

 principal object, until landscape painting, separated from 

 true historical painting, took its place as a distinct form. 

 Whilst this separation was being gradually effected, the 

 human figures were sometimes inserted as merely eecondary 

 features in a mountainous or woodland scene, a marine or a 

 garden view. It has been justly remarked, in reference 

 to the ancients, that not only did painting remain subor- 

 dinate to sculpture, but more especially, that the feeling 

 for picturesque beauty of landscape reproduced by the 

 pencil was not entertained by them at all, but is wholly of 

 modern growth. 



Graphical indications of the peculiar features of a district 

 must, however, have existed in the earliest Greek paintings, 

 if (to cite particular instances) Mandrocles of Samos, as 

 Herodotus tells us ( 106 ), had ^painting made for the great 

 Persian king of the passage of the army across the Bos- 

 phorus; or if Polygnotus ( 107 ) painted the destruction of 

 Troy in the Lesche at Delphi. Among the pictures de- 

 scribed by the elder Philostratus mention is even made of a 

 landscape, in which smoke was seen to issue from the sum- 

 mit of a volcano, and the stieam of lava to pour itself into 

 the sea. In the very complicated composition of a view of 

 seven islands, the most recent commentators think that 



VOL. II. G 



