78 LANDSCAPE PAINTING 



An entire treasury of old memorials is found both in the 

 miniatures ( ll6 ) adorning superb manuscripts still in good 

 condition, and in the scarcer mosaics of the same period. 

 Bumohr mentions a manuscript Psalter, in the Barberina at 

 Borne, containing a miniature in which " David is seen play- 

 ing on the harp, seated in a pleasant grove from amongst the 

 branches of which nymphs look forth and listen : this personi- 

 fication marks the antique character of the whole picture/' 

 From the middle of the sixth century, when Italy was im- 

 poverished and in a state of utter political confusion, it was 

 Byzantine art in the eastern empire which did most to preserve 

 the lingering echoes and types of a more nourishing period. 

 Memorials, such as we have spoken of, form a kind of 

 transition to the more beautiful creations of the later 

 middle ages: the fondness for ornamented manuscripts 

 spread from Greece in the east to the countries of the west 

 "and the north, into the Prankish monarchy, among the 

 Anglo-Saxons, and into the Netherlands. It is therefore 

 a fact of no little importance in respect to the history of 

 modern art, "that the celebrated brothers, Hubert and 

 John van Eyck, belonged essentially to a school of minia- 

 ture painters, which, since the second half of the fourteenth 

 century, had reached a high degree of perfection in Elan- 

 ders" (n?). 



It is in the historical paintings of the brothers Van Eyck 

 that we first meet with a careful elaboration of the landscape 

 portion of the picture. Italy was never seen by either of 

 them ; but the younger brother, John, had enjoyed an op- 

 portunity of beholding a south European vegetation, having, 

 in 1428, accompanied the embassy which Philip the 

 Good, Duke of Burgundy, sent to Lisbon, to prefer his 



