OP THE 15TH CENTURY. 79 



suit to the daughter of King John I. of Portugal. We 

 possess, in the Berlin Museum, the volets of the magnificent 

 painting which these artists, the true founders of the great 

 Netherlands school of painting, executed for the cathedral 

 at Ghent. On the sides which present the holy hermits 

 and pilgrims, John van Eyck has adorned the landscape 

 with orange trees, date palms, and cypresses, which are 

 marked by an extreme fidelity to nature, and impart to the 

 other dark masses a grave and solemn character. In view- 

 ing this picture, we feel that the painter had himself received 

 the impression of a vegetation fanned by soft and warm 

 breezes. 



The master-works of the brothers Van Eyck belong to 

 the first half of the fifteenth century, when oil painting, 

 though it had only just begun to supersede fresco, had 

 already attained high technical perfection. The desire to 

 produce an animated representation of natural forms was 

 now awakened ; and if we would trace the gradual extension 

 and heightening of the feelings connected therewith, we 

 should recal how Anton ello of Messina, a scholar of the 

 brothers Yan Eyck, transplanted to Yenice a fondness for 

 landscape ; and how, even in Florence, the pictures of the 

 Van Eyck school exerted a similar influence over Domenico 

 Ghirlandaio, and other masters ( 118 ). At this period, the 

 efforts of the painters -were, for the most part, directed to a 

 careful, but almost painfully solicitous and minute imitation 

 of natural forms. The representation of nature first appears 

 conceived with freedom and with grandeur in the master- 

 works of Titian, to whom, in this respect also, Giorgione 

 had served as an example. I had the opportunity, during 

 many years, of admiring, at Paris, Titian's painting of the 



