OF THE 16TH AND 1?TH CENTURIES. 81 



We find assembled, in the same century, Claude Lor- 

 raine,, the idyllic painter of light and of aerial dis- 

 tance; EuysclaeFs dark forest masses and threaten- 

 ing clouds; Gaspar and Nicholas Poussin's heroic forms 

 of trees; and the faithful and simply natural repre- 

 sentations of Everdingen, Hobbima, and Cuyp ( 121 ). 

 This flourishing period in the development of art com- 

 prised happy imitations of the vegetation of the north of 

 Europe, of southern Italy, and of the Iberian peninsula: 

 the painters adorned their landscapes with oranges and 

 laurels, with pines and date trees. The date (the only 

 member of the magnificent family of Palms which the 

 artists had themselves seen, except the small native 

 European species, the Chamserops maritima) was usually 

 represented conventionally, with scaly and serpentlike 

 trunks ( 122 ), and long served as the representative of tropi- 

 cal vegetation generally, much as Pinus pinea (the stone 

 pine) is, by a still widely prevailing idea, regarded as exclu- 

 sively characteristic of Italian vegetation. The outlines of 

 lofty mountains were yet but little studied : and naturalists 

 and landscape painters still regarded the snowy summits, 

 which rise above the green pastures of the lower Alps, as 

 inaccessible. The particular characters of masses of rock 

 were rarely made objects of careful imitation, except 

 where associated with the foaming waterfall. We may here 

 remark another instance of the comprehensiveness with 

 which the varied forms of nature are seized by a free and 

 artistic spirit. Rubens, who in his great hunting pieces has 

 depicted with inimitable truth and animation the wild 

 movements of the beasts of the forest, has also apprehended, 

 with peculiar felicity, the characteristics of the inanimate 



