COSMOS, VOL. II - World eBook Library

LANDSCAPE PAINTING. 441
scene, or in some sea or garden view. The separation of 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 ancients,
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 ancient
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.
f* 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, Lettres sur la Peinture historique murale, 1835, pp.
202 and 453.)
$ 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 (Jacobs, pp. xvii. and xlvi. ; Welcker, pp. Iv. and
xlvi). Otfried Mtiller 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 introductory
part of Critias (p. 107), of landscape painting as the art o f
pictorially representing mountains, rivers, and forests.