When Goethe was on his return trip from Messina to Naples he wrote at the sight of Scylla and Charybdis:  “These two natural curiosities, standing so far apart in reality and placed so close together by the poet, have furnished men with an opportunity to abuse the fables of the bards, not remembering that the human imaginative faculty when it would represent objects as important always imagines them to be higher than they are broad, and thus lends more character, seriousness, and dignity to the picture.  I have heard complaints, a thousand times, that an object known only from description no longer satisfies us when we come face to face with it.  The cause of this is always the same.  Imagination and reality bear the same relation to each other as poetry and prose:  The former conceives objects to be huge and precipitous, the latter always thinks that they flatten themselves out.  The landscape painters of the sixteenth century, compared with those of our own day, furnish the most striking example of this.”

A number of the most pertinent aphorisms might be developed from this short remark.  For us this one will suffice:  On account of their whole fantastic-romantic ideal of art the medieval painters were forced to make their landscapes steep and rugged and to crowd them within narrow confines.  The backgrounds of their landscapes—­in the sense of the above remark of Goethe—­are composed like poetry rather than like a painting.  It is not the portrayal of the earthly, but an imaginary sacred landscape, which stood everywhere so alpine-like before their spirit.  This, however, straightway became identified with the actual picture of nature, and determined the eye for natural scenery of the age.

From the biblical poetry of the Hebrews the Christian world (and not only the Germanic) had acquired an enthusiasm for the beauties of nature which could never have been kindled by ancient art.  With the deeper Christian knowledge of God comes also deeper poetic perception of His beautiful earth, and not until man felt with intense pain the transitoriness of this beautiful earth did he begin to love it so ardently.  It is therefore a transparent anti-realistic lanscape painting, like that of the Psalmist, which those pious painters give us; it strives after elevated forms for the outer senses also, strives upward, and seeks to gain an insight into an entire world, into a cosmos of concentrated, natural life, the archetype of which—­in spite of all childish naturalism—­it has seen in the paradise of fancy rather than in reality.  The tall luminous mountain peaks, attainable only by the eye, not by the foot, of themselves half belong to heaven.  The landscapes of the seventeenth century, on the contrary, which are inspired by earthly beauty pure and simple, have a tendency to flatness, just as in reality all landscapes lie spread out in length and breadth before us.  Classical antiquity had just as uncultivated an eye for the beauty of the Alps as the age of Renaissance and the Rococo which emulated it so ardently.  Humboldt mentions that not a single Roman author ever alludes to the Alps from a descriptive point of view except to complain of their impassableness and like qualities, and that Julius Caesar employed the leisure hours of an Alpine journey to complete a dry grammatical treatise, De Analogia.