This goes so far that one might even be deceived into thinking that the different ages had gazed upon the beauty of nature not only with differing mental eyes but also with a different faculty of seeing.  Most of the old masters have painted their landscapes with the eyes of a far-sighted person; we think, as a rule, that we can attain far greater natural truth if we paint our pictures, as it were, from the angle of vision of a near-sighted person.  A far-sighted painter will usually be more inclined to paint a plastic landscape, while a near-sighted one would make a mood-picture out of the same scene.  The very trees of the old Italians, on which the leaves are numbered, may serve to exemplify this comparison.  The scenery of the landscapes of Van Eyck and his pupils is quite often painted as though the artist had looked at the background through a perspective glass and the foreground through a magnifying one.  Jan Breughel paints his charming little landscapes with such detailed precision of outline, especially as regards foliage, he draws in his swarming little figures with such sharp lines, that the whole seems reflected in the eye of an eagle rather than in that of a man.  On the other hand we miss the unity and the differentiation of the combined effect—­the concentration of large groups, an eye for the landscape as an organic whole.  Claude Lorraine and Ruysdael are the first who may be called epoch-making along these lines; they are also, in this sense, the ancestors of modern landscape painting.  Where the old masters still counted the leaves, flowers, and blades of grass and laboriously imitated them, we have now adopted broad, general, and, to a certain extent, conventional forms of foliage, meadowland, and the like.

Taken separately, these are far less true to nature than the miniature imitation of detail.  Taken collectively, on the other hand, they are far more profoundly true to nature and to art.  Do we not at present sometimes see artists who almost seem to consider it their whole life’s mission to paint landscapes which have scarcely any definite plastic forms, pure mood-pictures, as, for example, Zwengauer, who is never tired of portraying barren moorlands with some water in the foreground, a shapeless tract of land in the centre, and above the fiery glow of the sunset, which, with a considerable portion of atmosphere growing ever darker and darker, fills up the largest part of the whole picture.  It is as though fire, water, air and earth, the four elements as such, were demonstrated before us on the Dachauer moor and combined to form a landscape harmony.  For such pictures of mood, pure and simple, the old masters had absolutely no eye.  If a painter of the fifteenth or sixteenth century should rise from his grave and gaze upon even our best landscape paintings he would certainly take very little pleasure in them; he would consider them daubs executed after a recipe according to which one can obtain the most beautiful foliage by throwing a sponge dipped in green paint against the wall.