mood-pictures, trees in the foreground, for example, on whose deformed greenish-brown foliage an elegiac late-autumnal tinge rests?  And these are shoved into position regularly each evening for every dialogue scene, and every light comic situation—­a satire on the inner eye of our time.  In a German metropolis of art one can even see sign-boards of sausage manufacturers on which sausages, hams, salted spare-ribs and swards are appetizingly painted with brilliant technique; and they too are conceived like mood-pictures, since that soft melancholy mist, with which our landscape painters are so fond of coquetting, spreads likewise over these sausages and hams, almost making them look as though they had all grown moldy.  That is another indication of the eye for natural scenery of our time.

Change of styles that great masters had made conventional, the degeneration and progress of technique, etc., play a large part, to be sure, in all these things, with and beside the changing eye.  How much, however, essentially depends upon the latter we can notice very plainly when the question is one of architectural landscapes and, in general, of the portrayal of old works of sculpture and architecture, which men have seen very differently in different ages and represented accordingly, while the originals have, in truth, remained the same throughout the centuries.

The purest Gothic architecture portrayed in the pigtail age nearly always has a pigtail look.  The ornamentation of leaves and vines, executed in accordance with the laws of organic necessity, becomes, without the draughtsman being aware of it, an arbitrarily curved rococo scroll; the proportions, which in reality soar upward, spread out in width, so that one might think it possible for the eyesight to change also, and yet in the building itself perhaps not a stone has been disturbed since its erection; the pigtail surely did not transport itself into the original—­it existed only in the eye of the copyist.  The views of cities and buildings furnish the most striking examples of this, for in them we can see how these additions have been made, in woodcut, to the numerous topographical works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Almost every medieval tower here bears the stamp of the Renaissance, every pointed arch is, if possible, compressed into a Roman arch, so firmly implanted were these new forms in the eye and hand of the people of that time.  For even in an external sense men no longer possessed an organ for the old lines.  Peter Neefs, the celebrated architectural painter of this age, did indeed stand on such a high plane of art and technique that he reproduced the perspectives of his Gothic churches absolutely correctly.  He had in this particular preserved the objectivity of the artistic eye which is absolutely lacking in the mechanical works mentioned above; nevertheless, even here, he shows himself to be the child of his age.  For example, he almost always paints the