[45] Claude Gelee [1600-82], usually called Claude Lorrain, a French
  landscape painter and etcher.

[46] Vasari, in his Lives of the Painters, tells how Giotto, when a student under Cimabue, once painted a fly on the nose of a figure on which the master was working, the fly being so realistic that Cimabue on returning to the painting attempted to brush it away.

  [47] Guercino’s Hagar in the Brera gallery in Milan.

[48] Gerard Dow [1613-75], a Dutch genre painter; Hobbima [1638-1709], a Dutch landscape painter; Walpole [1717-97], a famous English litterateur; Vasari [1511-74], an Italian painter, now considered full of mannerisms and without originality, mainly famous as author of The Lives of the Painters.

  [49] Giotto.

  [50] Purgatorio, 12. 31.

OF THE NOVELTY OF LANDSCAPE

VOLUME III, CHAPTER II

Having now obtained, I trust, clear ideas, up to a certain point, of what is generally right and wrong in all art, both in conception and in workmanship, we have to apply these laws of right to the particular branch of art which is the subject of our present inquiry, namely, landscape-painting.  Respecting which, after the various meditations into which we have been led on the high duties and ideals of art, it may not improbably occur to us first to ask,—­whether it be worth inquiring about at all.

That question, perhaps the reader thinks, should have been asked and answered before I had written, or he read, two volumes and a half about it.  So I had answered it, in my own mind; but it seems time now to give the grounds for this answer.  If, indeed, the reader has never suspected that landscape-painting was anything but good, right, and healthy work, I should be sorry to put any doubt of its being so into his mind; but if, as seems to me more likely, he, living in this busy and perhaps somewhat calamitous age, has some suspicion that landscape-painting is but an idle and empty business, not worth all our long talk about it, then, perhaps, he will be pleased to have such suspicion done away, before troubling himself farther with these disquisitions.

I should rather be glad, than otherwise, that he had formed some suspicion on this matter.  If he has at all admitted the truth of anything hitherto said respecting great art, and its choices of subject, it seems to me he ought, by this time, to be questioning with himself whether road-side weeds, old cottages, broken stones, and such other materials, be worthy matters for grave men to busy themselves in the imitation of.  And I should like him to probe this doubt to the deep of it, and bring all his misgivings out to the broad light, that we may see how we are to deal with them, or ascertain if indeed they are too well founded to be dealt with.