determination to enquire into the source of our pleasure in landscape
painting; or rather--to avoid a subject of vast extent for which this is
not the place--of landscape painting as practised by the Florentines.

[Page heading: LANDSCAPE PAINTING]

Before Verrocchio, his precursors, first Alessio Baldovinetti and then
Pollaiuolo, had attempted to treat landscape as naturalistically as
painting would permit. Their ideal was to note it down with absolute
correctness from a given point of view; their subject almost invariably
the Valdarno; their achievement, a bird's-eye view of this Tuscan
paradise. Nor can it be denied that this gives pleasure, but the
pleasure is only such as is conveyed by tactile values. Instead of
having the difficulty we should have in nature to distinguish clearly
points near the horizon's edge, we here see them perfectly and without
an effort, and in consequence feel great confirmation of capacity for
life. Now if landscape were, as most people vaguely believe, a pleasure
coming through the eyes alone, then the Pollaiuolesque treatment could
be equalled by none that has followed, and surpassed only by Rogier van
der Weyden, or by the quaint German "Master of the Lyversberg Passion,"
who makes us see objects miles away with as great a precision and with
as much intensity of local colour as if we were standing off from them a
few feet. Were landscape really this, then nothing more inartistic than
gradation of tint, atmosphere, and _plein air_, all of which help to
make distant objects less clear, and therefore tend in no way to
heighten our sense of capacity. But as a matter of fact the pleasure we
take in actual landscape is only to a limited extent an affair of the
eye, and to a great extent one of unusually intense well-being. The
painter's problem, therefore, is not merely to render the tactile values
of the visible objects, but to convey, more rapidly and unfailingly than