nature would do, _the consciousness_ of an unusually intense degree of
well-being. This task--the communication by means purely visual of
feelings occasioned chiefly by sensations non-visual--is of such
difficulty that, until recently, successes in the rendering of what is
peculiar to landscape as an art, and to landscape alone, were accidental
and sporadic. Only now, in our own days, may painting be said to be
grappling with this problem seriously; and perhaps we are already at the
dawn of an art which will have to what has hitherto been called
landscape, the relation of our music to the music of the Greeks or of
the Middle Ages.

[Page heading: VERROCCHIO'S LANDSCAPES]

Verrocchio was, among Florentines at least, the first to feel that a
faithful reproduction of the contours is not landscape, that the
painting of nature is an art distinct from the painting of the figure.
He scarcely knew where the difference lay, but felt that light and
atmosphere play an entirely different part in each, and that in
landscape these have at least as much importance as tactile values. A
vision of _plein air_, vague I must grant, seems to have hovered before
him, and, feeling his powerlessness to cope with it in full effects of
light such as he attempted in his earlier pictures, he deliberately
chose the twilight hour, when, in Tuscany, on fine days, the trees stand
out almost black against a sky of light opalescent grey. To render this
subduing, soothing effect of the coolness and the dew after the glare
and dust of the day--the effect so matchlessly given in Gray's
"Elegy"--seemed to be his first desire as a painter, and in presence of
his "Annunciation" (in the Uffizi), we feel that he succeeded as only
one other Tuscan succeeded after him, that other being his own pupil
Leonardo.