see that they bestowed hardly a thought on the subject of their
pictures. When Titian painted the "Entombment of Christ", what did he
see? A contrast--a white body, livid and dead, carried by
full-blooded, red-haired Italians, who wept, and whose sorrow only
served to make them more beautiful. That is how he understood a
subject. The desire to be truthful was not very great, nor was the
desire to be new much more marked; to be beautiful was the first and
last letter of a creed of which we know very little to-day.

Art died in Italy, and the subject had not yet appeared; and at the
end of the sixteenth century the first painters of the great Dutch
school were born, and before 1650 a new school, entirely original,
having nothing in common with anything that had gone before, had
formulated its aestheticism and produced masterpieces. In these
masterpieces we find no suspicion of anything that might be called a
subject; the absence of subject is even more conspicuous in the
Dutchmen than in the Italians. In the Italian painters the subject
passed unperceived in a pomp of colour or a Pagan apotheosis of
humanity; in the Dutchmen it is dispensed with altogether. No longer
do we read of miracles or martyrdoms, but of the most ordinary
incidents of everyday life. Turning over the first catalogue to hand
of Dutch pictures, I read: "View of a Plain, with shepherd, cows, and
sheep in the foreground"; "The White Horse in the Riding School"; "A
Lady Playing the Virginal"; "Peasants Drinking Outside a Tavern";
"Peasants Drinking in a Tavern"; "Peasants Gambling Outside a Tavern";
"Brick-making in a Landscape"; "The Wind-mill"; "The Water-mill";
"Peasants Bringing Home the Hay". And so on, and so on. If we meet
with a military skirmish, we are not told where the skirmish took
place, nor what troops took part in the skirmish. "A Skirmish in a
Rocky Pass" is all the information that is vouchsafed to us. Italian