rock in Fig. 5, at the side, is one put by Ghirlandajo into the background of his Baptism of Christ. I have no doubt Ghirlandajo's own rocks and trees are better, in several respects, than those here represented, since I have copied them from one of Lasinio's execrable engravings; still, the harsh outline, and generally stiff and uninventful blankness of the design are true enough, and characteristic of all rock-painting of the period. In the annexed plate I have etched the outline of a fragment of one of Turner's cliffs, out of his drawing of Bolton Abbey; and it does not seem to me that, supposing them properly introduced in the composition, the substitution of the soft natural lines for the hard unnatural ones would make Ghirlandajo's background one whit less sacred. *This etching is prepared for receiving mezzotint in the next volume; it is therefore much heavier in line, especially in the water, than I should have made it, if intended to be complete as it is. § 14. But be this as it may, the fact is, as ill luck would have it, that profanity of feeling, and skill in art, increased together; so that we do not find the backgrounds rightly painted till the figures become irreligious and feelingless; and hence we associate necessarily the perfect landscape with want of feeling. The first great innovator was either Masaccio or Filippino Lippi: their works are so confused together in the Chapel of the Carmine, that I know not to whom I may attribute, -or whether, without being immediately quarrelled with, and contradicted, I may attribute to anybody,-the landscape background of the fresco of the Tribute Money. But that background, with one or two other fragments in the same chapel, is far in advance of all other work I have seen of the period, in expression of the rounded contours and large slopes of hills, and the association of their summits with the clouds. The opposite engraving will give some better idea of its character than can be gained from the outlines commonly published; though the dark spaces, which in the original are deep blue, come necessarily somewhat too harshly on the eye when translated into light and shade. I shall have occasion to speak with greater speciality of this background in examining the forms of hills; meantime, it is only as an isolated work that it can be named in the history of pictorial progress, for Masaccio died too young to carry out his purposes; and the men around him were too ignorant of landscape to understand or take advantage of the little he had done. Raphael, though he borrowed from him in the human figure, never seems to have been influenced by his landscape, and retains either, as in Plate 11, the upright formalities of Perugino; or, by way of being natural, expands his distances into flattish flakes. of hill, nearly formless, as in the backgrounds of the Charge to Peter and Draught of Fishes; and thenceforward the Tuscan and Roman schools grew more and |