Page:Landscape Painting by Birge Harrison.djvu/26

 was an Oriental derivative(see the Byzantine school), and that it remained throughout the whole of the Italian Renaissance in the service of the Oriental religion which we had imported from Palestine. Moreover, the Italians were themselves more or less Oriental in character, with the subtle southern temperament and the southern mental bias. There was little of the cave-dweller or the viking in their ancestry.

However this may be, it is quite certain that the old masters knew little about landscape—and cared less. Their concern was with humanity; its joys and its sorrows; its loves and its passionate hatreds; its wars; its pageants; its faiths and its superstitions. Landscape to them was never more than a stage setting, a background against which the human actors played their parts. Viewed simply in this light, it was not