Painting

(CARPACCIO)

JOHN RUSKIN

(LEONARDO DA VINCI) 

WALTER PATER

(PAUL POTTER)

EUGÈNE FROMENTIN

(RUBENS)

EUGÈNE FROMENTIN

(VAN EYCK)

KUGLER

(FRAGONARD)

EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT

In the preceding chapters we have traced the development of painting for five centuries—from the beginning of the fourteenth, that is to say, to the end of the eighteenth—in Italy, in the Netherlands, in Germany, in Spain, and lastly in France and England. In the nineteenth the story is confined to the last two alone, as with one or two minute exceptions the art of painting had by this time entirely ceased to be worth consideration in any of the others.

By the will of God, in the year 1240, we are told by Vasari, Giovanni Cimabue, of the noble family of that name, was born in the city of Florence, to give the first light to the art of painting.

Meantime we must turn our attention to Holland, where Frans Hals, who was born only three years later than Rubens, namely in 1580, was the forerunner of Rembrandt, Van der Helst, Bol, Lely, and a host more of greater or less painters, who made their country as famous in the seventeenth century for art as their fathers had made it in the sixteenth for arms.