The Italians of the seventeenth century were too close to Raphael, and Michelangelo, and Titian, to permit of a landscape being generally received as a great work of art, but there appeared at this time in Rome numerous foreigners from France, and Flanders, and Holland, who were devoted to landscape, and amongst them the greatest genius known in the art--Claude Lorraine. He was the first to put the sun in the sky on canvas for the purpose of pure landscape; the first to master thoroughly the intricate difficulties of aerial perspective; the first to adorn the earth with fairy castles and dreamy visions of nature, such as we might suppose to have been common in the days of the Golden Age, ere yet men fought for power, or toiled from morn to eve for daily bread. With his magic wand he skimmed the cream of natural beauty and spread it over the Roman Campagna, transforming this historic ground into a region of palaces, terraces, cascades, and glorious foliage. At the same time Nicholas Poussin was also using the Campagna for the landscape settings of his classical compositions--such perfect settings that it is impossible to imagine the figures separated from their surroundings. These two artists with their disciples, and many Flemish and Dutch painters headed by Berghem and the two Boths, formed a landscape colony of considerable importance, but no Italian landscape school was founded from it. In the next century there was little pure landscape in Italy. Some fine works of topographical, and a few of general interest were produced by Canaletto and his followers, and a kind of landscape school was maintained in Venice for half a century or more, but elsewhere in Italy the cultivation of landscape was spasmodic and feeble.