The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern TimesBiese, Alfred
History
The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and Modern Times
Biese, Alfred
Nature; Nature in literature
[Footnote 12: Fred Cohn, '_Die Gärten in alter und neuer Zeit,' D.
Rundschau_ 18, 1879. In Italy in the sixteenth century there was a
change to this extent, that greenery was no longer clipt, but allowed
to grow naturally, and the garden represented the transition from
palace to landscape, from bare architectural forms to the free
creations of Nature. The passion for flowers--the art of the pleasure
garden, flourished in Holland and Germany. (Falke.)]
[Footnote 13: W.H. Riehl states (_Kulturstudien aus drei
Jahrhunderten_) that Berlin, Augsburg, Leipzig, Darmstadt, and
Mannheim were described in the seventeenth century as having 'very
fine and delightful positions'; and the finest parts of the Black
Forest, Harz and Thuringian mountains as 'very desolate,' deserted,
and monotonous, or, at best, as not particularly pleasant scenery. If
only a region were flat and treeless, a delicious landscape could be
charmed out of it. Welcker, Court physician at Hesse Cassel,
describing Schlangenbad in 1721, said that it lay in a desolate,
unpleasing district, where nothing grew but foliage and grass, but
that through ingenious planting of clipt trees in lines and cross
lines, some sort of artistic effect had been produced. Clearly the
principles of French garden-craft had become a widely accepted dogma
of taste. Riehl contrasts the periwig period with the mediæval, and
concludes that the mediæval backgrounds of pictures implied feeling
for the wild and romantic. He says: 'In the Middle Ages the painters
chose romantic jagged forms of mountains and rocks for backgrounds,
hence the wild, bare, and arid counted as a prototype of beautiful
scenery, while some centuries later such forms were held to be too
rustic and irregular for beauty.' One cannot entirely agree with
this. He weakens it himself in what follows. 'It was not a real scene
which rose Alp-like before their mind's eye, but an imaginary and
sacred one; their fantastic, romantic ideal called for rough and
rugged environment': and adds, arguing in a circle, 'Their minds
passed then to real portraiture of Nature, and decided the landscape
eye of the period.' My own opinion is that the loftiness of the
'heroic' mountain backgrounds seemed suitable for the sacred subjects
which loomed so large and sublime in their own minds, and that these
backgrounds did not reveal their ideal of landscape beauty, nor 'a
romantic feeling for Nature,' nor 'a taste for the romantic,' nor yet
a wondrous change of view in the periwig period.]
[Footnote 14: In his _Harburg Program_ of 1883 _(Beiträge zur
Geschichte des Naturgefühls_), after an incomplete survey of ancient
and modern writings on the subject, Winter sketches the development
of modern feeling for Nature in Germany from Opitz to 1770, as shewn
in the literature of that period, basing his information chiefly upon
Goedeke's _Deutsche Dichtung._]
[Footnote 15: Comp. Chovelius _Die bedeutendsten deutschen Romanz des
17 Jahrhunderts_. Leipzig, 1866.]
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