Page:An Elementary History of Art.djvu/466

436 Painting Among the first . Dutch marine painters, Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom (1566 — 1640), and who executed a sketch of the Defeat of the Spanish Armada for the Lord High Admiral of England ; Adam Willaarts (1577— aft. 1666) ; and Jan Peeters (1624 — 1677), whose picture of a Storm in the Pinakothek, Munich, is valuable, as an early specimen of the art in which the Dutch subsequently attained to such exceptionable excellence. 2. The German School. In a previous chapter we have spoken of the early masters of the School of Cologne, who were, if we may so express it, strictly orthodox painters, expressing in their works unwavering devotion to the Church of Pome, and unfaltering allegiance to the traditional mode of treating sacred subjects. We have now to examine the productions of men im- bued with the spirit of the Reformation. These men, whilst stretching forward to that freedom of conscience in art which, as in religion, was finally attained at so terrible a cost, clung with truly Teutonic steadfastness to the weird symbolism inherited from the old Norse sea-kings ; they pressed it, so to speak, into the service of the new doctrine, and hinted in their sacred pictures at a real and personal conflict between spiritual and material .agencies, by the constant introduction of some weird fantastic monster, treated with a force and life which speak volumes for that deeply-rooted faith in the supernatural so start- ling in men of the strength of character of Diirer, Luther, and the great reformers of the day. This faith, more than any other peculiarity, separates the art of Germany from both that of Italy, with its beautiful idealisation even of