Excerpt from Art of the Netherlands and Germany: Five Hundred Reproductions Illustrating the Flemish, Dutch, and German Schools of Painting, From the Early Fifteenth to the Eighteenth Century; German Sculpture From the Eleventh to the Seventeenth Century The lover of beauty, even the earnest student of art from the historical side, can scarcely fail to find his heart sinking as he turns over these pages after becoming thoroughly conver sant with the art of the Italian Renaissance. He misses both the homely and the graceful stories told by Giotto and Ghiberti; the pensive pathos of the Madonna of Botticelli and his deli cate play of fancy, as well as the riper, completer beauty of Leonardo and Raphael, and the mastery of thought and ex pression of Michelangelo. The ideal seems lost, so uncon vincing and so unattractive are these northern saints and Madonnas. Is art, then, lacking? About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.