Garden Sculpture: The Garden of Euphues

In the place of Thetis, Apollo, Latona, or the Rape of the Sabines, the Dutchman preferred genre sculpture; he was, after all, a realist at heart and not a romantic, he did not picture himself as a Greek philosopher in the groves of Academus, but as a Dutch mynheer smoking his pipe in his own garden; when he deviated from reality he preferred to do so in the direction of the earthily grotesque. In the fifteenth century the Low Countries had satisfied many of the conditions that might have made them leaders of the new break in civilization, but what they lacked besides the Italian character was the constant presence of a revivifying past, a memorial finger pointing to the achievements of pre-Christianity. There were no ruins to guide them, no statues to dig up. The great commercial wealth of Ghent, Bruges, and Antwerp brought an exuberance of the older forms of art, the dying display of medieval Christian civilization; but it was the overripe fruit of an old tree, not the opening flower of a new; Ghent was not Florence, nor Antwerp Venice. Had there been no interruption caused by the warm influences flowing up from the Mediterranean the north would certainly have developed different forms of life and thought, different forms of art; there would have been a completed northern flowering of the spirit not consciously based upon the old forgotten cultures. But southern influences were strong, and though native genius mingled with it to produce local hybrid forms, it was still essentially the ancient classical world that in the sixteenth century linked all Europe as medieval Christianity had formerly linked it. We cannot treat the Low Countries as one land, subject throughout to the same influences. The countries we now know as Belgium and Holland have racial, religious and topographical differences which give them different cultures. Close in religion and race and physical fact to the French and for periods actually under French control, Brabant and Flanders created gardens which can be considered a variant of the French, because at the critical period French influence was paramount' The Netherlandish provinces of Holland and Zeeland are different.