pictures that omitted a great many features we cannot do without.

But painting does not only concern itself with representing the world
we actually see and the people that our eyes actually behold. It
concerns itself quite as much with the world of fancy, of make-believe.
Indeed, most painters when they look at an actual scene let their fancy
play about it, so that presently what they see and what they fancy
get mixed up together, and their pictures are a mixture of fancy and
of fact, and no one can tell where the one ends and the other begins.
The fancies of people are very different at different times, and you
can't understand the pictures of old days unless you can share the
fancies of the old painters. To do that you must know something about
the way they lived and the things they believed, and what they hoped
for and what they were afraid of.

Here, for instance, is a very funny fact solemnly recorded in an old
account book. A certain Count of Savoy owned the beautiful Castle of
Chillon, which you have perhaps seen, on the shores of the Lake of
Geneva. But he could not be happy, because he and the people about
him thought that in a hole in the rock under one of the cellars a
basilisk lived--a very terrible dragon--and they all went in fear of
it. So the Count paid a brave mason a large sum of money (and the payment
is solemnly set down in his account book) to break a way into this
hole and turn the basilisk out; and I have no doubt that he and his
people were greatly pleased when the hole was made and no basilisk
was found. Folks who believed in dragons as sincerely as that, must
have gone in terror in many places where we should go with no particular
emotion. A picture of a dragon to them would mean much more than it
would to us. So if we are really to understand old pictures, we must
begin by understanding the fancies of the artists who painted them,