Landscape in the Arts

Throughout the course of Western history, the concept of landscape and the technique of painting changed, interchanged, and exchanged with social, political, and religious modifications. Classical Egyptian art privileges depictions of the human figure and human activities over the landscape, which is more often than not included to provide a background or setting for an event or activity. The classical Greeks were biased toward humanism, human values, and, thereby, the human figure, so that feelings or artistic expressions of nature were as a background or historical setting. Although disputed among scholars, the connections between Hellenistic poetry and art may signal the origin of both landscape painting and of the concept of amoenus, or the "lovely place," a term thought to have been introduced by Theocritus (c. 310–250 B.C.E.). The Romans, however, who might be aptly defined as hesitant in their depictions of nude human figures, greatly admired nature and the landscape. Roman poets sang of the delights and beauty of the countryside and natural realm, and writers including Horace, Pliny the Elder, Ovid, Vitruvius, and Virgil discussed the mutualities between the image and the poetry of landscape, with Virgil identified as the originator of the concept of the Georgic landscape. The finest examples of the visualizing of the Roman idea of the landscape are found in the decorative walls covered with illusionistic landscape that redefined the size and borders of individual rooms. During the early Christian and Byzantine periods, presentations of the landscape were related in terms of decorative designs and symbols. These were bifurcated: paradisal gardens or the wilderness exile were rendered through a symbolic vocabulary of flora and fauna, topographical elements, and human presence.

While the Middle Ages saw a retrieval of classical naturalism in presentations of the landscape, symbolic codings of nature, especially in the metaphorical paradise garden, continued. Medieval attention to the landscape involved the introduction of meteorological properties. Renaissance attitudes toward the landscape were divided between idealization and visual poetry, with an artistic concern for the interplay of light and spatial relations. With the religious and cultural revolution known as the Reformation and its southern European correlative, the Counter-Reformation, landscape painting began its journey toward an independent genre, as evidenced by Albrecht Dürer's employment of the term landschaft and the contemporary appearance of the paese in the Italian center for landscape painting, Venice. The secularization of the arts in the Reformed countries emphasized the turn to history, portraiture, still-life, and genre themes, which included landscape. Dutch landscape painting in particular experimented with effective displays of light and weather and was fostered by the Calvinist dictum that God's largesse is manifested in the natural world. The economic prosperity of the rising middle class created a new audience and patronage for landscape paintings in northern Europe. The next major shift in the idea of landscape came in the eighteenth century with the delicate pastoral formulated by Jean-Antoine Watteau. In the nineteenth century the famed Kantian turn to the subject and his discussion of the sublime conjoined with a Human as subordinate to nature. Harvesters (1565) by Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Oil on panel. THE GRANGER COLLECTION, NEW YORK variety of technological advances in painting, the economic and societal ramifications of the Industrial Revolution, and the political modifications of revolution and democratic governance to support first the development of romantic landscape, then realist and impressionist landscape by midcentury, and expressionist and abstract landscapes at the end of the century. The twentieth century, with its cultural and religious pluralism, provided new lenses affected by science, technology, and societal revolutions through which the landscape could be interpreted no longer as a major artistic topic but as a nostalgic vision of spiritual values. Landscapes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were affected by ecological concerns, computer technology, and the development of specialized movements such as land art. From the middle of the nineteenth century to the present, Western art was first challenged and then influenced by the development of photography; similarly the technological advances of moving pictures, television, and computer art have re-formed the modes through which landscape is perceived and imaged.

Despite the variations in attitudes, interpretations, and perceptions of the landscape in Western painting, there are two consistent and fundamental modes of artistic representation employed by Western artists: classic and romantic. Essentially the classic type reorders and enhances nature in an expression of emotion tempered by technical perfectionism evidenced by smooth surface, measured if not invisible individual brush strokes, and careful delineation between colors, forms, and figures often identified as painting with a hard line. The romantic landscape is characterized by its visioning of the undisciplined and savage dimensions of nature as connotative of the sacred mysteries of the divine, signified by textural variations in the layering of and brushwork for paint and the indecipherable borders between colors, forms, and figures identified as painting with a soft line. The art historian Joshua C. Taylor counseled that what is here identified as the classic has prevailed during periods of economic, political, and social unrest whereas the romantic style has been favored during times of economic, political, and social stability.

Two works from the Renaissance era provide an important series of visual comparisons that can be "read" to clarify the classic and romantic modes: Giorgione's La Tempesta (The Tempest; 1507–1508; Galleria dell Accademia, Venezia) and Titian's Sacred and Profane Love (c. 1515; Galleria Borghese, Rome). Neither of these two paintings is a dedicated landscape painting; rather, they incorporate nature into the background, Giorgione more speculatively than Titian. The theme and subject of Giorgione's mysterious La Tempesta remains an encoded secret, as it appears to be without a narrative, historical, mythic, A pastoral landscape with figures. Departure from the Island of Cythera (1717) by Jean-Antoine Watteau. Oil on canvas. THE ART ARCHIVE/MUSÉE DU LOUVRE PARIS/DAGLI ORTI (A) religious, or cultural referent. Such a task of aesthetic discernment should reveal the meaning of this painting and the relationships among the three human figures and between the human elements and nature. The juxtaposition of an undressed nursing mother holding her suckling child at her right breast with a standing, fully dressed male pilgrim may signify everything and nothing. The mysterious positioning of the indecipherable human figures and their story (stories) within the boundaries of this canvas are secondary to the physical presentation that Kenneth Clark identifies as "the quintessence of poetic landscape." The creation of space within Giorgione's canvas is enhanced by a series of triangular intersections of topographical and architectural elements that lead the viewer's eye into the center space, which then evaporates into the wafting storm clouds. This mixture of hard-and soft-line effects evokes an atmospheric aura of ambiguity and heightened emotion as the storm either approaches or passes over.

Titian's equally difficult-to-interpret canvas is visually divided between the characteristics of sacred and profane love represented anthropomorphically by the two female figures, one dressed, the other nude. This same dialectic is signified in the two attitudes toward landscape, as untouched natural vegetation flourishes behind the elegant figure of sacred love while an idyllic pastoral vista proffers its mannered display behind the classical figure of profane love. Titian's ability to present both approaches to the landscape connotes his artistic recognition of the symbolic values attributed to nature.

The visual transition evident from Pieter Brueghel's Harvesters (1565; The Granger Collection, New York) to Jean-Antoine Watteau's Departure from the Island of Cythera (1717; Musée du Louvre, Paris) to John Constable's Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds (1825; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) provides a progression toward the idea of pure landscape in Western painting. Paralleling this evolution in attitudes to the landscape are the economic and social influences of the move from an agrarian to a mercantile to an industrialized society. Brueghel's harvest scene follows the medieval tradition of the "labors of the month" first captured in cathedral carvings and adapted later in the fourteenth century into richly elaborate paintings. Brueghel's harvesters incorporate those currently at work and those at rest. The canvas is bifurcated by a diagonal path that separates the reapers who are integrated into the tall hay on the left side of the canvas from those who rest under the shade of a single tall tree in the right foreground. The right-hand side of Brueghel's canvas displays the cut hay either onto rectangular or tentlike forms. The distant background is also divided into a mannered mountain vista on the left and a verdant wilderness on the right. Although premised, one could Awesomeness of nature. Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds (c. 1825) by John Constable. © GEOFFREY CLEMENTS /CORBIS argue, upon scriptural passages related to the Fall, Harvesters is devoid of mythological, political, or literary referent, and yet the familiarity of the theme makes commentary unnecessary and its appeal immediate and widespread. Brueghel has moved the viewer beyond the landscape as symbolic setting or backdrop for a painting to the landscape as subject, with its allusions to the eternal passing of the seasons and the vastness of space. The abundance of nature herein affirms the transition to a situation in which the human is subject to nature.

On the other hand, Watteau's ethereal re-visioning of the pastoral landscape emphasizes soft colors and lines as the large group of revelers crosses the undulating horizon line. This famed rendering of a romantic idyll incorporates handsome couples who apparently will attend the fête galante. The freshness and informality of the artist's vision is highlighted by his development of a new genre painting of a pastoral landscape with figures. Demonstrating his debt to Giorgione and the evocation of a poetic mood, Watteau positions his strolling lovers in a garden setting in which the division between foreground and background is a semicircular arrangement of figures over a gentle central knoll. The background vista, like that of Giorgione, is softer in line and color as the floating wispy clouds fuse with the lofty trees and airy mountains. The idyllic garden then becomes simultaneously a setting for an event and the event itself as the poetic tranquility, fluidity, and atmosphere create an aura of intimacy and magic much like the enchanted gardens of classical and medieval landscape painting.

Constable's sunlit pastoral landscape is one of his many simple and quiet scenes anchored in his childhood memories of life in Suffolk. In this version of Salisbury Cathedral, he divides the canvas both horizontally and vertically to highlight the painting's centerpiece—the cathedral building itself. On the narrow pathway on the left side of the canvas are diminutive male and female figures walking together away from the viewer, while two rows of grazing cows are located on the right-hand side in parallel relationship to the strolling couple. The association between humanity and nature veers toward a recognition of the awesomeness and mystery of the romantic landscape. Constable's use of sunlight predetermines his disposition toward the heightened color of fresh greens, bold brushwork, and the meteorological modulations between stability and Humanity's spiritual relationship to the natural world. Two Men in Contemplation of the Moon (1819–1820) by Caspar David Friedrich. Oil on canvas. PHOTO CREDIT: ERICH LESSING / ART RESOURCE, NY change. Like his contemporaries, this British artist was torn between science as a mode of observation of nature and religion as the center of values. As this painting demonstrates, however, restitution of a moral high ground was his clear choice. Nature, thereby the landscape, is the direct messenger of God's divine providence, and landscape painting conveys moral ideas and values.

This transformation from Brueghel's agrarian landscape with its overt partnership between humanity and nature to Watteau's ethereal enclosed garden in which humanity continued in a major role and finally to Constable's resplendent pastoral in which the human figure is so diminished as to be noticeably absent is signified by the transition from populated to nonpopulated. The journey toward landscape, then, is a process of both definition and liberation.