Landscape in the Arts

Formal discussions of the idea of landscape date, as mentioned earlier, to the philosophic and poetic texts from the classical era of Greece and Rome. In the early Christian era, however, beyond scriptural and patristic references to landscape as the garden, the wilderness, the land of milk and honey, or the desert, little attention was given to either landscape as an art form or as nature until the time of Francis of Assisi (1181 or 1182–1226), who retrieved and reshaped the pre-Christian understanding of the beauty of the natural order as a reflection of God.

Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1600) is recognized as the first author to discuss formally an aesthetics of landscape through his distinction of "privileged places" and "places of delight" in his Trattato dell'arte della pittura, Libro VI (1584). Seventeenth-century commentaries by Roger de Plies, André Félibien, and Samuel van Hoggstraten, among others, continued to define, classify, and elevate the idea of landscape in art. The eighteenth century produced significant philosophic reflections on the idea of landscape, particularly with relation to the sublime, by Edmund Burke, William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Immanuel Kant. Curiously, nineteenth-century painters wrote more influential texts on landscape than philosophers or theologians, including Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable, and Thomas Cole, although the writings of John Ruskin and Ralph Waldo Emerson would be formative on later aesthetics of landscape. With the advent of the twentieth century, critical assessments of the idea of landscape, particularly in painting, began to appear; however, most were limited to studies of "modern" attitudes toward landscape.

There is no single classic study of the theme of the idea of landscape either in the arts or more specifically in painting throughout the history of either Eastern or Western culture. However, classic studies such as Michael Sullivan's The Birth of Landscape Painting in China (1962) and Barbara Novak's Nature and Culture (1980) consider the development of landscape painting in relation to a specific geographic location or chronological period. Kenneth Clark's singular Landscape into Art (1946) is an observant analysis of the cultural concepts of landscape in Western culture with a subthesis that the artistic move to landscape as a recognized category of "high art" corresponds to the secularization of Western culture and values.

A variety of intriguing texts including Leo Marx's now classic The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964) and Yi-Fu Tuan's Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977) provide lenses through which to expand the boundaries of art-history-based analyses of landscape. Similarly Robert Rosenblum's Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: From Friedrich to Rothko (1975), Denis E. Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels's edited volume The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments (1988), and any of Barbara Novak's texts provide specialized studies integrating theological, cultural, scientific, and philosophic influences on the meaning and presentation of landscape in painting.

The reality of both the interdisciplinary motif and methodology for the study of this theme, that is, the idea of landscape (through painting), has been emphasized by Western scholars within the categories of Western art and cultural studies. The most creative work being done appears to come from the research and curatorial presentation for special exhibitions. For example, the reader should consult The Natural Paradise: Painting in America, 1800–1950 (1976), edited by Kynaston McShine; American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875 (1980), edited by John Wilmerding; and American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880 (2002), edited by Andrew Wilton and T. J. Barringer.