World landscape
The world landscape, a translation of the German Weltlandschaft, is a type of composition in Western painting showing an imaginary panoramic landscape seen from an elevated viewpoint that includes mountains and lowlands, water, and buildings. The subject of each painting is usually a Biblical or historical narrative, but the figures comprising this narrative element are dwarfed by their surroundings.
The world landscape first appeared in painting in the work of the
The compositional type was taken up by a number of other Netherlandish artists, most famously Pieter Bruegel the Elder. There was a parallel development by Patinir's contemporary Albrecht Altdorfer and other artists of the Danube school. Although compositions of this broad type continued to be common until the 18th century and beyond, the term is usually only used to describe works from the Low Countries and Germany produced in the 16th century. The German term Weltlandschaft was first used by Eberhard Freiherr von Bodenhausen in 1905 with reference to Gerard David,[3] and then in 1918 applied to Patinir's work by Ludwig von Baldass, defined as the depiction of "all that which seemed beautiful to the eye; the sea and the earth, mountains and plains, forests and fields, the castle and the hut".[4]
Netherlands
The treatment of landscape backgrounds in Early Netherlandish painting was greatly admired in Italy, and Flemish specialists were employed in some Italian workshops, including that of Titian. The backgrounds to many of Albrecht Dürer's early prints were appropriated by a number of Italian artists. Patinir, "emboldened by the Italian taste for Northern rusticity, began as early as the 1510s to expand the backgrounds of his paintings out of all proportion" in a way that "violently reversed the ordinary hierarchy of subject and setting".[5] By 1520 he was well known for these subjects, and when Dürer visited him in Antwerp he described him in his diary as "the good painter of landscapes" (gut landschaftsmaler) in the first use of Landschaft in an artistic context.[6]
The paintings are relatively small and use a horizontal format; this was to become so standard for landscapes in art that it is now called "landscape" format in ordinary contexts, but at the time it was a considerable novelty, as "portable panel paintings were almost always vertical in format before 1520" and "Patinir's landscapes were among the first small horizontal panels of any sort".[7] He typically uses three base colours to articulate his compositions, with a brownish foreground, a blue-green middle zone, and blues in the distance. The horizon-line is relatively high on the picture plane.[8] Patinir (and Herri met de Bles) came from Dinant on the Meuse (in modern Belgium) where, in "a startlingly un-Netherlandish landscape", there are dramatic rock cliffs and free-standing crags along the river. These are frequently recalled in his paintings, and came to form a common feature of works by other artists.
With other vertical features, these are painted as though seen straight on even when in the lower parts of the landscape, and thus "reassert the integrity of the picture plane" in his works, against the sprawling horizontal impetus of the main landscape.[9] Both Kenneth Clark and Simon Schama see these as "the last survivors of the landscape of symbols", relating them to medieval and even earlier "corkscrew" representations of mountains.[10]
The style is related to the landscape backgrounds of
Most art historians regard the figure subject as continuing to be important in the works of Patinir and his followers, rather than mere
The style is also an early example of the 16th-century artistic trend to "Mannerist inversion" (the term devised by Max Dvořák) or the "inverted composition", where previously minor or background elements come to dominate the picture space. In the 1550s Pieter Aertsen began a style of large canvasses dominated by great spreads of food still life and large genre figures of cooks or market-sellers, while in the background small biblical scenes can be glimpsed. Some paintings by Jan Sanders van Hemessen place genre figures in the foreground of paintings on religious or moral subjects.[13] In the 17th century all these subject areas became established as independent genres in Dutch and Flemish painting, and later throughout Western painting.
Patinir's invention was developed by Herri met de Bles (1510 – c.1555–1560), who was probably his nephew. He took the type into the new style of Northern Mannerism.[14] Other artists were Lucas Gassel, the Brunswick Monogrammist, and Cornelis Massys.[15]
Massys was the son of
The style was adopted and made more natural in the landscapes of
Other works explored variations on the theme, with his famous set of landscapes with genre figures depicting the seasons being the culmination of his style; the five surviving paintings use the basic elements of the world landscape (only one lacks craggy mountains) but transform them into his own style. They are larger than most previous works, with a
Danube school
The Danube school was a contemporary group of German and Austrian artists who were also pioneers of landscape painting, and the first to regularly paint pure landscapes without figures. Their landscapes revel in the forests of the Upper Danube, and the place of a foreground figure is often taken by a single tree, a formula invented by Albrecht Altdorfer, the most significant artist of the group, and used, mostly in drawings and prints, by Wolf Huber and Augustin Hirschvogel. Other innovative works showed close-up views of dense forest with hardly any distant view or even sky. But many of their landscapes are panoramic in a version of the Netherlandish style, although the river winding out of sight normally replaces the sea that occupies the horizon of many Netherlandish works.[20] It is probable that at least Altdorfer had seen a Patinir by about 1531; one was in Augsburg from 1517 (an Assumption now in Philadelphia).[21]
Altdorfer's painted landscapes are usually vertical, The painting originally formed one part of a set of historical paintings in the same format.
Influence on later landscape painting
Both the Netherlandish and Danubian approaches to landscape painting were greatly influential for later artists.
Aspects of the particular formula of the world landscape, though no longer usually described by that term, continue to reappear in different versions until the 19th century. In Dutch Golden Age painting the idiosyncratic paintings and prints of Hercules Seghers (c. 1589 – c. 1638), as rare as Patinirs, were great panoramic views, very often with mountains.[28] In contrast, Philips Koninck (1619–1688) used the panoramic elevated view, and often included water, but showed vistas of flat farmland or town roofs with a low horizon.
The Italian
With Romanticism this changed, but panoramic views continued to be painted in the 19th century, and artists such as those in the Hudson River School, Edward Lear and Russian landscape painters took the compositional style to new landscapes around the world in works such as The Heart of the Andes (1859, Frederic Edwin Church), though often excluding all people and buildings. These still featured in the huge apocalyptic religious paintings of the English painter John Martin, which are often literally "end of the world landscapes", taking the history of the genre back to its origins with Bosch.
Notes
- ISBN 1856694151, 9781856694155, Google Books
- ^ Schama, 431
- ^ In his monograph on Gerard David and his School (Munich, F. Bruckmann), Weemans, 263
- ^ Weemans, 263, quoting von Baldass
- ^ Wood, 42–45, 43 and 45 quoted in turn
- ^ Harbison, 138; Wood, 45 (dating the visit to 1521)
- ^ Wood, 47, quoted
- ^ Harbison, 139; Jenson, 280
- ^ Snyder, 410; Harbison, 139, quoted ("reassert"); Silver, 30; Schama, 416–417, 416 quoted ("startlingly un-Netherlandish")
- ^ Clark, 25–27, 27 quoted; Schama, 415–417
- ^ Silver, 27
- ^ Silver, 26–36; Wood, 274–275
- ^ Harbison, 152–153; Falkenberg, throughout
- ^ Snyder, 432, 441–2
- ^ Silver, 35–39; Baldwin, 362
- ^ Wood, 45; Snyder, 409
- ^ Snyder, 410; Silver, 35–36
- ^ Silver, 39–52; Snyder, 502–510; Harbison, 140–142; Schama, 431–433
- ^ Wood, Chapter 5, especially 275–278
- ^ Wood, throughout, especially 160–168; Snyder, 357–359, 362–364; Harbison, 142–143
- ^ Wood, 267
- ^ Wood, 49
- ^ Wood, 22–23, 201–202, 266–267; Snyder, 362–363; Harbison,
- ^ On Danubian influence: Wood, 165–171, 234–235, 267–275
- ^ Vlieghe, 175–176, 179–180
- ^ Vlieghe, 182–183
- ^ Vlieghe, 189–192, 191 quoted
- ^ Silvers, 162–163
- ^ Blunt, Anthony, Art and Architecture in France, 1500–1700, p. 61, 2nd edn 1957, Penguin
- ^ Reitlinger, 74
References
- Baldwin, Robert, Review of "Mirror of the Earth": The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting by Walter Gibson, The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Summer, 1992), pp. 362–363, JSTOR
- Clark, Kenneth, Landscape into Art, 1949, page refs to Penguin edn of 1961
- Falkenberg, R. L. (1988), Iconographical connections between Antwerp landscapes, market scenes and kitchen pieces, 1500–1580, Oud Holland, 102, 1988
- Harbison, Craig. The Art of the Northern Renaissance, 1995, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, ISBN 0297835122
- Jenson, Susan H., "Patinir..." in Renaissance and Reformation, 1500–1620: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. by Jo Eldridge Carney, 2001, Greenwood Publishing Group, ISBN 0313305749, 9780313305740, Google Books
- Reitlinger, Gerald; The Economics of Taste, Vol I: The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices 1760–1960, 1961, Barrie and Rockliffe, London
- ISBN 0006863485
- Silver, Larry, Peasant Scenes and Landscapes: The Rise of Pictorial Genres in the Antwerp Art Market, 2006, University of Pennsylvania Press, , JSTOR)
- ISBN 0136235964
- Vlieghe, H. (1998). Flemish Art and Architecture, 1585–1700. Yale University Press Pelican history of art. New Haven: Yale University Press. ISBN 0300070381
- Weemans, David, "The Earthly Paradise, Herri Met de Bles's Visual Exegesis of Genesis 1–3", in The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Image and Text in Northern Europe, 1400–1700, 2011, BRILL, ISBN 9004215158, 9789004215153, Google Books
- ISBN 0948462469
Further reading
- Gibson, Walter S., Mirror of the Earth: The World Landscape in Sixteenth-Century Flemish Painting, 1989, Princeton University Press (two reviews in References)
- Falkenburg, Reindert, Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Life, 1988, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company
- Buijsen, Joachim, review (long, rather critical) of Joachim Patinir: Landscape as an Image of the Pilgrimage of Life by R. L. Falkenburg, Simiolus, Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vol. 19, No. 3 (1989), pp. 209–215, JSTOR