Landscape Art, European

Landscape art is a genre of art in which nature or natural scenery is the primary subject. Landscape art, as expressed through painting, is an articulation of an artist's interpretation of nature. European landscape art developed during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries and occasionally has been influenced by social or intellectual developments as well as by artistic theory.

Origins of Landscape Art. The origins of Western and European landscape art can be found in Hellenistic and Roman art, in surviving examples of landscape murals that adorned the walls of Roman villas. Sometimes painted to look like a view out of a window, these first-century все murals depict scenes from the Homeric epic The Odyssey or blooming gardens. The presence of landscape art in Roman villas is believed to reflect a celebration of the life in the Roman countryside that can be found in the poetry and literature of this period.

The Christian art of the Byzantine empire and medieval Europe (c. second century ce to c. fourteenth- fifteenth centuries ce) focused on religious subjects. Nature became the background against which human activity and divine events took place. The shimmering sixth-century ce Byzantine mosaics of churches such as Saint Apollonaire in Classe in Ravenna, Italy, represent an idealized, formal landscape of paradise.

In Europe, landscape art could be found in illuminated manuscripts made for nobility and royalty, such as Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (1413-1416), which was a prayer book, or Book of Hours, used for private religious devotions. The French nobleman the Duc de Berry commissioned the Flemish Limbourg brothers to create it for him. A calendar as well as a book of religious devotions, Les Tres Riches Heures details seasonal human interactions in nature.

Palace decorations in southern France and northern Italy also utilized seasonal motifs, usually involving such activities of the nobility as hunting parties. Nature as a background for human activity would continue to be a motif in Renaissance painting.

Italian Landscape Art during and after the Renaissance. Renaissance art is noted for its humanism, a literary and cultural movement that influenced western Europe between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries. Along with Christian themes, Renaissance art reflected an interest in Classical or mythological subjects. Landscape was utilized extensively in Renaissance art as a backdrop to human activity, often evoking the mood of the painting.

In St. Francis in Ecstasy (c. 1458), painted by Venetian artist Giovanni Bellini (c. 1431-1516), the landscape is seen in perspective. The clearly drawn rock formations in the foreground almost dwarf St. Francis, and the buildings visible among the hills in the background show carefully depicted topographical details such as trees, fields, and a sunlit sky.

Italian artists Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) and Titian (c. 1477-1566) also included landscapes as backgrounds in some of their most famous works. Da Vinci created a hazy, dreamlike landscape behind the figure in Mona Lisa (1503-1506), and Titian's twilight landscape backdrop to his portrait Charles V at Mühlberg (1548) shows King Charles V, mounted on his horse, emerging from a forest.

By the end of the sixteenth century the reintroduction of the pastoral ideal of country life influenced art as well. Italian artists, as well as those from the Netherlands, would, in turn, visit the countryside near Rome and re-create its ruins and its light in paintings depicting landscape far from the classical ruins of Rome.

Northern European Landscape Art. The Italian landscape tradition influenced the artists of northern Europe as well. Some, like Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) of Germany, made studies of the Italian landscapes, focusing on mountains and atmosphere. Dürer's Little Pond House (c. 1497) is a watercolor where landscape and nature alone are the subject of the composition.

Dürer began using the term landscape in 1520, and his recognition of the ability of a landscape painting to stand on its own as a work of art helped to pave the way for the acceptance of painting nature for its own sake as a form of art.

Flemish painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 15251569), who spent most of his life in Antwerp and Brussels, was one of the first to use landscape as the central focus of a major work. Using the medieval motif of the months of the year, Brueghel's The Return of the Hunters (1565) shows a winter village scene where human figures are part of the painting, but they are small against the bare trees, flat snowy plain, distant craggy hills, and gray sky.

Prints made from Brueghel's other sketches of the Alps, along with drawings by artists that depicted scenes of forests and of village life, helped to increase the popularity of landscape art by making examples available to the general public.