Seventeenth-Century Italy: Center for Landscape Art. Golden Age of Dutch Landscape Painting

In spite of the fact that landscape art had become a recognized artistic genre by the seventeenth century, it lacked any specific guidelines or theory and remained low on the scale of artistic importance. History painting held the top position in the artistic hierarchy, out of which developed ideal, or classical, landscape painting.

Inspired by the beauty of the Roman Campagna, or Roman countryside, artists from France and northern Europe experimented with landscape art, particularly with the effects of light. Many of them, such as French artist Claude Lorrain (1600-1682), sketched from life. French artist Nicolas Poussin (15941665) and Lorrain spent significant amounts of time in Italy and used the countryside around Rome as the model for their landscapes.

Poussin, who was the first French painter to gain international fame, kept within the classical tradition of painting, using historical or mythological themes. In his Landscape with the Burial of Phocion (1648), Poussin details the burial of a Greek hero against a backdrop of a precise and orderly landscape dotted with temple and trees set on gently rolling hills.

Whereas Poussin painted idealized landscapes, Lorrain painted idyllic and pastoral ones. The figures in his landscapes are "meant to intensify the mood of the landscape and bring it into focus for the spectators" (Lucie-Smith 1971,82). In Lorrain's A Pastoral Landscape (c. 1650), the human figures in the foreground are incidental, with the majority of the painting open sky, fields, and trees, lit by either a rising or setting sun.

Golden Age of Dutch Landscape Painting. The seventeenth century was the golden age of Dutch painting, and it was Dutch artists who helped to refine landscape art. Many of the greatest Dutch landscape painters spent many years in Italy, studying the Roman Campagna. Initially, Dutch artists used the unique light of the countryside around Rome when painting their native landscapes.

By the mid-seventeenth century, however, Dutch artists recognized the uniqueness of their local landscapes and began to concentrate on capturing a more naturalistic vision of the moist atmosphere and pearly gray skies of northern Europe.

The increasing affluence of the Dutch middle class helped to increase the popularity of landscape art in the region. Middle-class merchants had an appreciation for fine paintings, and although those of the Dutch painter Rembrandt (1606-1669) were out of the reach of many, landscape paintings were not.

These paintings' subjects ranged from the familiar, such as Jan van Go- yen's Fort on a River (1664), which depicted well-known elements of the Dutch countryside, to the more fantastic, such Jacob van Ruisdael's dark and melancholy The Jewish Cemetery (1655-1660).

Van Ruisdael (c. 16281682) is recognized as the greatest Dutch landscape painter, and his more emotional vision of nature would inspire the Romantic landscape painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Among its other characteristics, Romanticism focused on human beings' emotional response to nature, which would add further depth to European landscape painting.