This is the first in a series of lectures and seminars I created and delivered as part of my undergraduate module Looking into Landscape: Reading, Researching, Responding, which I conducted, and which apparently is still taught, at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University.
The presentation has been abridged and edited for publication here. Seminars, being interactive, are not included. Only still images of the slides are provided; animations have been omitted.
Looking into Landscape: Origins and Tradition
“Looking into Landscape.” Why this title? With it, I mean to suggest that we are not just going to look at examples of landscape art. We are going to look into the meaning of the word “landscape.” It may not seem such a complicated word to you. But words get more complicated – and more interesting – when we investigate their meanings.
Where does the word “landscape” come from? How have its meanings evolved over time? What makes something we call a “landscape” a landscape?
Take a piece of paper and, in a few seconds, draw what you think of as a “landscape.”
On the reverse side, make a list of the first five words that come to mind of when you hear the word “landscape.”
We will have a look at and compare those responses when we meet in person for our first seminar.
Now, I haven’t shown you a single image yet. That is because I did not want to influence your responses. We are going to look at a lot of images. And we will look at those images in relation to that one word: “landscape.”
We are going to explore the history of “landscape” in a series of five lectures. On alternate weeks, we are going to meet for our follow-up seminars in which we explore aspects of the lecture topic and develop reading and research skills.
During seminar week, Looking into Landscape is divided into two groups. Small groups are essential to what we call “active learning” – to learning not by listening alone but by doing, by contributing to group discussions and participating in workshop exercises. Those activities are not assessed, but they are designed to help you learn and make the most of what you learn.
Throughout this series, we are going to explore the role that human figures play in works of landscape art.
Some years ago, my husband Robert Meyrick – former head of the School of Art – and I wrote a monograph on the Welsh landscape artist Gwilym Prichard. Then we wrote another book on the work of Gwilym’s wife, the painter Claudia Williams.
Both artists were influenced by the places they visited and where they lived. But Gwilym Prichard preferred creating landscapes without figures. And Claudia Williams preferred to focus on figures, close up, in compositions showing relationships between people, real or imagined.
Williams and Prichard never collaborated on a painting that would transport Williams’s figures into Prichard’s landscape. But, when I worked on those two books, I thought: What would have happened if they had?
How would Prichard’s work be transformed by the presence of figures? How would Williams’s figure compositions change if she were to zoom out and show us more about the environment in which – and with – these figures interact?
That gave me the idea for your research project.
Claudia Williams and Gwilym Prichard’s son Ceri Pritchard is also an artist. And to some extent his art combines elements of his father’s landscapes and his mother’s figure compositions.
Ceri would not appreciate being compared to his still better-known parents. For a long time, he avoided referring to his artist parents. He wanted to be an artist in his own right. And he is.
But, as his mentor, I have encouraged him to think of his work as related to – but different from – the tradition to which his parents works respond.
And, whether you are studying fine art or art history, I encourage you to think about where your ideas come from and how they relate to what happened before you came onto the scene.
Ceri Pritchard, who has lived in France, Mexico and the United States, but who now lives and works in Wales, creates imaginary landscapes. And many of them include figures in varying degrees of abstraction, as you can see here. How essential figures are to works of landscape art is what I want you to debate.
Consider beginning your investigation of the role of figures in landscape art by thinking the figures away. You may find it useful to edit those figures out of compositions that contained them. Let’s have a look.
How is the landscape altered by the removal of figure? How does the meaning or purpose of the composition change?
This painting by Claude on the right is a traditional Western landscape. How did this tradition start? What came first? Figures or Landscapes?
Today’s lecture is titled “Origins and Traditions: Landscape in Western Visual Culture.” As the word “Origins” suggests, we are starting from the beginnings of landscape art in the West, and we are going to move forward in time in the weeks to come.
The talks follow a chronological order. Chronology is important in art history. It allows us to establish sequences of events and chart developments. But chronology itself is not history.
History is storytelling. It means interpreting facts and connecting the dots to tell meaningful stories that make sense of the past and the present – stories that explain why and how art comes into being and develops.
Art history involves the interpretation of data in order to tell logical and compelling stories that are rooted in fact. Keep in mind that, because data is being interpreted, there is never just one history.
Let’s start with the data. Whenever I show slides like this one, I use the same format to convey basic information. The green dot indicates that a particular work of art is reproduced in our main text Landscape, Nature and Art by Malcolm Andrews.
And the number refers to the page on which the reproduction – and insights about the work of art – can be found.
The basic information about a work of art should be stated in a caption. A responsible, useful caption answer the following questions:
- What is the title of the work (if it has a title)?
- When was it made?
- Who made it?
- How was it made: (medium).
- Dimensions are helpful to gain a sense of the scale of an object. Height x width; or height x width x depth, for a three-dimensional object
- Lastly, where is that work located if it is not mass-produced?
I suggest you follow this format to caption all the images you use as illustrations of your argument. The format will help you to remember the basic pieces of information about a work of art that you should include in a caption. It will also encourage you to source images responsibly, as academic sources include information that you would not get just by Googling an image.
Most of us would not hesitate to call View of Haarlem with Bleaching Fields a “landscape.” You might say that it is a “traditional” landscape painting. And yet, when this painting was produced, that tradition did not yet exist. Or, at least, it was a very new tradition.
This looks like an old painting, doesn’t it? It is an old painting. But it is – or was, at the time – a new way of responding to a certain place.
It was produced by a Dutch painter and represents a Dutch “view.” We will look at Dutch paintings like this in our second lecture. What circumstances made this new kind of cultural product possible, perhaps even necessary? If it was new, what came before it? How – and why – did the meaning of “landscape” evolve over time?
“Landscape” is a familiar word. But that doesn’t mean it is a simple word. The word “Landscape” has different meanings in different contexts. It can be used to refer to a physical place – to scenery, to the outdoors.
When we say “I love the landscape of Ceredigion,” we mean the physical world we view – maybe from the window of a train that takes us to Aberystwyth – rather than a work of art.
The word “landscape” is also used for works of art, for compositions that represent and interpret a physical space.
Some of those compositions might show just a few elements of the physical world outside, while others seem to focus on that world and be recognisable as works of landscape art.
In other words, there are landscapes, landscapes, and landscapes.
No wonder the term “Landscape” can be confusing. It is often confused with “nature.” But, as you can see in my photographs of the Rheidol Valley, on the left, there is evidence of human activity or intervention: buildings, roads, and fields.
In art history, the term “Landscape” is generally used to define conventionalised compositions with a particular subject matter – works of a particular “genre” or type.
The genre of “landscape.”
Still life is a genre.
And portraiture is another genre.
Not that these distinctions are always quite so clear cut. Young Knight in a Landscape (1510) by Vittore Carpaccio, which was once attributed to – that means, believed to be by – the German artist Albrecht Dürer, has been called “one of the earliest examples of a full-length portrait in European painting.”
We don’t know for certain whom it portrays. We assume it shows a particular person. The work on the right is also believed to be representative of the genre of we call “portrait.” It contains elements of “landscape.” But it focusses on the figure.
How large do you think a figure can be in a landscape before a landscape turns into a portrait or, if we don’t know the identity of the sitter, a figurative painting? Our responses and assumptions to such questions are rooted in the Western tradition that created categories such as “landscape” and “portraiture.”
We will look more closely at the word “Genre” in our second lecture and seminar. For now, think of “genre” as an established – and visible – set of conventions that a work of art may be following and according to which it can be classified. But, as we have seen, the word “landscape” does not always mean “belonging to a certain genre.” Besides, many works of art – including Young Knight in a Landscape (1510) – were made before the classification system of genres was created.
One important clue about what “Landscape” means more generally is in the word itself: “Land”/”scape.” Something is added to “Land.” And it changes the meaning of “land.”
“Scape” is an old form of the word-ending “ship,” which we use in words like “artisanship” and “friendship.” It means to shape something. Land is turned into landscape through human activity. It is “shaped.”
That meaning becomes clearer when we look at the word “landscaping.” When gardeners are landscaping, they transform a plot of land into something we recognise as being designed and designated as a park or a garden.
The eighteenth-century British poet Alexander Pope went so far as to say that “All gardening is landscape-painting.”
Not all shaping of our land is as creative and artistic as gardening, as we have seen a few days ago, with the violent removal of an iconic tree that was a landmark of great cultural significance.
Land is changing; and landscape art – or creative engagement with land – can draw attention to those changes, including climate change. That is something we are going to explore in lecture 5.
In this series, we are going to look at ways in which land is transformed – as in the case of this man-made landscape of Hafod, a few miles from Aberystwyth – or translated into two-dimensional works of art or other products of visual culture.
The most important thing to remember is that “landscape” is not the same as “nature,” just like a tree we plant is not in the ground naturally but placed there and shaped – that is, assisted and restricted – by human activity.
In Hafod, about three million trees were planted over a period of thirty years, more than two hundred years ago. Rocks were blasted and caves were created, all for dramatic effect. We are going to have a look at this kind of romantic – or picturesque – landscape in lecture 3.
But let us return now to works of art from earlier periods. View of Haarlem (c. 1650–c. 1682), for instance, predates the previous one by over a century. The physical landscape it shows is not nearly as dramatic – but it is similarly artificial. It certainly does not show us nature: it shows us a vast expanse of shaped, cultivated and domesticated land.
We will look at paintings like this one again in our second lecture, which is about landscape art of the Renaissance in Northern Europe, and in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic in particular.
What is important to consider for now is that it was part of an emerging tradition of landscape painting, of landscape as a genre, and of landscape as a commercial product.
It follows specific compositional principles of perspective and presents us with a specific, identifiable location to create what, in discussions of Landscape art, we call a “view.” And, yes, there are figures in this landscape.
This painting is well over a century older than View of Haarlem, perhaps even 150 years older. I say “perhaps” because we do not have exact dates for either. What art historians do, among other things, is to make educated guesses based on analysis and research.
This landscape also shows signs of habitation but it is devoid of figures. Should we conclude from this that older landscapes have no figures, and that figures were a later addition to landscape painting?
Actually, the opposite is the case. This is one of the earliest landscape paintings without figures. And the more conventional landscape paintings you look at, the more unusual this one becomes: Why was it painted? What is it meant to show? Where are we, and why is the artist taking us there?
This work of art is older the previous one by almost a thousand years. It is different in many ways from the two paintings in the previous two slides.
This is not a Western landscape. This work is Chinese. The title – in translation – suggests that it is not about a certain place and its faithful representation. It contemplates the experience of strolling, of being in an environment.
Looking at works from other cultures, we become aware that the way we recognise landscapes as landscapes is informed by our upbringing and education.
We are studying Western landscapes not because there aren’t any other landscapes but so that we can explore in more depth what landscapes say about specific cultures and nations, what they have to do with the history and politics of those nations. After all, the word “landscape” includes “land.” And land is associated with nationality in words such as Holland or The Netherlands.
Chinese landscape art tradition developed much earlier than Western landscape art.
This landscape is more than nine hundred years older than Altdorfer’s painting. It is not even the oldest example of Chinese landscape art. And, yes, there are plenty of figures in this composition as well.
So, Altdorfer’s painting is hardly the first landscape painting ever. But, as the art historian Christopher Wood has pointed out, it is one of the first “independent landscapes” in Western art.
Independent means that the landscape is doing the talking. It does not communicate its meaning through figures. Landscape is not a backdrop against which characters act out a play. Human activity is implied here, not shown. The painting conveys little about the people who built or use this bridge. It is not designed to tell stories about people. For the first time in Western art, a landscape is asked to speak on its own.
For centuries, landscape was not independent. It was not yet a genre. For centuries, landscape served as a setting for a story. In this particular case, we no longer know what the story is. Historians speculate about what the artist intended to say.
What makes this landscape mysterious is that we sense that the figures are important even if we are not certain who they are and what their story is.
Landscape with Scenes from the Life of St. Catherine (1525) is a fresco. It is an example of the tradition of Italian mural painting. It decorates a chapel in the church of San Silvestro al Quirinale in Rome. It was produced shortly after Altdorfer’s painting.
The figures are less prominent than in Giorgione’s painting. But they are not just there to indicate scale, to suggest how large this open space is. This painting is an interpretation of the biblical story of the Resurrection. The story is told in the Gospel according to John, chapter 20, verses 14-18. Mary Magdalene discovers that Christ’s tomb is empty. Christ appears to her, but tells her not to touch him, not to hold on to his physical body (“noli me tangere”). He is no longer part of the physical world. He is a spirit.
When Mary Magdalene first sees Christ after the Resurrection, she thinks that he is a gardener. So the setting is part of the story that this painting relates visually. Even if we are not familiar with that story, we can sense that storytelling in an aim of this painting.
That is also the case in Andrea Mantegna’s Agony in the Garden (c. 1458–60). Once again, the setting is biblical. After the last supper, Jesus is praying while his disciples sleep. Judas is approaching to have him arrested. Again, the landscape is secondary to the figures.
In the painting St Francis in the Desert (c. 1480), Bellini portrays the Italian 12th-century saint Francis of Assisi in an Italian landscape. Francis lived in poverty in the beginning of his sainthood and went on spiritual retreats. The animals in the picture may represent the saint’s love for nature. Nature is a place of healing and contemplation.
Only when we compare works of the same period or a slightly earlier period do we realise how unusual Altdorfer’s “independent landscape” is for a work of its time. It does not follow the tradition. It breaks with it.
This drawing is about as old as Altdorfer’s painting. This landscape has no figures, but it does not seem quite independent. It does not seem able to stand on its own. Do you sense that there is something missing?
The composition draws us into the center, but there is little there to warrant our attention.
Only when a figure is placed in the setting does the picture seem complete. It becomes readable. It makes sense. It has a purpose. All the visual elements combine to tell the story of the figure in the centre.
This landscape is not simply a backdrop. It is invested with symbols and adds vital support to the argument. But in neither case here is the landscape independent. The landscape needs the figure to tell its story – but the figure also needs the landscape.
Malcolm Andrews writes: “The introduction of the human subject focuses the landscape, salient details of which now function to illustrate the narrative of Jerome’s spiritual crisis” (26).
The figure is what we call the argument of the work on the right. It is the main point of the composition. That figure is St Jerome.
Cranach’s woodcut invites us to translate the visual clues about his life that surround the saint. Comparing these works, we can learn a lot about the changing role of landscape art in the West. We can also see how these works are related; they come at least from the same workshop. We can speculate about which one was produced first.
If the drawing comes first, then it seems to serve the purpose of developing visual support for the argument of the woodcut on the right.
Both works are housed in collections thousands of miles apart. Art historical research shows them to be closely related. Art history can help us to connect the dots to draw informed conclusions from our observations. You can find out more about these works and their relationship in Malcolm Andrews’s Landscape and Western Art, from which took this example.
The story of St. Jerome is the subject of many Western paintings. St Jerome was a priest, a scholar, and a translator. He is famous for translating the Bible into Latin. Latin was then a living language spoken by the people of Rome, where St Jerome studied. He is also the Patron Saint of Students. And it so happens that teaching always starts around September 30th, which is St Jerome Day.
St Jerome has already helped us to explore the purpose of landscapes and the relationship between figure and landscape. And I will call on him – or works featuring him – for additional support from time to time.
This painting by Joachim Patinir is another interesting example of a landscape featuring St Jerome. Patinir’s painting relates several episodes in the saint’s life in a single composition. The composition is like a movie – centuries before there were movies – except that our eyes have to do the moving.
In art, Jerome is generally depicted as an old man, often with a lion by his side. One day, when St Jerome lived in a monastery he had founded in Bethlehem, a lion entered the grounds. While all the other monks ran away in fear, Jerome saw that the animal was injured. The lion had a thorn in his paw, and Jerome healed it. After that, the lion became the saint’s companion.
As our eyes travel across the canvas, we can spot the lion three times in three different places – and in different parts of St Jerome’s story.
To earn his keep at the monastery, the lion was given work to do. He was trained to guard a donkey. But one day, the donkey goes missing. And the lion is believed to have attacked and killed it.
The lion then, in a manner of speaking, proves his innocence, by finding the donkey. Here we see the saint, late in life, in a cave in the wilderness. The faithful lion is still by his side.
Paintings like this are called “World Landscapes,” because they have many different features and – unlike a “view” – are not meant to depict one specific location. Patinir originated this kind of landscape art.
Sometimes, world landscapes are so vast and complex that they cover more than one panel, as in this earlier work by the same painter.
Patinir’s landscapes are not independent; they clearly dependent on figures. Their purpose is to translate a religion into images.
But the vastness of his landscapes in relation to the figures that populate them, and the fanciful detail of his imaginary settings for those figures has caused him to be regarded as the first “landscape” painter. Is all the landscape needed to tell St Jerome’s story? Not really. The story could be told in a series of close-ups.
So, even though the emphasis seems to be on storytelling, the landscape draws attention to itself.
In 1521, the printmaker Albrecht Dürer called Patinir a “good landscape painter.” This suggests that, as early as the early sixteenth-century, “landscape” was coming into its own. It was becoming a subject – or a genre – of art.
By the time this painting by the French artist Poussin was produced, landscape had become a genre – a particular kind of painting following a set of conventions and compositional principles but also allowing for variations.
Poussin is known for what is called “heroic” landscape painting.
Figures play an important role in such narrative landscapes, but the landscape – with its physical features and indications of weather conditions – is itself dramatic and expressive. Gradually, landscape was becoming the subject rather than just the backdrop for figures and the setting for scenes.
Paintings like this one, which is called “art chamber” – meaning a room for the storage and display of art – provide us with visual information about the growing appreciation for landscape art in the seventeenth century, which is where we pick up the story of landscape in the next lecture.
Landscapes are on prominent display here. They were, by that time, fully established as a genre, even though they were not considered to be as significant and valuable as other genres such as portraits.
We are going to explore the conventions of genre in greater detail in seminar two. For now, the main point to keep in mind is that landscapes are not nature. Nor are they imitations of nature. Landscapes are products of culture.
In the coming weeks, we will continue to examine the functions of landscape art in Western culture, and what figures in landscapes can tell us about cultures in which they were created: about changing values, attitudes and belief systems.
Here is an exercise – or a question – for you, in preparation for next week’s seminar:
- How do these four works relate to the subject of “landscape”?
- What do they share with landscapes?
- Are they landscapes?
- How do you determine that?
- How would you define “landscape”?
- And what is your definition founded on?
None of those exercises are marked. But all of them are intended to prepare you for the assignments that are marked.
I hope you gathered some useful information and meaningful ideas about landscapes and figures from this introductory talk, and that you jotted down a few notes for future reference.
I am looking forward to hearing about your ideas.
Harry Heuser 