DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.56225#0025
2
LANDSCAPE painting as an independ-
ent art form is a late comer among the
art forms of the West. The middle ages
were far too concerned with the world
beyond to pay much attention to the ter-
restrial world. The medieval artist made
use of conventional abbreviations for
nature handed to him by previous gener-
ations and sanctified by age—symbolic
motifs, many of which can be traced
back to non-Christian civilizations of the
Near East. Gradually this symbolism
gave way to observation of nature—a
development in art that was paralleled
in philosophy by the endeavor of St.
Thomas Aquinas and his school to recon-
cile religious revelation with rational
thinking. When Giotto in 1305, decorat-
ing the walls of the Arena Chapel in
Padua, replaced the golden background
of Byzantine art with a blue sky, he made
the decisive step toward the creation of
landscape painting. But it took more
than a hundred years before Masaccio,
in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria
Novella in Florence, painted the first
convincing landscape space around his
figures. Perspective—this significant
achievement of early scientific think-
ing—had to be developed before land-
scape painting as the West knows it was
possible; and it is no accident that this
development took place chiefly in Flor-
ence, the center of humanism, as an in-
tegral part of the great movement that
heralded modern art: the Renaissance.
Renaissance art, however, did not im-
mediately create pictures in which na-
ture was reproduced for its own sake.
The center of interest, unchallenged by
any other subject, was man himself. For
this reason nature was relegated to the
role of a background for man and his
activities. At the best it served to sym-
bolize personality traits, as in Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa where the spell of the sitter is
suggested by haunting mountain scenery
with meandering rivers and paths.
At about the same time that Leonardo
gave the landscape a new significance
in his figure paintings, young Albrecht
Diirer, coming from the North, painted
water-color studies of Alpine landscapes
which were possibly the first landscapes
painted for their own sake. The masters
of the “Danube Style” who were active
in the Alpine regions of southern Ger-
many and Austria produced a few pure
landscape etchings in the sixteenth cen-
tury and some paintings in which the
landscape evidently was more important
than the figures.
In the meantime another artistic de-
velopment took place in the Low Coun-
tries and Burgundy which ultimately led
to landscape painting more or less inde-
pendently of the German and Italian
approach: the evolution of calendar il-
LANDSCAPE painting as an independ-
ent art form is a late comer among the
art forms of the West. The middle ages
were far too concerned with the world
beyond to pay much attention to the ter-
restrial world. The medieval artist made
use of conventional abbreviations for
nature handed to him by previous gener-
ations and sanctified by age—symbolic
motifs, many of which can be traced
back to non-Christian civilizations of the
Near East. Gradually this symbolism
gave way to observation of nature—a
development in art that was paralleled
in philosophy by the endeavor of St.
Thomas Aquinas and his school to recon-
cile religious revelation with rational
thinking. When Giotto in 1305, decorat-
ing the walls of the Arena Chapel in
Padua, replaced the golden background
of Byzantine art with a blue sky, he made
the decisive step toward the creation of
landscape painting. But it took more
than a hundred years before Masaccio,
in the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria
Novella in Florence, painted the first
convincing landscape space around his
figures. Perspective—this significant
achievement of early scientific think-
ing—had to be developed before land-
scape painting as the West knows it was
possible; and it is no accident that this
development took place chiefly in Flor-
ence, the center of humanism, as an in-
tegral part of the great movement that
heralded modern art: the Renaissance.
Renaissance art, however, did not im-
mediately create pictures in which na-
ture was reproduced for its own sake.
The center of interest, unchallenged by
any other subject, was man himself. For
this reason nature was relegated to the
role of a background for man and his
activities. At the best it served to sym-
bolize personality traits, as in Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa where the spell of the sitter is
suggested by haunting mountain scenery
with meandering rivers and paths.
At about the same time that Leonardo
gave the landscape a new significance
in his figure paintings, young Albrecht
Diirer, coming from the North, painted
water-color studies of Alpine landscapes
which were possibly the first landscapes
painted for their own sake. The masters
of the “Danube Style” who were active
in the Alpine regions of southern Ger-
many and Austria produced a few pure
landscape etchings in the sixteenth cen-
tury and some paintings in which the
landscape evidently was more important
than the figures.
In the meantime another artistic de-
velopment took place in the Low Coun-
tries and Burgundy which ultimately led
to landscape painting more or less inde-
pendently of the German and Italian
approach: the evolution of calendar il-