Landscape Painting 2

As landscape is an integral part of our life we are seeing some of it’s uses and developments as used in artistic creativity. Early on light in landscape was often suggested by a symbolic means: in the Adoration of the Magi, 1321 by Gentile da Fabriano you get the sun as a golden disc, it’s lit by gold underpainting. In Van Eyck’s Adoration of the Lamb, 1425 he painted thin gold rays radiating down to earth that are in the same fashion. But in the same work his direct observation of actual landscape led him to ignore hard outlines and crude blocks of colour and create a tonal landscape that does not have the rigidity  of earlier works to create an ethereal, melting effect that illustrates the absorbent unity that light can create, probably the first painting to do so. Van Eyk was from the Low Countries.

So a slightly -to our eyes- more realistic or natural landscape is starting to appear but it is still subservient to the main focus; a saint, a prophet, someone from the Bible, a recording of an important event, an episode from history or the classical world. What happened next? Well artists started to notice the elements: Earth, Fire, Air and Water and the effects of these on the natural environment.

Water can mark the land in many ways when it’s in seas and rivers, winding streams, rain, fog, reflective lakes or blanketing snow.

Cloud shapes that can be lit and tinted by the sun can create other landscapes in the air and shadow the earth below. Perhaps the greatest gift to the artist is the merger of the intense light from the sun and our atmosphere that produces such a variety of effects and European painters have enjoyed the everchanging weather conditions that produce the most subtle nuances of luminosity. As Bo Jeffares says: “Daylight, hot and cold, delicate  dawn light, sleepy evening light, sunsets and sunrises, light om hazy autumn days or fresh spring ones and all the endless visual variations found in Europe are the mainstays of her landscape tradition.” Landscape artists use all these different kinds of light to set the emotional tone of a painting.

Van Eyck used light glowingly but there was another side to Northern painting which was sharp delineation, a linear clarity which indicates on-the-spot observation. Durer’s topographical views clearly indicate how the landscape of symbols was being gently eroded by other forms.

A big change started to happen in that as interest in landscape painting grew, the figures that had been so important figures got smaller and the landscape increased in proportion. This indicated a desire to look out on the world and to investigate it for it’s own sake. The landscape setting became every bit as important as the subject it contained and was now a complementary factor. Giovanni Bellini was a master of this approach. Have a look at his Madonna of the Meadow.

Each age sees what its beliefs enable it to see. .Renaissance artists became dissatisfied with the symbolic way of looking at nature in isolated units so they discovered new ways of questioning and looking more effectively and scientifically to help their work evolve. They wanted to see more realistically and more comprehensively’ Look at Leonardo da Vincis’ sketchbooks and Vesalius’ anatomical studies. To put it mildly things were buzzing back then!

The Italians were more governed by perspective as a definition of landscape, but this is only one way of creating an illusion of 3-D space on a 2-D surface.