Landscape Painting 1
Published by Lizzie Coulter in Art · 14 November 2025
Today I’m talking about landscape painting and how it reflects the way that people interpret the world around them. Artists have been making images that have become part of popular imagination since the Middle Ages and an “ideal” view of nature was depicted in the early sixteenth century. Later on artists interpreted landscape in terms of architecture or light whilst in the nineteenth century painters were “true” to nature. In the twentieth century painters have turned to symbolism to interpret nature.
Artists are always altering their ideas about their environment to fit in with the newest ideas of their time. We start off with the idea of the earthly paradise. This varies according to the nationality of the artist concerned and the places he/she was inspired by. But in it’s infancy there was a stylistic uniformity that came from a uniformity of beliefs, certainly in the western world, so you get the title International Gothic. In this first bit the movers and shakers are mostly from Italy.
The church’s idea was that one should treat nature symbolically, so things were seen as what they represented rather than what they were. This led to painters seeing things in isolation rather than cohesively, nature became a system of spiritual hieroglyphics. This was in an age where man was taught to aim for spiritual perfection disregarding his material life which was often seen as a complete distraction!
Early paintings, which are nearly always of a religious nature, nowadays seem naïve with their disproportionately sized people, angels , bushes, trees and flowers but they were not meant to look natural as they had a narrative rather than an aesthetic meaning. In an age when most people were illiterate, the pictures told a biblical story. That’s what they were there for.
Take the representation of mountains which was highly archaic showing absolutely no evidence of observation at all but as a motif was used without change for a very long time. Indeed the Florentine painter Giotto who painted really expressive figure groups gave them plain, rocky backgrounds.
The first real landscapes come from Sienna. Ambrogio Lorensetti’s frescoes “Good and Bad Government” show factual details which are said to be a hundred years before their time and Simone Martini’s work shows a beautiful interpretation of nature.
In the Palace of the Popes at Avignon the wall decorations depict people enjoying the outdoor life showing a demand for rustic imagery in a great palace. This became an escapist obsession.
The landscape of Medieval Europe was not a welcoming place with a lot of it covered in Wild forests with their complements of wild boar and bandits. If you are beset by dangerous and even lethal nature you work hard to cultivate your own patch making it safe and giving you enough to feed your family. This led to the idea of the enclosed paradise garden. This was an edited image of a cottage garden where man’s control of nature ruled – plants laid out in ordered rows or forming patterns, possibly around a fountain, the garden fenced in by orderly hedges, palings or fences reminiscent of the stockades and battlements that had been and still were in places, essential for survival. Also at this time, the 1350s, every part of the painting is enriched and individual details are as finished as they could possibly be. This is reminiscent of the tapestries and jewellery of the period.
In the Middle Ages nature was seen as a source of food but also as the natural background to daily life. The gentry hawked and hunted for sport and the peasants tilled the land. These activities were recorded in the marvellous seasonal calendars called now Books of Hours made with objective clarity in the courts of France and Burgundy around 1400 but created by various artists from the Low Countries.
