LANDSCAPE IN THE ARTS.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines landscape as both a verb and a noun, signifying not simply its multiple references in vernacular and specialized parlance or its active and passive modes but more importantly the varying perceptions of landscape as an artistic, cultural, and religious entity. Among the definitions of landscape as a noun, the OED proffers first "A picture representing natural inland scenery, as distinguished from a sea picture, a portrait, etc." Further definitions include "The background of scenery in a portrait or figure-painting," "A distant prospect: a vista," and significantly, "The object of one's gaze." While as a transitive verb, landscape proposes "to represent as a landscape; to picture, depict." This verbal form further connotes "to lay out (a garden, etc.)" as a landscape. Western art history classifies landscape as both iconography and theme; that is, as a series of signs and symbols that form the visual vocabulary that is encoded with specific meanings, such as the metaphor of the "errand into the wilderness," or the Garden of Eden. As a topic, landscape is either the subject matter of a painting or a series of prominent elements in a painting that coordinate the diversity of public understanding of the idea of "landscape." The early nineteenth-century transformation of landscape into an acceptable category of painting by the academy equal to history and portraiture signaled a shift in Western cultural and religious values.

Traditionally landscape is designated by such explanatory signifiers as pastoral, ideal, naturalism, and picturesque. Further, landscape is discussed as a background, a symbolic element, a historical setting, and a motif, so that the visual diversity of the paintings that form this visual essay are all appropriately identified as landscape paintings. The journey in the history of the idea of landscape—from the symbolic stylization found in classical Egyptian frescoes and early Christian mosaics to the awesome sublimity of Caspar David Friedrich's Monk by the Sea (1809–1810; Schloss Charlottenberg, Berlin) and Georgia O'Keeffe's Red Hills, Lake George (1927; Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.)—are interwoven with artistic, cultural, economic, political, and religious influences. Perhaps the most significant issue to be considered is whether or not any discussion of landscape painting is privileged as Western in orientation and classifications, especially following the attitudinal metamorphosis toward landscape shaped first by Edmund Burke's eighteenth-century treatise on the sublime and reaffirmed by Immanuel Kant's discussion of the sublime in his Critique of Judgment (1790). Essentially Kant argued that the sublime was premised upon the immeasurable extent and stunning intensity of nature and the sense of awe that these expressions of dynamis effect in humanity. The amalgamation of terror and delight educed simultaneously from the sight of such phenomena as fulminating cataracts and colossal mountains, thunder and lightning, volcanoes and hurricanes, elicits both a fascination with and a distrust of nature.

The Dictionary of Art (1986) has a major entry of nearly one hundred pages under the rubric of "landscape painting" that details the history and variations of landscape painting in the West and references descriptions of landscape as either a motif or a category in discrete entries dedicated to the world beyond the West, for example, China. This is not to suggest that landscape painting in the West is not a significant or an enormous entry topic in its own right but rather to recognize that the universality of landscape as a visual recording of human attitudes and perceptions of the natural world has been abbreviated. Therefore the tradition of defining and describing landscape requires reformulation of it as a pandemic idea. With that in mind, this essay will discuss origins and modern examples of landscape in Europe and the United States as well as in Japan and China. Whether rendered as ideal or real, harmonious or discordant, bucolic or refined, the landscape communicates solace, spiritual grandeur, and space for solitude.

Panoramic depictions of the subtle but expansive beauty of nature are incorporated into the landscape designs and themes found on Japanese screens. Sequential visual episodes are depicted upon individual panels, which when encountered as a unity create an effective visualization of the natural order, with its coordination of foreground, sky, middle ground, and flora and fauna. As a public or private form of display, these Japanese screens may be unfolded either in full or in segments, providing an ever-renewing composition of natural elements. Varying in size from personalized miniature screens to public monumental exhibition screens, the visual image extends from right to left in a horizontal flow of natural symbols ranging from cherry blossoms to gnarled branches to recognizable species of birds. As in Chinese landscape paintings, the most distinctive element of the Japanese landscape screen is the void or empty space for "no-thing-ness," which offers a spatial threshold for contemplation and quietude, for refreshment and solace.

The dramatically unique depiction of a diminutive, almost miniature, human figure in solitary contemplation of the limitless and enveloping expanse of sky, sea, and sand in Friedrich's Monk by the Sea stunned its original Western viewers. The minimizing of the natural elements to a state of abstracted essences transformed the conventional relationship between humanity and nature as the monk stands silently, almost belittled before the void. The traditional Western presentation of human dominion over nature had been reversed so that nature overpowers this "everyman," who is confronted by the enormity of the emptiness before him. Hypothesizing that Friedrich, who never ventured out of his native country, would not have seen or been influenced by the Eastern religio-aesthetic that informs the Japanese landscape, it is necessary to consider the cultural and artistic route to this singular yet artistically significant presentation of communion with nature by a Western painter. Even without any contact with the Eastern idea of landscape, Friedrich's new vision transformed the Western visual tradition of depictions of saints seated as the prominent subject in size, scale, and placement within a canvas. The normative pattern both of design and iconography was to site a large—usually out-of-proportion figure in comparison to the landscape imagery—human form in such a position as to garner the viewer's immediate attention thereby reaffirming human dominion over nature. Friedrich, on the other hand, eliminates all elaborate details and symbols within the frame of this painting; thereby, he creates and controls the visual emphasis on the atmospheric conditions and the immensity of nature. The miniaturized rendering of the monk required the viewer's complete attention to be located, perceived, and introduced almost to the shock of the viewer. The subject is no longer that of attesting to the human dominion over nature but rather that of the power of nature.

The Path toward Landscape

Throughout the course of Western history, the concept of landscape and the technique of painting changed, interchanged, and exchanged with social, political, and religious modifications. Classical Egyptian art privileges depictions of the human figure and human activities over the landscape, which is more often than not included to provide a background or setting for an event or activity. The classical Greeks were biased toward humanism, human values, and, thereby, the human figure, so that feelings or artistic expressions of nature were as a background or historical setting. Although disputed among scholars, the connections between Hellenistic poetry and art may signal the origin of both landscape painting and of the concept of amoenus, or the "lovely place," a term thought to have been introduced by Theocritus (c. 310–250 b.c.e.). The Romans, however, who might be aptly defined as hesitant in their depictions of nude human figures, greatly admired nature and the landscape. Roman poets sang of the delights and beauty of the countryside and natural realm, and writers including Horace, Pliny the Elder, Ovid, Vitruvius, and Virgil discussed the mutualities between the image and the poetry of landscape, with Virgil identified as the originator of the concept of the Georgic landscape. The finest examples of the visualizing of the Roman idea of the landscape are found in the decorative walls covered with illusionistic landscape that redefined the size and borders of individual rooms. During the early Christian and Byzantine periods, presentations of the landscape were related in terms of decorative designs and symbols. These were bifurcated: paradisal gardens or the wilderness exile were rendered through a symbolic vocabulary of flora and fauna, topographical elements, and human presence.

While the Middle Ages saw a retrieval of classical naturalism in presentations of the landscape, symbolic codings of nature, especially in the metaphorical paradise garden, continued. Medieval attention to the landscape involved the introduction of meteorological properties. Renaissance attitudes toward the landscape were divided between idealization and visual poetry, with an artistic concern for the interplay of light and spatial relations. With the religious and cultural revolution known as the Reformation and its southern European correlative, the Counter-Reformation, landscape painting began its journey toward an independent genre, as evidenced by Albrecht Dürer's employment of the term landschaft and the contemporary appearance of the paese in the Italian center for landscape painting, Venice. The secularization of the arts in the Reformed countries emphasized the turn to history, portraiture, still-life, and genre themes, which included landscape. Dutch landscape painting in particular experimented with effective displays of light and weather and was fostered by the Calvinist dictum that God's largesse is manifested in the natural world. The economic prosperity of the rising middle class created a new audience and patronage for landscape paintings in northern Europe. The next major shift in the idea of landscape came in the eighteenth century with the delicate pastoral formulated by Jean-Antoine Watteau. In the nineteenth century the famed Kantian turn to the subject and his discussion of the sublime conjoined with a variety of technological advances in painting, the economic and societal ramifications of the Industrial Revolution, and the political modifications of revolution and democratic governance to support first the development of romantic landscape, then realist and impressionist landscape by midcentury, and expressionist and abstract landscapes at the end of the century. The twentieth century, with its cultural and religious pluralism, provided new lenses affected by science, technology, and societal revolutions through which the landscape could be interpreted no longer as a major artistic topic but as a nostalgic vision of spiritual values. Landscapes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries were affected by ecological concerns, computer technology, and the development of specialized movements such as land art. From the middle of the nineteenth century to the present, Western art was first challenged and then influenced by the development of photography; similarly the technological advances of moving pictures, television, and computer art have re-formed the modes through which landscape is perceived and imaged.

Despite the variations in attitudes, interpretations, and perceptions of the landscape in Western painting, there are two consistent and fundamental modes of artistic representation employed by Western artists: classic and romantic. Essentially the classic type reorders and enhances nature in an expression of emotion tempered by technical perfectionism evidenced by smooth surface, measured if not invisible individual brush strokes, and careful delineation between colors, forms, and figures often identified as painting with a hard line. The romantic landscape is characterized by its visioning of the undisciplined and savage dimensions of nature as connotative of the sacred mysteries of the divine, signified by textural variations in the layering of and brushwork for paint and the indecipherable borders between colors, forms, and figures identified as painting with a soft line. The art historian Joshua C. Taylor counseled that what is here identified as the classic has prevailed during periods of economic, political, and social unrest whereas the romantic style has been favored during times of economic, political, and social stability.

Two works from the Renaissance era provide an important series of visual comparisons that can be "read" to clarify the classic and romantic modes: Giorgione's La Tempesta (The Tempest; 1507–1508; Galleria dell Accademia, Venezia) and Titian's Sacred and Profane Love (c. 1515; Galleria Borghese, Rome). Neither of these two paintings is a dedicated landscape painting; rather, they incorporate nature into the background, Giorgione more speculatively than Titian. The theme and subject of Giorgione's mysterious La Tempesta remains an encoded secret, as it appears to be without a narrative, historical, mythic, religious, or cultural referent. Such a task of aesthetic discernment should reveal the meaning of this painting and the relationships among the three human figures and between the human elements and nature. The juxtaposition of an undressed nursing mother holding her suckling child at her right breast with a standing, fully dressed male pilgrim may signify everything and nothing. The mysterious positioning of the indecipherable human figures and their story (stories) within the boundaries of this canvas are secondary to the physical presentation that Kenneth Clark identifies as "the quintessence of poetic landscape." The creation of space within Giorgione's canvas is enhanced by a series of triangular intersections of topographical and architectural elements that lead the viewer's eye into the center space, which then evaporates into the wafting storm clouds. This mixture of hard-and soft-line effects evokes an atmospheric aura of ambiguity and heightened emotion as the storm either approaches or passes over.

Titian's equally difficult-to-interpret canvas is visually divided between the characteristics of sacred and profane love represented anthropomorphically by the two female figures, one dressed, the other nude. This same dialectic is signified in the two attitudes toward landscape, as untouched natural vegetation flourishes behind the elegant figure of sacred love while an idyllic pastoral vista proffers its mannered display behind the classical figure of profane love. Titian's ability to present both approaches to the landscape connotes his artistic recognition of the symbolic values attributed to nature.

The visual transition evident from Pieter Brueghel's Harvesters (1565; The Granger Collection, New York) to Jean-Antoine Watteau's Departure from the Island of Cythera (1717; Musée du Louvre, Paris) to John Constable's Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds (1825; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) provides a progression toward the idea of pure landscape in Western painting. Paralleling this evolution in attitudes to the landscape are the economic and social influences of the move from an agrarian to a mercantile to an industrialized society. Brueghel's harvest scene follows the medieval tradition of the "labors of the month" first captured in cathedral carvings and adapted later in the fourteenth century into richly elaborate paintings. Brueghel's harvesters incorporate those currently at work and those at rest. The canvas is bifurcated by a diagonal path that separates the reapers who are integrated into the tall hay on the left side of the canvas from those who rest under the shade of a single tall tree in the right foreground. The right-hand side of Brueghel's canvas displays the cut hay either onto rectangular or tentlike forms. The distant background is also divided into a mannered mountain vista on the left and a verdant wilderness on the right. Although premised, one could argue, upon scriptural passages related to the Fall, Harvesters is devoid of mythological, political, or literary referent, and yet the familiarity of the theme makes commentary unnecessary and its appeal immediate and widespread. Brueghel has moved the viewer beyond the landscape as symbolic setting or backdrop for a painting to the landscape as subject, with its allusions to the eternal passing of the seasons and the vastness of space. The abundance of nature herein affirms the transition to a situation in which the human is subject to nature.

On the other hand, Watteau's ethereal re-visioning of the pastoral landscape emphasizes soft colors and lines as the large group of revelers crosses the undulating horizon line. This famed rendering of a romantic idyll incorporates handsome couples who apparently will attend the fête galante. The freshness and informality of the artist's vision is highlighted by his development of a new genre painting of a pastoral landscape with figures. Demonstrating his debt to Giorgione and the evocation of a poetic mood, Watteau positions his strolling lovers in a garden setting in which the division between foreground and background is a semicircular arrangement of figures over a gentle central knoll. The background vista, like that of Giorgione, is softer in line and color as the floating wispy clouds fuse with the lofty trees and airy mountains. The idyllic garden then becomes simultaneously a setting for an event and the event itself as the poetic tranquility, fluidity, and atmosphere create an aura of intimacy and magic much like the enchanted gardens of classical and medieval landscape painting.

Constable's sunlit pastoral landscape is one of his many simple and quiet scenes anchored in his childhood memories of life in Suffolk. In this version of Salisbury Cathedral, he divides the canvas both horizontally and vertically to highlight the painting's centerpiece—the cathedral building itself. On the narrow pathway on the left side of the canvas are diminutive male and female figures walking together away from the viewer, while two rows of grazing cows are located on the right-hand side in parallel relationship to the strolling couple. The association between humanity and nature veers toward a recognition of the awesomeness and mystery of the romantic landscape. Constable's use of sunlight predetermines his disposition toward the heightened color of fresh greens, bold brushwork, and the meteorological modulations between stability and change. Like his contemporaries, this British artist was torn between science as a mode of observation of nature and religion as the center of values. As this painting demonstrates, however, restitution of a moral high ground was his clear choice. Nature, thereby the landscape, is the direct messenger of God's divine providence, and landscape painting conveys moral ideas and values.

This transformation from Brueghel's agrarian landscape with its overt partnership between humanity and nature to Watteau's ethereal enclosed garden in which humanity continued in a major role and finally to Constable's resplendent pastoral in which the human figure is so diminished as to be noticeably absent is signified by the transition from populated to nonpopulated. The journey toward landscape, then, is a process of both definition and liberation.

Landscape East and West

Expanding the art historian Benjamin Rowland's now classic comparative discussions of Art in East and West (1954), we recognize that landscape is not simply a Western idea or artistic theme. Indeed, for Chinese, Korean, and Japanese artists, landscape was a primary artistic motif centuries earlier than in the West, and their religious and cultural attitudes interpreted nature and thereby landscape as an independent topos at least from the early tenth century. Perhaps best represented by the Chinese name, shanshui, or "mountains and water," this Eastern esteem for landscape was predicated upon more than an appreciation or respect for nature, its awesome wonders, and its universal processes; there was also a recognition of the place of humanity within the natural world. It was believed that a retreat or temporary withdrawal from society or "the modern" into a situation permitting contemplation of nature—countryside, mountains, or desert—facilitated a revelation of the ever-present pervasive spirit of the universe. Thus the idea of the landscape was as a retreat for renewal of an individual's mind and refreshment of the spirit. However, this landscape, which had its own life force, was not to be depicted as an illustration, that is line for line, form for form; rather, the real essence of the landscape was to be captured in a style prophetic of "the romantic." The distinction is simply understood if the Greek signifies the West and the Chinese the East. Where the Greek sought the personification (or anthropomorphization) of a grove or a tree, the Chinese saw a manifestation of the divine through the labors of the universal spirit.

Consider, for example, the renowned Chinese shanshui of Sage Contemplating the Moon by Ma Yüan (1200; Kuroda Collection, Tokyo), in which the economy of line and classic asymmetrical composition extends an invitation to the viewer to participate in the quietude and meditation of the reclining sage entranced within his contemplation of the vast emptiness before him and the singular present of the full moon. A potential Western conversation partner is Caspar David Friedrich's romantic vision of Two Men Contemplating the Moon (c. 1830; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). As beautiful a visual recording of this mysterious partnership between the two men and nature is, and as carefully as the viewer is invited through the painterly convention of interlocuter figures to participate in this experience, the visual differences between the Eastern and Western images are telling and help the viewer to recognize the cultural distinctions in the idea of landscape. Both paintings express the emotive power of the human connection with nature and the spirituality of this relationship. Both paintings could be classified within the Western category of romantic, with their soft edged forms, artistic focus on the evocation of mood, and presentation of nature mysticism.

However, Friedrich designed a series of internal spatial connectives between the mountainous foreground, the evergreen and gnarled empty trees, the distant mountainscape, and the two men that so clutter the canvas as to obscure the focus on the moon and thereby of the spiritual potential of nature. Further, his inclusion of two men who appear almost as partners in physical stature and social position suggests a common search for, and thereby discussion and explication of, the meaning of this encounter. Alternatively, Ma Yüan offers a simpler, more restrained vision of a mountainous landscape that includes a distorted gnarled tree and two men. However, these two men are separated not simply by the internal topographical barrier of a small mountain but also by their own physical size and social status. There is no internal conspiracy between them; rather, the sage and the boatman contemplate, each in his own way, the mystery and spiritual power of nature—the sage by concentrating on the moon, the boatman on the mountain. The large internal space given over by the artist to the void provides a sense of both the monumental vastness of the night sky and the place of the human within the context of the natural world. Further, this void provides a space in which the viewer, like the contemplative sage, can write her own story. One additional and perhaps ironic difference to note is that Friedrich employs a horizontal canvas and Ma Yüan a vertical one. Normally the former would be described as accessing the aesthetics of immanence and the latter the aesthetics of transcendence. However, this is open to debate, as these two paintings create internal attitudes toward the relationships of humanity with nature and of the human with the spirit.

Reversing the horizontal and vertical references is another comparison of Eastern and Western romantic views of landscape in James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Old Battersea Bridge (1872–1875; Tate Gallery, London) and Hiroshige's Fireworks at Ryūgoku Bridge (1858; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.). Perhaps this visual consideration of the universal elements of landscape is enhanced by the fact that the American expatriate painter had seen, owned, and was influenced by Japanese woodblock prints such as Hiroshige's prior to his painting of the Old Battersea Bridge. Japonisme swept through Paris, especially among the artistic circles Whistler frequented, beginning in the late 1850s and reaching a fervor in the mid-1860s. Japonisme was a major influence on the development of both Impressionism and the art for art's sake movement. Whistler, foremost among all his Impressionist, symbolist, and art for art's sake colleagues, was affected by the visual principles and religio-aesthetics of Japan. Although much of the Japanese woodblock art and pottery that entered the European and American markets was made for export, thereby not necessarily within the proper boundaries of theme, design, and execution for a Japanese audience, Whistler had a discerning eye, and his own approach to painting was transformed by the finest among such objects.

Hiroshige's depiction of a summer fireworks display is visualized at early evening when the bridge is covered with diminutive figures who stand above the water and mountains almost like birds looking down on the natural environment. The foreground and background of the print is divided by the vertical lines forming the Ryūgoku Bridge, with the fireworks boats and the boats with passengers viewing the display, almost obliterating the river waters. The bridge also partially obscures a series of mountains and beaches in the background. The falling lights of the fireworks are condensed into a small segment of the night sky, yet again diffused by the bridge. The internal tonal arrangement of soft, neutral colors works in tandem with the complex patterning of lines and curves to create on first glance an abstract pattern distinguished by the character of "flatness." The details of the fireworks, the varied audiences, and even parts of the natural environment became homologous elements in the visual pattern of colors and forms. A work such as Hiroshige's requires careful looking, as the first glance suggests an unpopulated landscape.

Whistler's painting is even more abstract in its presentation of form and figure. He sought to create a visual harmony of tones and forms that create a mood similar to that evoked in a listener by music, even unto his minimizing of titles to musical parallels: Old Battersea Bridge is among his "Nocturnes." To attain this effect he minimized the details, colors, forms, and lighting in paintings such as this, which he also distanced from a narrative. Through his presentation of the atmospheric relations of water, earth, and sky in a moment of poetic enchantment, Whistler invites the viewer to contemplation of the spirituality of landscape. However, what Whistler has also created here is a new vision, or perhaps a retrieval, of the classic mode, of the landscape of symbolic potential.

One of the major distinctions between Eastern and Western presentations of the landscape is the void. In the Chinese shanshui (landscape painting) the visual emphasis is as much upon the void as it is upon the sparsity of detailed renderings of botanical and topographical forms. Despite the economy of line, these paintings project the visual effect of nature. The placement of the majority of pictorial imagery left of center balances the void right of center to comprise the traditional asymmetrical composition favored by Chinese, Korean, and Japanese artists. However, the void has multiple roles, including a spiritual threshold for preparation to encounter the universal spirit and an aesthetic invitation to participate in this image of contemplation by painting or writing the viewer's own story in this otherwise empty space. The important socio-political function is clarified when a landscape with an empty poetry hall is contrasted to a landscape with the poetry hall filled in. The texts written into the poetry hall record the thinking of those who have contemplated the image with great care and, when the calligraphy includes seals, those of rank who saw the image in situ. The verses provide the viewer with a recognition of what others have experienced in front of this painting, perhaps as a spiritual guide or entry point for viewers who find images disturbing but words comfortable. Neither of these shanshui is a precise transcription of what this natural vista looks like; each depicts the spirit or essence of this landscape episode in the world of nature.

When these shanshui are compared with Western paintings in which the mountains perform a central, if not dominant, role, it becomes apparent that the fundamental distinction between East and West is in the spiritual and symbolic significance of the idea of landscape. The mountain connotes a variety of Western symbolic references, ranging from the classical Mediterranean "home of the gods" to the Hebraic monumental setting for conversations with Yahweh to the Christian site of transfiguration. The Chinese attitude toward the mountain is also multivalent and ranges from a site for celestial activity to a symbol of permanence and immensity. Shrouded in mist, clouds, or shadows, the mountains dissolve into a delicately splendid form that speaks to the senses rather than the intellect as the essence of the landscape.

Consider, for example, the surrealistic mountain formations found in the art of Leonardo da Vinci, which provide both a form of geological precision and an aura of mystery. His investigations of nature, and thereby his depictions of the landscape, were premised upon careful observation of the natural world and the anatomy of vision. Leonardo captured the rhythm and quiet energy of plants, water, and light. His passion for scientific investigation may have led him to the prominent inclusion of atmospheric blues in his renderings of the landscape, as in The Virgin of the Rocks (c. 1483; The National Gallery, London). The surreal shapes of the background mountains and surrounding rock distinguish this as a Western landscape premised upon the Greek principle of the personification: visual parallels between the rocks and human figures are evident in the gesturing hands and fingers and other extremities. By contrast, the Chinese strove to present the living spirit that vitalized the mountain in a painterly vision of mystical and lyrical aestheticism.

Paul Cézanne's Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902–1904; Pushkin Museum, Moscow) provides a Western approach to imaging the harmony of and within nature. A technical exercise in the interplay between vertical and horizontal forms, Cézanne's painting is divided into the traditional tripartite foreground, middle ground, and background. However, he creates a new way of understanding this perspectival relationship as his use of line and color moves the viewer's eye back and up toward Mont Sainte-Victoire, which is the object of his gaze. His experiments with brushwork provided him with the skill to create a rapid, loose brush stroke that results in an internal interplay between surface and depth, so that the viewer experiences a sense of perspective, depth, mass, and volume when there isn't any. Nonetheless, his explorations of the vista and monumentality of Mont Sainte-Victoire resulted in a series of regulated and erudite renderings of the landscape far removed from the spiritual attachment to nature fundamental to shanshui.

Attitudes toward the Landscape

A series of universal attitudes toward the idea of landscape in painting can be found in Eastern and Western cultures through the centuries. These are identified through the motifs of garden/paradise, space/place, awesomeness/sublimity, and form/formlessness. These attitudes relate to developments in religious values, philosophy, economics, and politics as well as to technological and stylistic changes in the arts.

Garden/paradise.

Traditionally understood to be derived from the Persian for "a walled enclosure," the paradise, particularly the paradise garden, is a widespread visual motif among world cultures and mythologies. Oftentimes synonymous with the enchanted garden, the paradise garden signifies first and foremost a place of safety where love and friendship can thrive. The glorious details of its flowery meadows, sweet aromas, shade-giving trees, and gentle animals are important, especially in its connotation as a metaphor of the heavenly paradise. The motif of the garden denotes both a space of beauty and vegetation and, in a number of religions, the site of the origins of humanity. A major metaphor for the earthly paradise, the Garden of Eden was first the home of Adam and then of Eve, in which all the terrestrial gifts of the creation were abundant until the primordial couple fell from God's favor and was expelled from the garden.

Early Christianity reformulated the classical perception of the natural world as a place of delight into a metaphor for our exile from the garden. Thus early Christian artists formulated an image of landscape as a symbolic paradise, as seen in the glistening apse mosaic featuring heaven and earth in the Transfiguration (c. 548; San Apollinaris in Classe, Ravenna, Italy). The highly stylized trees and plants are in keeping with the early Christian concern with flatness as an attribute distinguishing image from idol. The decorative glorification of the natural world denotes what Kenneth Clark identified as the "landscape of symbols" present in this Ravenna mosaic alluding to the lost but not forgotten garden. The garden motif was regularly contrasted to the desert and/or the wilderness in early Western monotheism; the "land of milk and honey" was the earthly locale providing a foretaste of the heavenly paradise.

During the twelfth century, the enchanted garden motif was reformed and aligned with the Christian hortus conclusus (enclosed garden) and the Islamic enclosed garden, as exemplified by the Master of the Upper Rhine's Paradise Garden (1410; Städelesches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt) and the manuscript illumination of Humay and Humayun in a Garden (c. 1430; Musée des Arts Décoratif, Paris). In the former, the normative medieval elements of a garden are fused with the Hellenistic poetic amoenus, or "lovely place," as the delicate sights and smells of flowers—including the singular form of thornless rose that medieval Christianity reserved as the sign of the Virgin's "enclosed garden"—and other flourishing vegetation create a visual delight. The Christ Child merrily plays music as his mother reads peacefully in this place of love, comfort, and safety. Similarly the earthly Humay and Humayan find happiness in both their pronouncements of love and in the enchanting setting for their rendezvous. This flower-filled garden is surrounded by a series of appropriately decorated screens that extend the floral and arboreal patterns against a romantic night sky. The presumably perfumed atmosphere, tender bird songs, shade-giving trees, and cool water of these enclosed gardens continue their visual analogies to the lost paradise of Adam and Eve.

The earth as a place of exile is fundamental to the medieval motif of the "labors of the months," which eventually was transformed into the fifteenth-century illuminations in books of hours, in particular, those of the Limbourg Brothers such as October from Trés Riches Heures de le Duc de Berry (1413; Musée Condé, Chantilly). The Limbourg Brothers here combine the "lost garden" motif with the result of the Fall, that is, that humans must toil in the fields. So as one man rides a horse to till the earth and another sows the winter seed in front of the then Palais du Louvre, the viewer experiences the sensation of the enclosed garden, because the wall in the background can be interpreted as a closing off of the farmed lands from the world of aristocratic and political activity. The passing of the seasons is highlighted by the astrological calendar that frames the top of this illuminated page. Further, the Limbourg Brothers connect the natural with the spiritual in their concern for the meteorological effects of the changing seasons, evidenced by the costuming and postures of the farmers as well as by the landscape. That which had been the happy home of the primordial couple has become the site of exile for their descendants, who must contend with the challenges of nature's bounty and powers.

Space/place.

The notion of space in landscape is twofold, that is, it occurs both inside and outside the frame. Further, there is a philosophic if not psychological reality to the transformation of space into place. This idea of land as space and place is promoted in the work of the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. The activity of transforming space into place encompasses the acts of identification, naming, possession, and privileging. Perhaps, as in the journey toward landscape, the path toward place is a metaphor for the process of individuation. Further, the spatial relationships within and without the frame have implications beyond the vista of a landscape.

We are surrounded with things which we have not made and which have a life and structure different from our own: trees, flowers, grasses, rivers, hills, clouds. For centuries they have inspired us with curiosity and awe. They have been objects of delight. We have come to think of them as contributing to an idea which we have called nature. Landscape painting marks the stages of our conception of nature.

source: Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art (1979 [1946]), p. 1.

Thomas Cole's now classic rendering of The Oxbow: The Connecticut River near Northampton (1836; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) is a multivalent reading of the idea of landscape in nineteenth-century American art. A diagonal line runs from the painting's lower right corner upward toward the swirling storm clouds in the upper left corner. To the left of this diagonal line Cole's landscape is a classic display of the wilderness: untamed and unmannered, with lushly green vegetation, decaying broken trees, and a storm-filled sky signaling the tempestuous conditions of nature. Correspondingly the landscape to the right of the diagonal is basked in sunlight, carefully managed and arranged, implicitly under human dominion and exuding a sense of serenity and silence. The founder of the Hudson River School of painters and later also of writers, Cole is further identified as the first American landscape painter. A devout Christian, Cole used his renditions of the landscape as a visual mode of moral and spiritual reflection. Knowing the date of this painting, it becomes necessary to consider the effect of the economic disasters of 1835 and the then-common reading of this painting as an omen of future disasters, most notably the Civil War. The Oxbow is also a depiction by Cole of America as the "new Eden," an artistic and literary motif popular in the early period of American landscape painting that both offered a connection to the European tradition of landscape painting and served as a vehicle for an American "Christian" art.

However, it is Cole's development and evolution of the intersecting concepts of space and spatial relations into "a place" that characterizes this idea of landscape in America. As a horizontal canvas, The Oxbow offers its viewers a peripheral range of vision as well as the traditional foreground, middle ground, and background. The meteorological effects of the stormy and thunderous clouds on the left of the center diagonal, and of the available sunlight with a series of soft clouds on the right, reflect a modernizing of the Limbourg Brothers' point of correspondence. Providing his viewer with a horizon line through which one can enter into this wilderness and pastoral landscape, Cole did not forget that Western characteristic necessity of the presence of the human. Toward the lower right-hand corner, as the wild vegetation begins to soften into the mannered presentation of the river and the farmed pastures, the disciplined viewer espies a white and red umbrella slanting away from the now decipherable diminutive portrait of the artist.

The twentieth-century painter Georgia O'Keeffe dedicated the last years of her life to the depiction of the landscape in the American Southwest. However, earlier in life she painted landscapes reflecting the places where she lived, including Texas, New York City, and Lake George. Influenced by the modernist ethos that incorporates Oriental (as in Chinese and Japanese) art and philosophy, her paintings such as Red Hills, Lake George (1927; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.) are minimized presentations of economical delineations of forms that express the ideas and evoke the emotions that characterize the artist's theme. Like Cole, she leaves an empty space in the upper sky that can be correlated to the void in Chinese and Japanese landscapes. Further, her use of hot-and cool-toned colors, in coordination with the simplicity of her forms, leads us to experience the essence of her idea of the landscape. Physically small in scale and squarer in shape than The Oxbow, O'Keeffe's painting creates the visual sensation of a wide-open space with the intersecting "v" formations of mountains. The viewer is without an entry point but comes to the recognition that this is a new way of seeing and expressing the idea of the landscape: the viewer is standing within the frame.

Awesomeness/sublimity.

The expression of energy and power found in the landscape is delineated by the categories of the awesome and the sublime. Depictions of extraordinary meteorological events, natural disasters, and spiritual intensity in landscape capture the essence of these categories. The nineteenth-century American painter Frederic Edwin Church created an image merging the awesome and the sublime in The Icebergs (The North) (1861; Dallas Museum of Art). Overcast by an aura of solitude and silence, The Icebergs draws viewers into the eerie blue-green water, the reflected colored lights on the other icebergs, and the almost surreal iceberg formations reminiscent of Leonardo's rock. One may not even initially see the broken, half-sunk ship frozen in the wintry waters of the north, the only sign of human presence.

Katsushika Hokusai's Mount Fuji Seen below a Wave at Kanagawa from his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji (Tokugawa period, 1830–1835; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) communicates a moment of simultaneous awe and terror. The dramatic energy of the inland sea is seen in the large, threatening waves, most significantly in the tallest ocean wave, which curls over with such intensity that it froths with foam and dwarfs Mount Fuji, which is visible in the background. The frothing waves extend talons of water and foam that reach out to overturn the boats cascading over the curvilinear water slides. Despite all these raging waters and potentially overturned boats, Mount Fuji, the sacred mountain, stands calmly, majestically, and reassuringly in the distant background. The awesome and the sublime fuse into an image that at once captures nature's swirling energies and its stability.

Vincent van Gogh's The Starry Night (1889; Museum of Modern Art, New York) coordinates warm and cool colors with an intensity of line to express a passionate vision of the landscape. The undulating swirls electrify the night sky, enhancing the white, blue-white, and yellow circles of "fire" that traverse the upper realm of this canvas. The large yellow crescent moon in the upper right corner is balanced by the flamelike vertical cypress trees in the lower left corner. The country village unfolding beyond these two reference points is accentuated by the church that stands almost at the center of the frame. The rhythm of the internal forms creates an atmosphere of spiritual intensity and reawakens the primordial awe at the vast magnificence and limitless powers of the natural world.

Form/formlessness.

The common perception is that natural objects such as trees, mountains, and flowers should be depicted accurately in Western painting. Representational forms, that is, those recognizable through their resemblance to what is seen in everyday life, are the most comfortable to the human eye and the least threatening to the human psyche. However, abstracting forms in order to artistically distill the essence of the thing or idea became an artistic convention in Western landscape most prominently with the influence of Japonisme in the 1860s. Thus a formless style of characterization became a visual mode for evoking emotion and response from viewers. Although a new practice among Western landscape painters, this "formlessness," or abstraction, had been common to Eastern artists almost from the inception of interest in nature as an universal reflection of spiritual values. Fuyake Roshu's Utsunoyama: The Pass through the Mountains (Edo period, 1699–1757; Cleveland Museum of Art) incorporates highly stylized but nonrepresentational forms for his mountains, vegetation, and river. This patterning of undulating masses, curvilinear flattened forms, and decorative vegetal shapes present the essence of landscape in a dynamic yet challenging mode.

Translated into Western art first by Whistler and then by the Impressionists, this artistic interest in formlessness, or "formless form," reached new heights in the late nineteenth century with paintings such as Paul Gauguin's The Day of the God (Manaha no Atua) (1894; Art Institute of Chicago). In this work, one of the paintings influenced by his Tahitian sojourn, the exotic is referenced not simply by title or attitude toward the human figure but also the expressive quality of Gauguin's colors. In this canvas he clearly merges form with formlessness in the abstractions of landscape in the foreground, where the discarded garments of the ritual celebrants are almost indistinguishable from the topography and the pool of water.

Pursuing the idea of landscape as a merger of form and formlessness one step further, Salvador Dalí painted images such as The Persistence of Memory (1931; Museum of Modern Art, New York) in which the viewer's normal concept of proportion is also skewed, as for example in the larger-than-life-size limp watch that hangs over a bare branch of a diminutive tree. Objects fuse with anthropomorphic elements in this landscape of dreams, as the formless foreground is absorbed into the recognizable forms of the lake and mountainside by Dalí's home in Port Lligat, Spain. In this way he coordinates the known with the unknown, dream with reality, and form with formlessness within the idea of landscape.

Scholarship on the Landscape

Formal discussions of the idea of landscape date, as mentioned earlier, to the philosophic and poetic texts from the classical era of Greece and Rome. In the early Christian era, however, beyond scriptural and patristic references to landscape as the garden, the wilderness, the land of milk and honey, or the desert, little attention was given to either landscape as an art form or as nature until the time of Francis of Assisi (1181 or 1182–1226), who retrieved and reshaped the pre-Christian understanding of the beauty of the natural order as a reflection of God.

Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1600) is recognized as the first author to discuss formally an aesthetics of landscape through his distinction of "privileged places" and "places of delight" in his Trattato dell'arte della pittura, Libro VI (1584). Seventeenth-century commentaries by Roger de Plies, André Félibien, and Samuel van Hoggstraten, among others, continued to define, classify, and elevate the idea of landscape in art. The eighteenth century produced significant philosophic reflections on the idea of landscape, particularly with relation to the sublime, by Edmund Burke, William Gilpin, Uvedale Price, and Immanuel Kant. Curiously, nineteenth-century painters wrote more influential texts on landscape than philosophers or theologians, including Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable, and Thomas Cole, although the writings of John Ruskin and Ralph Waldo Emerson would be formative on later aesthetics of landscape. With the advent of the twentieth century, critical assessments of the idea of landscape, particularly in painting, began to appear; however, most were limited to studies of "modern" attitudes toward landscape.

There is no single classic study of the theme of the idea of landscape either in the arts or more specifically in painting throughout the history of either Eastern or Western culture. However, classic studies such as Michael Sullivan's The Birth of Landscape Painting in China (1962) and Barbara Novak's Nature and Culture (1980) consider the development of landscape painting in relation to a specific geographic location or chronological period. Kenneth Clark's singular Landscape into Art (1946) is an observant analysis of the cultural concepts of landscape in Western culture with a subthesis that the artistic move to landscape as a recognized category of "high art" corresponds to the secularization of Western culture and values.

A variety of intriguing texts including Leo Marx's now classic The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964) and Yi-Fu Tuan's Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977) provide lenses through which to expand the boundaries of art-history-based analyses of landscape. Similarly Robert Rosenblum's Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: From Friedrich to Rothko (1975), Denis E. Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels's edited volume The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments (1988), and any of Barbara Novak's texts provide specialized studies integrating theological, cultural, scientific, and philosophic influences on the meaning and presentation of landscape in painting.

The reality of both the interdisciplinary motif and methodology for the study of this theme, that is, the idea of landscape (through painting), has been emphasized by Western scholars within the categories of Western art and cultural studies. The most creative work being done appears to come from the research and curatorial presentation for special exhibitions. For example, the reader should consult The Natural Paradise: Painting in America, 1800–1950 (1976), edited by Kynaston McShine; American Light: The Luminist Movement, 1850–1875 (1980), edited by John Wilmerding; and American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States, 1820–1880 (2002), edited by Andrew Wilton and T. J. Barringer.

See also Arts: Overview ; Chinese Thought ; Classicism ; Creativity in the Arts and Sciences ; Gender in Art ; Humanity in the Arts ; Iconography ; Japanese Philosophy, Japanese Thought .

Why does a virtuous man take delight in landscapes? It is for these reasons: that in a rustic retreat he may nourish his nature; that amid the carefree play of streams and rocks, he may take delight; that he may constantly meet in the country fishermen, woodcutters, and hermits, and see the soaring of the cranes, and hear the crying of the monkeys. The din of the dusty world and the locked-in-ness of human habitations are what human nature habitually abhors; while, on the contrary, haze, mist, and the haunting spirits of the mountains are what human nature seeks, and yet can rarely find.

source: Kuo His, An Essay on Landscape Painting, trans. Shio Sakanishi (1936), p. 30.

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Diane Apostolos-Cappadona