Landscape Painting . Landscape is a genre of painting that represents the countryside and the objects found there. Landscape is the richest, most pleasant and most fertile subject of painting. Indeed, of all the productions of nature and of art, there is none that the landscapist is not able to include in the composition of his pictures. Among the diverse and nearly infinite styles with which one can treat landscape painting , we must distinguish two main areas: namely the heroic style and the pastoral or rustic style. [1] We include under the heroic style all the grandest and most majestic sights that art and nature present to the eyes. There we take in marvelous points of view with temples, ancient tombs, country houses with superb architecture, etc. In the rustic style, on the other hand, nature is represented very simply, without artifice, and this negligence often suits her better than all the adornments of art. Here one sees shepherds with their flocks, recluses ensconced in the bosom of rocks, or deep in the thick forests, in the far distances, in the meadows, etc. The heroic style combines quite happily with the rustic style.

The genre of landscape painting demands coloring that is intelligent and that makes a great effect. Sometimes we represent uncultivated and uninhabited sites in landscape painting so as to have the liberty to paint the bizarre effects of nature’s livery, and the jumbled and irregular formations of undeveloped land. But this sort of imitation could not move us other than in moments of melancholy, where the thing imitated in the picture sympathized with our passions. In any other state, the most beautiful landscape painting , were it by Titian [2] or Carracci [3], would not interest us more than the view of a canton of a frightful or pleasant country. [4] There is nothing in such a picture that speaks to us, one might say, and as it barely touches us, it does not engage us very much. Intelligent painters have rightly sensed this truth so they rarely made landscape paintings deserted and without figures. They populated them, they introduced into these pictures a subject composed of many characters whose actions were capable of moving us, and consequently engaging us. That is how it was done by Poussin, [5] Rubens [6] and other great masters, who were not content to put a man walking on a path, or a woman carrying fruit from the market in their landscape paintings ; there they usually placed figures in thought, to give us a place to think; they put in men agitated by passions, to awaken our own, and by this agitation to involve us. Indeed, we speak more often of the figures in these pictures than of their terraces and their trees. The famous Arcadia of Poussin would not be so praiseworthy if it lacked figures . [7] On this painting see the article on Poussin, under the word Landscapist.

Notes

1. The painter and art critic Roger de Piles (1635-1709) divided landscape painting into two styles, the “heroic” and the “pastoral or rustic” in the Cours de Peinture par Principes (1708).

2. Tiziano Vecelli (c.1488-1576) was the leading Venetian painter of the High Renaissance. His pastoral and mythological landscapes were prized for their rich coloring and lush scenery.

3. Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) was a member of a famous Bolognese family of artists who restored the naturalistic ideal of the High Renaissance to painting. Influenced by Titian and the Venetian School, he set his religious and mythological subjects in an idealized natural environment that raised the status of landscape painting.

4. The text from this sentence to the end of the entry is virtually a quote from Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la Peinture (1719) by Abbé Dubos. A philosophe and member of the Académie française, Jean-Baptiste Dubos (1670-1742) advanced an affective theory of aesthetics that attracted an international following in the eighteenth century.

5. The French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) was renowned for the moral rectitude of his themes. He spent most of his career in Rome where he developed a characteristic “heroic” style of landscape with allegories and historical narratives. After the late 1640s, he also painted idealized “pastoral” scenes of the Roman Campagna.

6. Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), the most famous Flemish painter of the Baroque period, painted emotionally charged religious, mythological and allegorical subjects. He produced both “heroic” and “pastoral” landscapes with bravura brushwork and dramatic lighting developed from the Venetian School.

7. Poussin painted two versions of Arcadia in 1627 and 1638-39. See the entry Landscapist, n.13.