Claude Lorrain at the peak of landscape’s rise
It is fair to consider the history of landscape in the West as divided into two parts; before and after Claude Lorrain.
The genre of landscape painting arose initially, in the modern period at least, as the background to history painting or narrative pictures in general. But just as some subjects, such as Adam and Eve in Paradise, the Expulsion, or the Baptism of Christ, lent themselves to painting the nude, others naturally called for a landscape setting. Prominent among these was the Flight into Egypt, and one could almost do a survey of early modern landscape based on the treatment of this motif, from Giotto to Carpaccio, Tintoretto, Carracci or even Caravaggio.
In Giotto, both this subject and others such as the Lamentation or Pieta have landscape backgrounds conceived in the schematic way derived from Byzantine painting. Giotto does not really extend his proto-perspectival vision into the landscape, but that changes a century later when, after the interruption of the Black Death, the development that he set in motion is taken up again by the generation of Alberti, Masaccio, Donatello and Brunelleschi, the pioneers and theorists of linear perspective.
Perspective was always easiest to represent in architectural spaces with their grid-like pavements and matrices of orthogonal lines. But Masaccio, who executed a virtuoso demonstration of architectural perspective in the Trinity in Santa Maria Novella in Florence (c 1426-28), also applied the system to the organic forms of nature in the background to the Tribute Money in the Brancacci Chapel (c 1425). The landscape looks more austere today than was originally intended, because, like some of his contemporaries, Masaccio evidently painted the foliage of his trees as a secco, after the plaster of the fresco had dried, and it has therefore flaked off over the centuries.
So the first step in the development of modern landscape was to apply the new perspectival vision to natural scenery; the second was to base landscape backgrounds on real locations. The earliest extant landscape drawing of a real view is by Leonardo — a view of the Arno valley dated August 5, 1473. The Pollaiuolo brothers in Florence began painting real locations at the same time: Antonio’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian (1473-75) is also set against a view of the Arno Valley, clearly studied from life.
There is still an odd discontinuity in the spatial construction of this picture, however, which is due to painting the figures and the landscape from different points of view; the river valley was evidently drawn from an elevated vantage point, so that the narrative subject seems to be taking place on a ledge above a view far below. The artist must have been conscious of the problem and in the Hercules and Dejaneira painted a few years later (c 1475-80) he tried to achieve a spatial continuity between foreground and background.
The smooth transition from foreground to background — not as simple a matter as it may seem — was mastered by High Renaissance artists, in particular by Raphael, as we can see for example in his famous Cartoons (full-scale paper models) for a series of tapestries designed to hang in the Sistine Chapel, today in the V&A in London.
Meanwhile, if Florence had made the first great contribution to the growth of modern landscape with the invention of perspective and the idea of applying it to the depiction of real natural locations, Venice brought another element of incalculable importance: the sense of nature as speaking to the human heart, mirroring our feelings, and specifically as a setting for love and passion. This vision of nature was no doubt rooted in the Venetian love of colour and light — sensuous dimensions, in contrast to the Florentine love of tangible qualities like volume and space — but it also had an important literary source.
Printing had been invented in the middle of the 15th century, leading to an explosion of knowledge and access to ancient literature, and Venice was one of the great centres of the new industry. Aldus Manutius (c 1450-1515) was the founder of the Aldine Press, which published the first editions of some 30 classical Greek authors.
Among the authors rediscovered at this time was Theocritus, the Hellenistic poet from Syracuse in Sicily who had invented the bucolic genre of poetry. Like the early 20th-century composers who drew on ancient traditions of folk music, Theocritus created a sophisticated and self-consciously literary form from the rustic songs of shepherds and goatherds in the hills of Sicily. The subjects of this new genre were love and the sense of nature, and his Idylls — which have given us the word idyllic — inspired Virgil in his Eclogues and later Renaissance poets such as Sannazaro, author of the enormously influential pastoral romance Arcadia, written about 1480 and published in Naples in 1504.
The first Venetian painter who responds specifically to these influences is Giorgione, whose Fete champetre (c 1509), possibly finished by Titian, a fellow disciple of Giovanni Bellini, was one of the models for Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe (1863). Giorgione, who may have been exposed to ancient and modern bucolic or pastoral poetry at Caterina Cornaro’s court at Asolo, died young but was succeeded by Titian, who came to be regarded as, with Michelangelo, the greatest artist of the mid-16th century and was imitated for generations, from Rubens and Poussin to Reynolds and others.
Thus the Venetians rediscovered the only genre of literature that is actually concerned primarily with nature, and introduced what we might consider the romantic associations of landscape. The third contribution, in this schematic and somewhat artificially linear history of landscape, was made by the Flemish, who introduced a sense of fantasy, mystery and a northern feeling for the awfulness and sublimity of nature.
The first thing that may strike us as surprising about Flemish landscape is that it is filled with soaring mountains, precipitous chasms, winding roads and fragile bridges above abyss-like voids, when much of their own land is utterly flat and almost featureless. But perhaps it is not surprising that people who grew up in such uneventful landscapes should long for fantastic ones, and the many Flemish artists who travelled to Rome were clearly fascinated by the alpine and other mountainous scenery they encountered along the way.
The centre of the Renaissance had moved from Florence to Rome at the end of the 15th century, and Rome had become the capital of the High Renaissance. The sack of the city in 1527 by German troops — in the employ of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor but already infected with the new ideology of what would be the Reformation — left Italy without a clear cultural capital for the next half-century, but by the later 16th century, under a series of capable and ambitious popes, the city reasserted itself once again as the undisputed centre of modern art. It was here that the final pieces came together to form what we know as classical landscape painting. It is generally thought, and with some justification, that Annibale Carracci, who had been deeply influenced by Venetian art before coming to Rome and assimilating the lessons of the High Renaissance, was the one who brought all the elements together in the synthesis of his Flight into Egypt (c 1604). Under his influence, too, the Flemish Paul Bril evolved from fantastic landscapes earlier in his career to more harmonious and classical compositions that foreshadowed Claude Lorrain.
But there is, I think, one missing link that is easy to overlook, and that is the influence of ancient landscape painting. This is a rather elusive subject, since hardly any of these frescoes survive today. But there were undoubtedly more to be seen in the High Renaissance, when the Golden House of Nero was discovered, and when Raphael and some of his extensive team of assistants saw original ancient paintings for themselves. The style of antique ornamentation known as grotesques was directly modelled on what they saw in these now underground — hence grotto-like — rooms.
One surviving piece of evidence is in the work of Polidoro da Caravaggio, one of Raphael’s team of artists. In the little church of San Silvestro al Quirinale, which can only be visited by appointment, there are two frescoes in a chapel painted by Polidoro around 1525, shortly before the sack of Rome. These may be the closest things to the ancient landscapes that he was able to see for himself, and what is striking in each case is a kind of grandeur and nobility, as well as compositional stability, that derive from the combination of landscape and architecture.
This is precisely what anchors Annibale’s composition, with all of its romantic, bucolic feeling in the foreground and middle ground and hints of sublime mountains in the background: the solidity and weight of the central edifice, which imparts a sense of grandeur and unites history and landscape into a single powerful image.
After Annibale and his pupil, Domenichino, the great heirs to the tradition of classical painting, and the artists who carry the genre to its high point, are Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain, both of French origin but adopted Romans. They were friends and we are told they sometimes went out sketching together. At any rate we have a great many sketches from nature made by both, and especially by Claude, who is said to have camped out in the country overnight at times in order to capture the light of dawn in an ink study.
Poussin was always interested in the natural settings of his pictures, but under Claude’s influence he seems to have become increasingly drawn towards landscape later in his career. This never meant pictures of nature without human figures; but the figures and their stories are reduced in scale, so that the expression of the subject, as Poussin would see it, is as much conveyed by the forms of the landscape as by the narrative figures.
Poussin’s landscape vision was always coloured by a rational and analytical vision, which explains his popularity with modernists, especially with Cezanne. Claude’s vision was less analytical and more purely responsive to the living qualities of nature; in his greatest paintings he seems to evoke an ineffable sense of both human and natural life that is irreducible to any of the physical elements in the painting, just as the most intimate sense of a poem is irreducible to any of its words.
Claude’s oeuvre can be considered the pinnacle of the whole genre of landscape painting; of course it was not the end of the genre, but it is fair to consider the history of landscape in the West as divided into two parts, before and after Claude. His work was inspired by meticulous and exacting studies from nature, but the paintings were put together in the studio, as works of the imagination, like musical compositions. Like all great painters of nature, Claude was concerned primarily with truth; but the truth he was seeking was poetic and perennial.
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