The subject and formation of a landscape in European painting: a view of landscape geographer

Abstract

In the context of landscape science the landscape (paysage) in European painting is not a homogeneous genre. One can distinguish between landscape-decor, landscape-background, landscape-condition, landscape-participant and landscape-as-such. Only the last form of the landscape scenery in painting should be considered as a true landscape. The other forms of painted landscape in one way or another had extraneous art-scene load. In the Middle Ages, painters depicted landscape-participant. It carried an extremely high existential load, which had a basis in the very nature of the medieval world-view that is fundamentally different from modem European one. That is why modem European forms of the landscape in painting as regards the existential and real landscape are conceptually different from the medieval ones. But they also were genetically related to them. Modem European forms of the landscape painting were formed during Early and Northern Renaissance by transformation of the medieval landscape-participant. Landscape-as-such had emerged in the 1470-1490s. The first landscape painters of Europe, who had depicted pure landscape, were Piero della Francesca (1470), Leonardo da Vinci (1473) and Albrecht Dürer (1489). The first masterpieces of landscape-as-such painting in Europe portrayed anthropogenic (including urban) landscapes but not natural scenery.