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Romantic Landscape
The Invention of Landscape
Romantic conceptions of landscape were profoundly shaped by 18th century aesthetic debates that had their roots in artistic developments that began in the early 16th century.
There were important precursors in the 15th century Renaissance art of Flanders and Italy, but the first painter understood to have produced fully autonomous landscapes in the Western tradition was the Regensburg-based artist Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538). In the years around 1520, he produced two views of the area around the Danube in eastern Bavaria: Danube Landscape (1520-1525, Alte Pinkakothek, Munich) and Landscape with a Footbridge (1520, National Gallery, London).
Rubens and Reynolds
The work of Altdorfer and other German Renaissance artists such as Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) exerted a great influence in the areas north of the Alps and the term "landscape," derived from the Dutch landschap, entered the English language in the early 17th century. It became a critical element of the “Grand Manner” advocated by Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) and the Royal Academy of Art a century later.
The paintings the Antwerp-born artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) made around his country estate Het Steen in the 1630s had the most lasting impact on British landscape painting and Reynolds himself once owned Landscape by Moonlight (1635-1640). He used it as an example in his Royal Academy lectures from 1769 on (as well as in the published version, Discourses on Art [1]), and it provided a critical model for paintings of the Romantic era such as John Constable’s The Hay Wain (1821, National Gallery, London).
Claude Lorrain
Reynolds's Grand Manner fused the approach to topographical precision introduced by Altdorfer, Dürer, and painters from Dutch-speaking areas with an idealization epitomized by the art of 17th century France. The emphasis on rationalized order manifested itself in both the balanced Arcadian landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain (1600-1682) and the physical gardens designed by André Le Nôtre during the long reign of King Louis XIV (1643-1715).
Claude’s paintings, produced largely in and around Rome, are remarkable in their focus on the atmospheric and emotional effects of shifting qualities of light as well as the use of both natural features and human figures primarily as compositional elements. These figures were treated as “staffage” and Claude also used natural elements such as trees, shrubbery, or rocks as framing devices, turning the left or right portion of the foreground into a "coulisse" (like the wings of a theater stage).
In this way, Claude was able to create harmonized compositions that draw the viewer’s eye gracefully into the distance.
André Le Nôtre
By comparison, the structuring of physical space in the gardens Le Nôtre’s created first at the Château de Vaux-le-Vicomte (1661) and then even more grandly at Versailles (1681-1685) was more overtly theatrical and predicated upon a proto-cinematic play with optical illusion. While ambling along the demarcated paths, the viewer simultaneously takes in a series of shifting vistas and becomes part of the larger landscape design.
After passing a series of carefully positioned reflecting pools, the paths culminate in fountains and panoramic vantage points, from which the nobility and grandeur of the overall orchestration of landscape can be taken in.
Barry Lyndon
The best cinematic articulation of these ideas is in Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick, 1975). Combining aspects of formal garden design with the Claudian idea of perfectly balanced landscape, Kubrick merges several actual spaces into a composite cinematic illusion that filters the eighteenth century through its own artifice. The sequence begins with a view of Dunrobin Castle (Sutherland, Scotland), moves into the Italian style formal garden at Compton Acres in Dorset, and ends with a view of the lake constructed at the Palace of Blenheim (Woodstock, Oxfordshire) by English designer Lancelot “Capability” Brown between 1763 and 1773.
By linking the cinematic conventions of optical point-of-view with the characteristically 1970s formal device of the zoom lens (which slowly collapses planes together), Kubrick draws attention throughout to the relationships between presentation, perception, position, and power that were central to both the 18th century past depicted in the film and the period in which the film was made. This exploration of layered illusionism is deepened by the anachronistic use of the Franz Schubert’s Romantic music Piano Trio in E-Flat, Op. 100 (1827), which draws out the deep wells of emotion lying beneath the placidly refined surfaces.
The Sublime
During the mid-late 18th century period depicted in Barry Lyndon, landscape became central to debates about the nature of beauty, the universality of critical assessment, and the implications and significance of judgment, sensation, and subjective perception. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) [2], Edmund Burke (1729-1797) established some of the terms of the debate, distinguishing between the beautiful and the sublime. Beautiful landscapes, such as those of Claude Lorrain, encourage admiration by summoning up familiar experiences and the pleasure of recognition. The sublime, by contrast, excites the mind to outrun its own capacities. As Burke put it, “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling” (86). In Critique of Judgment (1790), the so-called “third critique,” German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) similarly emphasized the interior aspect of the sublime, using the term to describe the encounter with something the mind cannot fit within its recognized limits.
In between the beautiful and the sublime lies a third category called “picturesque,” after the Italian word pittoresco. 18th century advocates like William Gilpin (1724-1804) praised the irregular, asymmetrical, and rough arguing in "On Picturesque Beauty" (1792) that these elements would register as distinctively painterly: “Disputes about beauty might perhaps be involved in less confusion, if a distinction were established, which certainly exists, between such objects as are beautiful, and such as are picturesque – between those, which please the eye in their natural state; and those, which please from some quality, capable of being illustrated by painting."
Early Cinema
Paintings like Constable’s The Hay Wain reflect the influence of both Claudian idealization and the painterly “picturesque.” This had a pronounced impact on the treatment of landscape in many early narrative films.
D. W. Griffith’s The Country Doctor (1909), for example, elegantly begins with a left-to-right panning movement and ends with its exact opposite, elegantly linking the landscape to the human characters and situating their emotional travails in a deeper context.
Landscape and Cinema
Other painters, such as Constable’s contemporary J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), focused instead on evocations of the sublime through stark contrasts of scale and the dramatic use of natural elements to blur or dissolve traditional horizon and boundary lines. The St. Gotthard Pass in Switzerland was often the most dramatic and difficult part of the Grand Tour of Continental Europe taken by many upper-class young men from the 17th century.
Turner's treatment owes much to the work of pioneering Swiss landscape artist Caspar Wolf (1735-1783)
Landscape and Early Swedish Cinema
The filmmaker most associated with the natural sublime and with landscapes such as those painted by Turner and Wolf was Victor Sjöström, whose poetic and bold treatment of the peaks and waterfalls of Scandinavia catapaulted Swedish cinema to international prominence during and just after World War I.
Like his contemporary Mauritz Stiller, Sjöström brought his ideas and approach to Hollywood in the 1920s, but his influence can also be felt in the Breton films Jean Epstein made from the 1920s to the 1940s and, of course, in the work of his successor Ingmar Bergman.