The genre of fine art, the main theme of which is a living or created environment by a person, became independent later than the others - story, still life or animalistic.
Views of the landscape began to develop with renewed vigor when artists got the opportunity to work in the open air.
Definition
The French word "paysage" ("pays" - "country", "locality") is similar in meaning to the German "Landschaft" and the English "landscape". All of them denote the spatial environment surrounding a person in the open air. This environment may consist of elements of natural origin (relief, vegetation, water bodies, air atmosphere) created or transformed by humans (roads, buildings, farmland, power lines , etc.).
The word “landscape” has several meanings: it’s just what the human eye stops outside, a description of nature in a literary work, an image of the environment by means of visual art. Almost every work of art contains various types of landscapes. Photos, cinema, video, computer graphics and, of course, painting are involved in the display of the world.
Variety of topics
Every true artist has his own view of the environment. To help understand this diversity, it is customary to distinguish some types of landscape. For preschoolers, high school students, students and art lovers of any age, there are gradations of landscape paintings depending on the nature of nature and its nature.
There are natural, rural and urban landscape views in the painting. Each of them has varieties and features. The character of the landscape is historical and heroic, epic, romantic and mood landscape.
Natural landscape
Back in the Middle Ages, the image of nature was schematic and planar. It was auxiliary in nature to complement religious, mythological, or historical compositions. But starting from the Renaissance, paintings began to appear on which plots or figures of people were not used to express feelings and emotions, the main characters in them were land, forests, sky, sea in different states.
One of the founders of the genre of "clean landscape" is a German engraver, draftsman and painter Albrecht Altdorfer (1480-1538). For the first time on mythological canvases, the figures of heroes were often hardly distinguishable against the backdrop of a grandiose image of the natural environment.
Marina - a picture about the sea
In the natural landscape, a special place is occupied by images of the aquatic environment, which has always attracted the attention of artists. Views of the landscape associated with shipping, and marine painting (marina - a picture of a marine theme) were born in countries where shipbuilding was a common thing - in Holland, England, etc.
At first, the sea was an integral part of the image of ships and water battles, but then the expressiveness and powerful beauty of the elements, its elusive variability began to captivate painters themselves. The real peak of world significance is the work of the Russian artist-marine painter I.K. Aivazovsky (1817-1900).
The image of celestial spaces, planets and stars is also attributed to the natural landscape. Views of the landscape, called cosmic or astral, have always been a genre of fantastic or futuristic art, with the beginning of regular space flights such paintings are more realistic.
Rural landscape
Since idyllic paintings from the life of shepherds and shepherdesses of the Rococo era, the rural landscape has always occupied an important place in pictorial art.
The proximity to nature, the harmony of life on earth, peasant labor were the topic for many outstanding masters of different eras, such as Peter Bruegel (1525-1569), Nicola Poussin (1594-1665),
Camille Corot (1796-1875), Francois Millet ( 1814-1875).
Russian painting has been a rustic theme since the time of A.G. Venetsianov (1780-1847). Brilliant Russian artists have examples of the highest peaks in the rural landscape: I. I. Levitan (1860-1900), A. K. Savrasov (1830-1897), V. D. Polenov (1844-1927), A. A. Plastov (1893-1972). The special poetry of rural life surrounded by Russian nature inspires contemporary artists.
City landscape
In the 17th century, a genre in painting under the name “veduta” (“veduta” (Italian) - “view”) became very popular in Europe. These were paintings, views of the landscape, the essence of which is a topographically accurate and detailed image of city buildings, streets and entire neighborhoods. To write them, a pinhole camera was used - a device for obtaining an accurate optical image on the plane. The best examples of this genre are photographically accurate architectural cityscape. Views of Venice and London of the XVIII century are represented in the paintings of A. Canaletto (1697-1768), the skill of J. Vermeer (1632-1675) in the painting "View of Delft" is amazing.
The architectural landscape shows the value of buildings as works of architecture, their relationship with each other and with the entire environment. A special kind of such a landscape is fantasy compositions born of the artist’s imagination. At one time, “ruins” were very popular - views of the landscape from ancient ruins, giving rise to thoughts about the perishability of being.
You can also highlight the futurological, fantastic landscape - the types of cities of the future, the image of which changes with the passage of time depending on progress, the achievements of science and technology.
Another variety of the urban landscape is the industrial landscape, depicting the nature that is most transformed by man. The main theme of such paintings is the aesthetic impression of buildings, dams, bridges, towers, roads, transportation networks, factories and factories, etc. Among the first significant works of the industrial landscape, one can mention the picture of Claude Monet (1840-1926) “Station Saint-Lazare ".
Allocate in a separate category and park landscape. Similar in theme to rural or purely natural, geographically it refers to urban.
Styles of landscape painting
A work of art is always a creative understanding of the world, and the landscape of a real artist is not just a reality-like image, but an image of the surrounding natural or urban environment, the impression of it expressed by a creative person. Such an understanding very often determines the style characteristic of both an individual person and entire communities connected by one place and one time.
The historical belonging of the master to a certain style in landscape painting is especially noticeable. “Landscape with a Rainbow” by P.P. Rubens (1577-1640) - a masterpiece of the Baroque era and the painting of the same name by Konstantin Somov (1869-1939) are similar in plot. They are full of the same admiration from the outside world, but by what different means these feelings are transmitted!
Impressionist creativity has had a special impact on this genre. All types of landscape - natural, urban, rural - with the advent of the opportunity to work in the open air have undergone dramatic changes. Trying to express the momentary changes and the smallest nuances of light, using the new free painting technique, the impressionists opened new horizons in the landscape genre. After the masterpieces of Claude Monet (1840-1926), Camille Pissarro (1830-1903), Alfred Sisley (1839-1999) and many other impressionists, it became impossible to look at the world with old eyes, not noticing its beauty, not seeing the richness of its shades.
Eternal source of inspiration
Nature has always been the main source of new feelings and impressions for a true artist. Our distant ancestors tried to draw a sunrise on the cave wall with a piece of dried clay, landscape views for preschoolers today are photographs of Mars transmitted from its surface by a spacecraft. The feeling of surprise from the infinity of the world, from the joy of life, remains common.