Saylor.org ARTH207: "Claude Lorrain's Landscapes"

This lecture is entitled Claude Lorraine's Landscapes, or is there a point to all this beauty? Now Claude Lorraine, who you see over here on the left, is often just called Claude. Lorraine refers to the place in France that he called home, or that was his home before he went to Italy. Now he was a contemporary of Nicolas Poussin, who we studied in the previous subunit, and you might remember that Poussin was also a Frenchman who spent most of his life in Italy, so important to keep that in mind. There's sort of a trend here with some of these French artists we're looking at. Now, like Poussin, he spent a great deal of time in Italy, and he was very influenced by the work of Italian artists that he saw in Italy, but he was also very influenced by the Italian countryside, the countryside around Rome, and he used what he saw as inspiration in his landscapes, and you see two of his landscapes on the right side of the screen here. And he's known for these really lush, sumptuous, beautiful landscapes with this soft light and almost an impossible perfection. So, and just to introduce you to what these are, we're going to look at them a little bit later, but this image here is Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, and it dates to 1663. And over here on the right is an image known simply as Pastoral Landscape, and it dates to 1648. And I think you can see just right off the bat, they are these really idealized, beautiful landscapes, and there are certainly details within them of people and buildings, but mainly they are landscapes. Now, before we take a close look at these paintings, I want to take a look at some of the other artists of the time to provide some context and understand what Claude's unique role was in the Baroque. So here on the left, we have Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, which I, which we just looked at above. So it's Landscape, Landscape with the Flight into Egypt. And it dates to 1663. And on the right is an image we've already looked at in this course, and hopefully this is familiar to you. This is Jacob van Ruystel's View of Harlem, which dates to around 1670. Now, hopefully you remember that Ruystel was a very successful landscape artist, and he was working in the Dutch Republic, in a Protestant culture. And he was a really important figure in advancing landscape painting, but it's important to remember that he was working in a very different cultural context. You should hopefully remember that in Protestant countries, genre paintings were more popular, more common, more accepted. And remember that the Dutch Republic was Protestant. So this is Protestant. Culture. Whereas Claude was working in a Catholic context. And in Catholic cultures, paintings were still expected to have a little bit more grandeur in them. And what I mean by that is you often see noble paintings depicting historical events, usually from the classical world or from the Bible. And of course, there are a lot of religious paintings commissioned in Catholic cultures. So the fact that Claude was able to paint a lot of landscape paintings and to make them very successful and popular in this context is important, because he was working against a little bit more of a hurdle there than Ruystel was in this Protestant context. Interestingly, he does kind of insert little stories, and that is Claude I'm talking about, into his landscapes almost as a way of justifying the rest of the landscape. So this is landscape with a flight into Egypt, and that's exactly what we see within this circled area here. And the flight into Egypt was a biblical story, a story of the Holy Family fleeing King Herod, who had ordered all babies to be murdered because he had heard a young king was born. So this is the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt, but essentially this is just a landscape painting. You can't really see this little detail in here. You might not notice it right away. So that's a major difference between these two paintings, right? In Jacob van Ruystel's painting on the right, we have an image of a place. This is clearly identifiable as Harlem. Sorry, that's right. If you were from this place in the 17th century, you would see this and know what you were seeing. Whereas with Claude, it's a little unclear. This seems more like a fantasy world, not necessarily an immediately recognizable place. Landscapes really can do and say a lot of different things, and I just kind of want to show you a few images to hit that point home. So like Jacob van Ruystel's painting, and again, this is view of Harlem over here, which we already looked at. Images can tell you about place. They can say, I am a photo, I am a picture of an identifiable place that is real and you know about. Much like this photograph here on the right, if you're familiar with the geography of the United States, you might immediately say, oh, that looks like the American Southwest. Or if you're even local to the area, you might know this is Utah. Landscapes can also be something of a background. And on the left here, we have Nicolas Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego, which and again, we looked at Poussin already. And that's much like this image on the right, which is a photograph of the Vietnam War, and it's a violent image. Now both of these have a story going on, and the landscape kind of serves as the background. It certainly helps add to this story. We know, you know, where the story is taking place, but really the main point of these images is what's going on, right? We have violence and war, in this image on the right, and in Nicolas Poussin's painting, a story of these shepherds encountering a sarcophagus in this beautiful place in Arcadia. So that's another way landscapes can work. Now with Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego in mind, and that's again what we see here on the left, Et in Arcadia Ego versus Claude's pastoral landscape. Now, I mentioned already that these two artists are contemporaries. They're both French, they're both working in Italy, and they both do pay a lot of attention to landscape in their paintings. But I think you would agree, if you just take a moment and look at these two, that there's some very different different things going on in these paintings. For one thing, there's figures front and center in Poussin's painting. And as I mentioned when we just looked at the example above, this is really a story here. We have shepherds who've come across the sarcophagus with the inscription Et in Arcadia Ego, which means I too am in Arcadia. And this is often viewed as a meditation on death, right? Even this image of death, this sarcophagus, intrudes into the peaceful and idealized world of Arcadia. So this is kind of a meditation on a very specific idea. Whereas in Claude's painting, there are figures over here, probably shepherds, right? We have some animals, but there isn't necessarily a clear story or narrative to focus on. And really this is pure landscape. Our attention is drawn into the details of of nature, right? And our eye is drawn kind of back into this deep landscape. And indeed, Poussin is often called an intellectual painter, or you hear scholars call him stoic. Whereas there seems to be a greater level of emotion in Claude's painting. Both artists are clearly influenced by classicism. But again, there's more emotion and a meditative quality in Claude's painting here on the right. And indeed the style is different too. Notice the softness of the light in Claude's painting. You can really see the way it illuminates the landscape. And really the landscape is front and center here. There's more attention to color in Claude's, whereas it's more about line in Poussin's. And really, I think this boils down to an interest in mood in Claude, versus narrative and ideals in Poussin. And to me, Claude's painting evokes a timelessness, a sort of perfection. And indeed, there is sort of a perfection of already beautiful nature in Claude's painting. And really it's a meditation on beauty. And this golden age of classicism and a desire to return to that kind of perfection. So back to my question, is there a point to all this beauty? Well, I think in this seemingly straightforward landscape, there is really a wealth of very deep and lofty ideas that you can meditate on. And yeah, maybe beauty is sort of the point too.