Renaissance Discoveries: Landscape Painting

Wow, does that make you want to travel to Italy or what? The landscape around Florence is incredibly and famously beautiful and striking, full of gorgeous vistas of sun-bathed vine-clad hills, blue skies, and cypress trees that look like exclamation marks emphasizing the beauty of the scene. And it was within this landscape it's worth considering that the Italian Renaissance took shape in the 1400s. The Renaissance was born, in other words, in a place of uncommon natural beauty. Hello and welcome. I'm Ross King and this is Renaissance Discoveries. And in this video we're going to look at the development of landscape painting in Italy in the 1400s. Now we tend to associate the Italian Renaissance with the human form. There was a turn to human values in the 1400s with man becoming the measure of all things, a tendency I outline in my video on proportion. And in fact the importance of the human figure is expressed in much Renaissance art, in the sculpture of Michelangelo, for example, or in Leonardo da Vinci's Portraits and Drawings, drawings in which he tries to reverse-engineer the human body to figure out how it was put together. But in tandem with this concern for the appearance of the human body was a concern for the appearance and importance of the physical landscape, the countryside, including the countryside outside of Florence. A people such as the Florentines, who were devoted to beauty, could not help but appreciate the glorious scenery of hills, valleys, blue skies and sunshine that surrounded them. And so it's no surprise that the landscape came to feature in some of the pioneering art of the 1400s. And one of the great pioneers of landscape painting in Florence was someone, I'm betting, who you may not have heard of, a painter and jack of all trades, who was the artistic grandfather both of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and who was once hailed as the cause of the Renaissance. So stick around and we'll give him his proper due among the men who created what we call the Renaissance. In so many of these videos we've seen how the Italians of the 1400s took their cultural cues from the ancient Greeks and Romans with civilizations they were in the midst of enthusiastically rediscovering and exploring. Everything from the works of Plato and Quintilian to libraries, classical Latin and pleasure gardens, all of which energized and inspired their own cultural responses to the world around them. It should come as no surprise then that in some ways the Italians of the 1400s discovered the beauties of their landscape and of landscapes in general thanks to the writings of the ancient Romans. It became the fashion in the first century BC for wealthy Romans to have country retreats where they relaxed and distressed amid beautiful scenery. Many ancient Romans praised the countryside as a place of beauty and bounty. One of the most vocal was the poet Virgil who claimed that no other place on earth may rival the glories of Italy. The fields teem with crops, he said, the vines with grapes, the trees with olives. Here spring is perpetual and summer extends to months other than her own. Twice a year the cows calve, twice a year the trees serve us fruit. Here are no ravening tigers or savage brood of lion. Very important if you want to enjoy the countryside. Likewise Virgil's exact contemporary the poet Horace wrote in his poetry for the many delights of the countryside as did the great statesman and writer Cicero, owner of numerous country estates scattered around Italy. This becomes a trope among the ancient Romans, how fruitful their land is, how beautiful the weather, how gorgeous the scenery, how much they wish they could escape from the turmoil of the city into the soulless and simple delights of the countryside. And we should note that the pleasures of the countryside, both in ancient Rome and afterwards, are most enjoyed by city dwellers. An ardent appreciation of the rural landscape depends on urbanization and on a class of people from the city who have the leisure and desire to experience the beauties of the country. Anyway, all of these Roman writings add up to a persuasive advert for the good life in Italy. And this beauty and fruitfulness incidentally explains why, for many centuries, hundreds of thousands of people from north of the Alps, from barbarian places such as Germany and Hungary, where winters were harsher and life not quite so idyllic, would so often try to invade Italy. The beautiful and productive Italian landscape was put into paint by ancient Roman artists such as a guy named Studius, who was a contemporary Virgil. He's a man about whom almost nothing is known apart from the fact that he was the one apparently who pioneered landscape painting on the walls of Roman villas. None of his works has survived and we have only a few descriptions of it. Pliny the Elder, coming along a few decades later, wrote that Studius first introduced the fashion of painting walls with scenes of gardens, groves, fish ponds, rivers, and seascapes. Again, great advert for the good life. But of course, the good life in Italy didn't last. The Roman empire in the west fell in 476 AD and the barbarians, as the Romans called them, arrived from north of the Alps. And the people who succeeded the Romans in Italy, the Christians, didn't put so much emphasis on the beauties of nature. It's revealing, for example, that the Roman gods lived in the natural world, in the landscape. The Romans believed that deities inhabited were responsible for and could be worshipped in the world around them. Sylvanus was the god of the countryside. Eutyrna, the goddess of springs and fountains. Diana, the goddess of the woods and wild animals. And she was worshipped in the grove of Diana Nemerensis, Diana of the Wood, on the shores of Lake Nemi. The Christians, however, were monotheistic. Polytheism and pantheism had no place in their system. And nature was therefore downgraded. Nature was the creation of God, of course, and is such beautiful and valuable. But it was also transient. Our time on earth is fleeting. Our earthly life is simply a brief and difficult interlude that gives us a mere glimpse of the eternal beauties that await us in the afterlife, which is much more important. And so for Christianity, there is no need to dwell on the physical surrounding. For example, in his Confessions, Saint Augustine writes, men go about to wander at the heights of mountains and the mighty waves of the sea and the wide sweep of rivers and the circuit of the ocean and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not. So what's important for Augustine is not the investigation of the natural world, but rather the cultivation of the self and the soul. The message was clear. Seek your treasures and pleasures in heaven and not on earth. So it makes sense that in medieval art we have very little in the way of landscape scenes or settings. Artists did not need to concern themselves with conjuring beautiful and realistic visions of the local countryside. When we do see landscapes, such as in some Byzantine mosaics, like these beautiful ones in the Palatine Chapel in Palermo, painted in the 12th century, we get nothing more than a few formalized trees, hills, and animals. For example, in the flight into Egypt, we see Mary side-saddle on the horse with Joseph striding ahead beside a rather perfunctory stream in which we see some fish. And the mosaics have added a couple of trees, including a date palm. But the ground on which they tread is so notional and unimportant that the chap at the back seems to levitate. There's not really a landscape to anchor and integrate him, only this little assemblages of images through which he floats. More often, the landscape simply did not appear in works of art. Here's an adoration of the Magi, now in the Getty Center in Los Angeles, done around 1400 by a painter, probably in Burgundy at any rate, somewhere in northern Europe. There's obviously no landscape. We just have, as a backdrop, this beautiful red cloth with its shimmering stars. The three wise men have come on their long and arduous journey to Bethlehem, but we see nothing of the landscape through which they've made their way. The star that they followed isn't even in an actual sky. It's on the colored cloth. It's a tapestry star. Now, I hasten to add that does not make works such as these inferior to what's going to follow, because these works are incredibly beautiful in themselves and they did the job for which they were created. But different priorities will emerge, and the natural world begins appearing with a more enthusiastic attention to detail and naturalism. And for these priorities to emerge, there had to be a new concept about what nature was all about. It had to go from being a veil of tears and a place of exile to one of beauty, leisure, and pleasure. And among the first to celebrate the visual world in this way, the first since the ancient Romans, were the troubadours, who sang of the beauty and goodness of nature in much the same way the ancient Roman poets did. For example, here is Bernard de Voltadur writing in the 12th century. When tender leafage doth appear, when vernal meads grow gay with flowers, and I with singing loud and clear, the nightingale fulfills the hours. I joy in him, and joy in every flower. This joy in birds and flowers does make its way into Christianity several decades later through the figure of Saint Francis of Assisi, whose canticle of the sun is a celebration of the natural world. We praise you, Lord, for sister earth, who sustains us with her fruits, colored flowers, and herbs. Now, Saint Francis traveled around Italy through Tuscany and Umbria and down to Rome, so he was well acquainted with the pleasures and pains of the Italian landscape. But a much more inveterate traveler coming along in the next century, that is the 1300s, was Petrarch, someone I discussed at length in one of my other videos. He had an interest in both classical literature and the natural environment, and in some ways the former led him to a deeper appreciation of the latter. He read in his copy of Titus Livius' History of Rome, for example, how Philip V of Macedon, around about 200 BC, climbed a mountain in the Balkans because he'd heard that the Adriatic Sea, the Danube River, and the Alps could all be seen from the top. So Petrarch decided that he too would climb a mountain for the sake of its view, and he climbed Mont Ventoux in southern France. However, the experience was ruined for him because of the fact that he brought along his favorite book, his copy of Saint Augustine's Confessions, and when he got to the top of Ventoux, he opened a page at random, and wouldn't you know it, of all the luck, it turned out to be the one in which Augustine complains about those who go forth and admire lofty mountains. And so poor Petrarch, suitably chastised, closed his book and rejoiced no more in the view. Now, there was a problem with enjoying landscapes during much of the Middle Ages. In one of his poems, Italia Mia, Petrarch describes what he calls the soul-delighting land of Italy, but he deplores its war-ravaged state, the fact that its lands are stained with barbarous blood, i.e. that of the German soldiers who are fighting on Italian soil. They are a backward race, he tells us, and he exhorts, people of Latin blood, free yourself from this harmful burden. This poem reminds us of two things. A, that a landscape is a place of patriotic appeal in which the viewer or the artist has an emotional or sentimental investment, and B, that in order for it to flourish and provide enjoyment, in order for it to provide material for an artist, it must be peaceful. There must be no barbarous Germans running around brandishing their swords. These points are explicitly made around the same time that Petrarch was writing, in this remarkable fresco cycle painted in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in the late 1330s, Ambrogio Lorenzetti's allegory of good and bad government. This is an amazing painting that unfortunately I don't have time to do justice to right now, but its theme is the effects on society of both good and bad government. Here we see the effects of good government in the city, which is clearly Siena, where people, because they're well governed, can trade, can make money, can learn in school, all of which makes them so happy that they're quite literally dancing in the streets. Ambrogio also shows us what happens in the countryside when we have good government, and he depicts the Tuscan landscape around Siena. This panel, The Effects of Good Government on the Countryside, shows us an idyllic and productive landscape in which people can safely travel the roads, and they can work in the fields, bring in the harvest so that people can be fed. So Ambrogio makes an important point. For us to appreciate the landscape, we must have a place of safety from which to enjoy the view, and the view will only be beautiful and appealing if it is peaceful, if ignorant armies are not clashing by night. Virgil celebrated the fact that Italy was free from ravening tigers and savage broods of lions, but he could also have added that the landscape needed to be free from bandits, brigands, and the roaming armies that so troubled Petrarch. So a beautiful and peaceful landscape is a human achievement. It requires the blessings of peace and of civilization, and it requires, as I've said, an urban population who rely on it for relaxation and pleasure, as well as their food. And that's why Lorenzetti's fresco is a matter of intense civic pride and importance. It's in the Civic Hall, after all. It's a painting in a civic setting where it was meant to concentrate the minds of the local politicians on governing their city well. It's possibly no coincidence, therefore, that landscape painting takes off in Italy when a. the countryside is pacified, relatively speaking, there's a large urban population in places such as Florence, Siena, and Pisa, and c. people take pride in the beauty and productivity of their rural possessions, which shows much, as Ambroggio shows, to the efforts of wise and capable politicians. This becomes a trope for the Florentines in the 15th century. Around 1400, the scholar and politician Leonardo Bruni, again a man I discuss in many of these videos, wrote of the countryside around Florence. The very hills seem to smile and to convey a sense of joy. No one could ever tire of such a sight. This whole region could rightly be considered a paradise where beauty and joyful harmony are unparalleled anywhere in the world. Many people in Florence agreed, and Florentine architecture was soon specifically designed, like that of ancient Rome, to take advantage of this beautiful landscape. The architect Leon Battista Alberti wrote in his 1452 treatise on the art of building that a country house should be constructed so as to give its owner views of mountains, of cities, of the sea, or a plain. And this is the view from a building that Alberti helped design, the Villa Medici in Fiesole, just north of Florence. Alberti even advised decorating the walls of the house with paintings, especially landscapes, because he knew from his reading that the ancient Romans had done this. Our minds are delighted in a particular manner with the pictures of pleasant landscapes, he wrote, of flowery fields and thick groves. Alberti was extremely sensitive to the charms of the Italian landscape, and he once claimed that the sight of a field of corn or a grove of beautiful trees could move him to tears. So there's something therapeutic about landscapes, Alberti believed, whether we see the actual countryside through a window or from a balcony, or whether we simply see it painted onto a wall. Incidentally, another great lover of the Italian landscape was a guy named Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, who in 1458 got a very important job. He became Pope, Pope Pius II. Aeneas came from Tuscany and was a passionate champion for its beauties, and we can appreciate his love when we consider that he came from a place called Corsignano, which as Pope he would remodel and rename Pienza, the place that is spectacularly beautiful even by the superlative standards of Tuscany. It's only to be expected that Florentine painters in the 1400s would begin depicting this beautiful and celebrated landscape in their works, not least because their patrons began demanding it. So, for example, Domenico Ghirlandaio was hired in 1485 to execute a fresco cycle in a chapel in Santa Maria Novella, the Tornabuoni Chapel. Domenico's patron, Mr. Tornabuoni, asked for, quote, figures, buildings, castles, cities, mountains, hills, plains, rocks, animals, birds, and beasts of every kind, a full spectrum of landscape views populated by all imaginable creatures, and Domenico was happy to oblige. This is his version of the Adoration of the Magi, in which he satisfied his client's demands for beasts of every kind by featuring a giraffe in the royal entourage. It was based on the Medici giraffe, which was sent to Lorenzo the Magnificent by the Sultan of Egypt in the 1480s, and it caused, understandably, a sensation until it suffered a fatal accident when it banged its head on a roof beam in its stable. There's paint loss in the center of this scene, but we can clearly see what Domenico has done. He's pulled back the red curtain that we saw in the Getty Center Adoration and opened up the back of the painting to show us a landscape view, a landscape that looked suspiciously like Tuscany rather than the Holy Land. But, of course, it doesn't matter that it's Tuscany. Neither Domenico nor virtually anyone who saw the fresco knew what the Holy Land looked like, and his job was to make his landscape convincing, because by the 1400s there was an expectation on the part of patrons and spectators that painted scenes would be convincing, that they would see recognizable buildings and local landscapes depicted on the walls of churches and chapels, making it so that the religious scene would seem to be continuous with their own experience and therefore more emotive and more spiritually uplifting. To make his scene convincing, Domenico had to reach into his bag of tricks. Over the previous century, artists had been given new powers to render the physical world realistically, to increase the powers and possibilities of artistic expression. Now, at this point, I urgently refer you to my video on perspective, in which I discuss how Italian artists developed a series of special effects designed to make their scenes real in order to satisfy this demand for verisimilitude. The greatest and most spectacular of these technological innovations was, as I discuss, perspective. This technique allowed painters to add, quite literally, another dimension to their paintings, a third dimension, to give the illusion that their figures occupied a convincing and believable space, which was often expressed through architecture. Ghirlandaio was a master of perspective, and he gives us ample testimony of his abilities here in the Tornaboni Chapel. But perspective allowed artists not just to create a sort of stage on which their figures could act, but also to punch through the back wall of the painting, so to speak, to give us a view such as we might see through a window. Once the concept of this third dimension develops, once painters remove that back wall, the sky is quite literally the limit, because they soon learn to paint distant views realistically through the perspective of distance, or aerial perspective, or atmospheric perspective, whatever we want to call it, by using different gradients of color, and also by having people, trees, buildings, and hills diminish in proportion to their distance from us. And so we come to the guy who I said was the artistic grandfather of Leonardo and Michelangelo, and that is one Alesso, or Alessio, because he seems to have answered to both, Alesso Baldovinetti. We may not know his name that well, but he taught Ghirlandaio, who taught Michelangelo, and he gave instruction to Andrea del Verrocchio, who taught Leonardo da Vinci, and hence he was a kind of artistic grandfather to both of them. Baldovinetti was born in 1425, so 27 years before Leonardo. He was the son of a wealthy Florentine merchant, but he didn't want to go into business, he wanted to be an artist, and he was soon working with painters such as Fra Angelico. I said earlier that he was a jack of all trades, and he was remarkably versatile, even for a Florentine painter in the 1400s. He painted altarpieces and frescoes, he designed stained glass windows, he painted the wood for scenes done in Tarsia, he illuminated manuscripts, he even designed knobs for bed stands. He probably became most famous, though, for working in mosaics, and he also worked as a restorer of mosaics, including on those in the vault of the Baptistery in Florence. Best of all, Alesso sometimes didn't even charge his lines, but rather offered his services for free for the love of God. Alesso's most remarkable painting is here, in the cloister of the Basilica of Santissima Annunziata in Florence. It's a nativity scene that he painted in the early 1460s. It's badly preserved because it's a fresco that was exposed to the elements, and also because Alesso experimented all the time with his paints, researching new chemical formulas for his pigments, often with disastrous results. But we can still see that what he shows is a manger scene. What really catches our eye, though, is the landscape background, which is identifiable today, as it was in the 1460s, as the Orono Valley. We see the river twisting through the landscape, and the hills receding in the distance beyond the huddles of the buildings and the walled town. To open your painting onto this kind of vista is something very rare and extremely new in Italian art, and I'm sure the first people who saw the painting reacted with the same sort of wonder that we see in the shepherds Alesso shows us. They're actually responding to the miracle of the birth of Christ because this is technically an annunciation to the shepherds, but Alesso gives a kind of visual pun because the shepherds reflect, as I say, our wonder at this panoramic view. Just as an aside, this painting features in the E. M. Forster novel A Room with a View, in one chapter of which the characters set off to try to find this particular view outside of Florence, the exact spot, in other words, from which Alesso painted. They do so unsuccessfully, of course, but they do debate whether he was a cause of the Renaissance or one of its manifestations. If we move forward a couple of years, we come to this work that Alesso also painted, A Madonna and Child Now in the Louvre. We see the Virgin Mary adoring the little Christ Child, who is perched on a ledge with a landscape background, which also shows his first-hand observation of the Arno Valley. Once again, Alesso offers some nice visual puns, since we can see how the river winding through this landscape gives a visual echo of the ribbon wound around the Christ Child, as well as of the tresses and flowing mantle of the Virgin. We'll soon see exactly this sort of echoing done, as well as this same pose, in a much, much more famous painting. Alesso's elevated view of a landscape appears in the next decade in a work by Piero della Francesca, in his double portrait of Federico de Montefeltro and his wife Battista, now in Uffizi. We see the pair of them in profile, each perched above a chunk of their domains, the well-kept Urbino countryside, which owed its peace and prosperity to both the generosity and the military vigor of Federico, who was a famous soldier. Federico is a fascinating character, and for anyone who wants to know more about this one-eyed warlord who burnished his unsavory reputation for massacre and mayhem by commissioning the finest library since antiquity, I urgently refer you to a certain book by a distinguished scholar and mesmerizing storyteller in which Federico takes a prominent place. Around the time that Piero was putting the finishing touches on this painting, a kid from a village outside Florence went for a walk in the country on a public holiday in August and did a spot of sketching. The result was this work, dated August 5th, 1473, and the kid was Leonardo da Vinci. This is his bird's-eye-view drawing of the Arno Valley. What makes it remarkable is the fact that there's really no precedent for it. It's a landscape done for the sake of the landscape alone. There are no human figures. There's just the landscape background, or better, the landscape background has become the subject of the painting. Leonardo would become one of history's great landscape painters, and his work reveals his passion for delineating natural detail, both to enhance the biblical stories his paintings tell, but also for the sake of those natural details themselves, of which he made very assiduous studies. We might not think of the Mona Lisa as a landscape painting, but as the art historian Martin Kemp has shown, the landscape is crucial to the understanding of this masterpiece. First of all, let's notice how Leonardo has adopted the same style of pose as Alesso in his Louvre Madonna and Child, and Piero della Francesca in his Urbino double portrait, that is, a figure seated high above a landscape background. And like Alesso, he initiates a kind of dialogue between the figure and the landscape, expressing and exploring the parallels between the human body and the earth, between the microcosm, Lisa, and the macrocosm, the world of which she is a part. A key text for understanding this painting is something Leonardo wrote in one of his notebooks. By the ancients, man was termed a lesser world, in that man is composed of water, earth, air, and fire. His body is an analogue for the world. He goes on to say that our bones are like rocks, our blood the equivalent of rivers and oceans in the earth, and our breathing is like the tides. As Kemp shows, Leonardo uses his painting of Lisa with his human form set against the geological background to explore the implications of this view, that we are an analogue for the world, that we're a lesser world whose biological features, and even in the case of Lisa, sartorial choices, match the geological ones of our planet. For example, the cascades and rivulets of Lisa's hair and dress match those of the landscape behind her, and the watercourses and cascades in the landscape, which he knew from his topographical studies of the Arno Valley, match the vascular system of the human body that he knew from his various dissections. Leonardo put into this work everything he knew, not only about the landscape, but also about things such as anatomy and geology. This isn't, therefore, just a portrait or landscape, it's a philosophical painting about the world and our place in it. Nature is seen as a powerful force whose patterns and motions are replicated within ourselves, and so the landscape wasn't something extraneous to the painting, it became essential to it. We've come a long way, obviously, from celebrations of bosky woods and babbling brooks. I'll end with Leonardo's exalted claim to the landscape artist as a creator, almost as a kind of god, in a note that he called, the painter is lord of all types of people and things. If the painter wishes to see beauties that charm him, it lies in his power to create them. And if he wishes to produce inhabited regions or deserts, or dark and shady retreats from the heat, or warm places for cold weather, he can do so. If he wants valleys, or likewise, if he wants from high mountaintops to unfold a great plain extending down to the sea's horizon, he is lord to do so. And in the centuries that followed, painters would indeed become lord and master of every kind of scenery, and landscape painting would become, thanks to the men who created what we call the Renaissance, one of the most enduring and beloved genres in art. Thank you, as always, for watching. Please subscribe. Please watch more. And please, if you wish to know a bit more about the great artists of the 1400s, I urgently urge you to read some of my books on the subject, available in your favorite bookshop.