The portrait of nature as a separate subject, for its own sake, began with the development of landscape painting and then gained great popularity in Western Europe in the 19th century. The goal was to depict a scene in such a way that it was regarded as realistic, or even more realistic than it really was.
In Egyptian and Greek art, there are examples of landscape or elements taken from it, like the Nilotic landscape on Papyrus found in Tomb of Menna (c. 1420 BC), or the frescoes of Akrotiri (c. 1500 BC) also with a river theme.
In Roman art this genre began to acquire autonomous character. The Romans painted landscapes for the walls of their houses to decorate them with vivid colors and realistic details, as in the frescoes of Villa of Livia situated in Pompei (before 79 AD), which represents a thriving garden.
In the Christian art of the early Middle Ages there were no examples of autonomous landscape scenes. In Eastern art, gold leaf was used as a background and in Western art landscapes became an unrealistic background. Nature was considered only from a symbolic point of view; landscapes were abstract, flat and lacking in perspective space.
The evolution of the landscape in Chinese painting was a long process. It began during the Han Dynasty, and reached its peak during the Song dynasty, when artists began creating paintings on different materials, from decorative scrolls to actual pieces of art.
The 14th century, in Tuscany the representation of landscape began to become realistic again, influenced by the figure of St. Francis and his poem Il Cantico delle Creature (1224). This poem was an ode to God, in which the Saint praised him for all that he has created, like natural elements, animals, plants, fruits of the earth. This poem was so famous that it.
In the International Gothic style, painted landscapes assumed a fundamental role of showing the work of man and his dominion over nature. The image of the creative activity of God who, at the beginning of Genesis, created the natural reality and the garden of Eden. Medieval landscapes represented life in the cities and work in the countryside, as in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Effects of Good Government in the City (1338-39) and Effects of Good Government in the Countryside (1338-39).
The landscape became an integral part of paintings. It was used by artists as a place for a symbolic language: Piero della Francesca, in the Resurrection of San Sepolcro, (1450-63) communicates Christ's victory over death with the passage between bare trees and flowering trees. The invention of the linear geometric perspective by Filippo Brunelleschi made landscapes closer to the real world, as in the frescoes painted by Masaccio in the Brancacci Chapel (1424-28).
Giorgione's use of perspective in The Tempest is so masterfully executed that it feels like a natural extension of his subject matter. It seems to unfold as if we're looking out from an airplane window, encountering it for the first time. His placement of the interest point leads our eyes from left to right and into each part of the painting in a way that feels dynamic and alive despite being static on paper.
The new art of perspective was developed in the Italian Renaissance. The representation of space and depth by means of overlapping lines, objects, and figures helped create an illusion of three-dimensionality. At the same time, in central and northern Europe such Flemish masters as Jan Van Eyck (Adoration of the Lamb, 1432) or Joachim Patinir (Landscape with Saint Christopher, c. 1520), took a new course in the representation of landscape. They could capture in a minute the details with brilliant colors, using a new invention: oil painting.
In the 16th century, the landscape gradually became the main protagonist of representations. The strict rules of the Counter-Reformation influenced art and condemned its decorative and anti-moral aspects. The great astronomical discoveries changed the vision of man and his relationship with the world, showing his majesty towards nature. Landscape painting exploded and served to show new knowledge even in biblical scenes with less sacred elements depicted on canvas. Adam Elsheimer, painted in The Flight into Egypt (c. 1609), created a first vision of The Milky Way on canvas.
The French artist Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes contributed to the acceptance of landscape painting in European art. In his book Elements de perspective practique, he stressed the aesthetic ideal of the historical landscape, which had to be based on the study of real nature. This is why, in the Netherlands, Frans Hals and Johannes Vermeer painted scenes of everyday life and in Italy Correggio, Titian and Paolo Veronese depicted stories from mythology and religion with a great sense of emotion.
The landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, with their dark trees and skies, as well as the lonely figures of his paintings, express all the senses of Romanticism: from awe and wonder, through melancholy and despair, to religious faith and comfort. They are able to convey a strong emotional message when read through the lens of Romanticism.
When the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, one of its first members was William Turner. Though his watercolors were prized during his lifetime, after his death in 1851, he was forgotten by history. Thanks to a determined group of admirers and scholars, who spent years researching his life and work, Turner is now considered one of England's greatest painters.
The birth of photography and the introduction of synthetic pigments revolutionized painting. The invention of color in a tube meant painters could work en plein air. This revolutionized landscape painting, with landscapes becoming one of the most popular genres. Among Impressionists, such as Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, it was professed directly observing nature and capturing it in fast techniques. Their works opened the way for Post-Impressionist landscape visions of Van Gogh and Cezanne.
Avant-garde movements in the early 20th century sought to break with tradition and technical rules, including that of the landscape. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque would use their paintings as an analysis of the object in question and illustrate all angles from which they observed their subject. The concept of time had also been overcome, and their images were therefore structured and geometric, inspired by Cézanne's work with his studies on objects (Picasso's Houses and Braque's Houses on the hill). Colors were generally not very lively, and perspective was free rather than portrayed directly.
In geometric art, abstract art stepped further away from the representation of objective reality and communicated through elementary shapes and colors. Some artists like Kandinsky and Klee brought out memories of a nature that could be seen among shapes and colors.
Surrealism is a 20th-century art movement in which realistic and fantastical images are combined. With Surrealism, landscape detached itself from what is observable, and became a place of meanings linked to a vision of the world of the unconscious, where everything seems suspended in time, like in Magritte's painting The Domain of Arnheim (1962) or Salvator Dali's Without title. Landscape (1948).
Even within the field of contemporary art, which tends to be highly curated, Land Art is a movement that displays a distinctively different relationship between artist and landscape. Not only does Land Art seek to bring the natural world into its own by making it the star of an artwork, but in some cases also treats the landscape itself as an entity built from construction materials.
