SCENERY

SCENERY
A word with French etymology (“paysage”), in a broad, everyday sense meaning scenery, view, while in a narrower sense – a genre of visual arts, mainly painting, including images of views of nature. Landscape.

Scenery understood as a genre of the visual arts can have an urban (veduta), maritime (marina) character, it can also show views of the countryside or wild nature. In a landscape human figures (staffage) play a small role (they appear as figures in the landscape). The scenery can be maintained in a realistic and fantastic convention, or it can be stylised in reference to the idyllic tradition or such aesthetic categories as the picturesque or the sublime.

Kenneth Clark identifies four types of landscape: symbolic, factual, fantastic and ideal. He places the birth of the ideal landscape at the end of the Middle Ages, noticing its close affinity with the symbolic landscape. For both types the inspiration came from the dream of paradise on earth and both focused on the issue of Arcadian harmony between humans and nature. Clark discusses the basic assumptions of the ideal landscape using the example of 17th-century painting, comparing it with the factual landscape characteristic for northern Europe. The researcher noted that the factual landscape, which was developing vigorously in the Renaissance, at the turn of the 18th century transformed into a topographical model, and the aesthetic category of the picturesque became the most characteristic of the fantastic landscape. From this point of view, the development of landscape painting and its subsequent stages can be considered as elements of a process in which the discovery and study of landscape turned into its glorification, which in turn is a manifestation of a more general tendency to aestheticise nature.

The birth and rapid development of European landscape painting (Białostocki, Gombrich) coincided with the discovery of the beauty of nature and landscape in the 15th century (Burckhardt, Białostocki), Renaissance art flourished, the linear (Alberti) and air perspective (Leonardo da Vinci) were invented. Since the 16th century, there have been differences between the Italian landscape, more conventionalised (in the Arcadian, heroic, idyllic type), which in the 17th century influenced French landscape painting, and the Northern European landscape (especially Dutch), which had a descriptive and realistic character (Alpers). Alpers, characterising the differences between the Italian and Dutch landscapes, points out that the Italian landscape gives a sense of depth and the Dutch landscape represents a flat landscape; in the Italian landscape the view is captured in imaginary frames (Alberti’s “window”), in the Dutch version visual experience transcends frames, suggesting that it is a fragment of reality. As a consequence, two types of gaze have coexisted in the art of European landscape since the 17th century: panoramic (perspective, Italian type) and topographic (Dutch type). Since the 17th century, the landscape has functioned as an independent painting genre, mainly due to Dutch painters. The landscape painting developed intensively during the Romantic period. Two new varieties of this genre were created: mystical (Friedrich) and realistic (Turner, Constable). At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, influenced by romantic aesthetics, the romantic landscape emerged, showing nature in a poetic way. From the first half of the 19th century the realistic landscape (the Barbizonian school) started to develop: painters practicing this type of landscape worked in the open air. This tradition was continued by the impressionists, who made the landscape (urban and non-urban) one of the main motifs of their work. Although the works of this genre were also created by artists in the 20th century (and still are today), with the advent of the avant-garde, the painting landscape has lost much of its significance.

The aesthetic category of the picturesque has contributed to the development of the landscape, which has consolidated the perception of the landscape as worthy (or not) of painting. The interpretation of picturesqueness as an aesthetic category was presented by William Gilpin, who mentioned chiaroscuro effects, diversity and irregularity emphasising the dramaturgy of nature as desirable features of the landscape. The landscape was picturesque in as much as it pleased the eye and was worth immortalising it on canvas (Claude Lorrain’s work was a model of picturesqueness). This understanding of landscape is closely linked to the creation of a new style in landscape gardening: landscape parks.

In the 18th century, the idea of scenery also contributed to the development of tourism, when trips began to be taken in search of picturesque views. The heir to this tradition is the contemporary concept of viewpoints materialising the “tourist’s gaze”. (Urry).

[B. F., M. G.].

Literature:

Alpers, Svetlana. The Art of Describing. Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984.

Białostocki, Jan. Narodziny nowożytnego krajobrazu. In: Krajobrazy. Antologia tekstów, ed. Beata Frydryczak, Dorota Angutek. Poznań: Wydawnictwo PTPN, 2014.

Clark, Kenneth. Landscape into Art. London: John Murray, 1952.

Frydryczak, Beata. Krajobraz. Od estetyki the picturesque do doświadczenia topograficznego. Poznań: Wydawnictwo PTPN, 2013.

Gombrich, Ernst H. The Renaissance Theory and the Rise of Landscape. In: Norm and Form, New York and London: Phaidon Press, 1985.

Jackson, John. B. The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.

Ritter, John. Landschaft: zur Funktion des Ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft, Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 1963.

Shepard, Paul. Man in the Landscape. A History of the Esthetics of Nature. Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2002.

Simmel, Georg. Philosophie der Landschaft. In: Brücke und Tor. Stuttgart, 1957.