It was once common to distinguish between two kinds of landscape. One was wild and full of surprises, and lent itself especially well to painting. The other, lacking in such effects, made up for them in its fertility and abundance. Although not considered suited to painting, it did at least afford excellent places in which to live. Paolo Pino, for one, presented this view in a treatise on painting published in Venice in 1548:
The northerners show a special gift for painting landscapes because they portray the scenery of their own homeland, which offers more suitable motifs by virtue of its wildness, while we Italians live in the garden of the world, whichis more delightful to behold in reality than in painting.
The distinction between beauty and delight, between art and experience, was hardly a natural one. Why should places that are more deserving of our admiration be assumed to be too remote and strange for human life? Or indeed why, conversely,
should places where life is pleasant be deemed not beautiful enough to merit painting? In a few words Pino defined the situation preceding the gradual transformation in landscape painting over the next 250 years: the transformation from a cosmic landscape representing God’s creation in its diversity and completeness to a personalised landscape in which the artist transcribes a deeply felt experience.
The pivotal flgure in this development was Claude Lorrain, a man born in 1600 or 1604 in the relative wilderness of northeastern France (Lorraine, from which he takes his name). Having elected to live in Italy, first in Naples and then in Rome (where he died, in 1682), Claude was among the first to recognise the pictorial virtues of the garden of the world. In his painting Mercury Stealing the Herds of Admetus from Apollo the atmosphere is instantly affecting. The shade seems
delightfully cool, and the air exceptionally calm. The mood, to which a few lines from Ovid offer a kind of decorative pretext, is one of distraction. ‘We feel sympathy neither for Apollo’s lovesickness for a nymph nor for the loss of the cow in his care. If we rush after the angel-like figure of Mercury, it is not in the hope that someone might retrieve the stolen herds, but that he may guide our eyes to the landscape’s distant shore. Claude’s figures exist in and for the landscape, a landscape that, in a diffuse sense, was a recollection of the artist’s own experience.
Irénée Scalbert, A Real Living Contact with the Things Themselves (2004)
Claude Lorrain, Mercury Stealing the Herds of Admetus from Apollo (1660)
landscape theory 