LANDSCAPE PAINTING. Landscape art began when artists sought to give a slight expression of background in their works of men and animals. As used by the earliest artists it is very simple : a mere line expresses a horizon; a few lines express foreground and distance. In Indian and Persian prints a few leaves represent the near location of a tree. The best of the early attempts to express landscape are by Chinese artists upon silk. These artists are unknown but experts form some idea of their antiquity, the earliest recorded being about A.D. 300. They ex pressed space and distance painted exquisitely in decorative com position. A few fine examples are "The Ten Horses" by Pei Kuan owned by the Metropolitan Museum; four paintings of the life of Wen-Chi, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; "The Earthly Paradise," in the British Museum and Ma Yuan's land scape roll in the Freer collection in Washington. Fine examples of wall decoration discovered at Boscoreal and Pompeii have an air of landscape art. (See ROMAN ART; CHINESE PAINTING.) A further development of landscape painting is seen in the illuminated manuscripts (q.v.), with landscapes sometimes painted in the large beautifully decorated initials and in the line drawings for the masterly engravings and etchings that appeared in Europe with the development of the printing press, and in the backgrounds of the Italian primitives where the representation of rocks, hills, plains and skies appear. There are also the rich and beautiful landscapes in the Books of Hours, the miniatures from the "Hours of Turin" by Hubert Van Eyck (destroyed by fire in 1903), the landscape backgrounds of Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, and the landscapes in the famous paintings of Albert Ouwater. In depicting scenes from the stories in the Testaments the artists of the early Renaissance enhanced and amplified these stories by endeavouring to place the characters in an imaginative landscape. Their archaisms lent them a peculiar decorative effect. The close adherence of students to the art conventions of their particular masters caused them to neglect painting from nature, although Michelangelo's master, Ghirlandajo, painted views of Florence in his frescoes of S. Trinita, Florence, and Leonardo da Vinci was an ardent student of nature.
The modern development of landscape painting may be said to have originated in Italy in the 15th century. One of the first artists to depart from the control of older conventions was Giovanni di Paolo. In the first and second of his six panels of the story of St. John, the figures are small and the landscape of the external world large in the scheme of composition, making a vivid representation that St. John encountered a physical earth and may have been affected by his impressions of it. Mathias Grunewald's polyptych (1510) known as the altarpiece of Isen heim, composed of several pictures with various backgrounds, is an impressive composition with a landscape effect which is an integral part of the expression of his idea. Jerome Bosch at the dawn of the 16th century conceived an inspired landscape of the Campinoise plains, in which there is a distinct atmosphere of the fantastic equally in its elements and in the figure subjects. Earlier than either of the foregoing is Conrad Witz's picture dated 1444 in the museum at Geneva, representing the Apostles fishing on the Lake of Geneva with Mt. Blanc in the background.
The landscape backgrounds of Titian's paintings are those which so much inspired later painters of landscape. They are reminiscent of the Cadore country where he spent his boyhood and of the views of the plains of Treviso with the far distant mountains to be seen from the window of his studio in Venice. In the work of the foregoing artists, however, landscape appears only as a background or accessory. The earliest detached land scapes are said to have been done by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, about 1338, on the wall of the Papazzo Pubblico at Siena. Even his fresco, however, is peopled with figures and can hardly be called "pure" landscape. Paul Bril (1554-1626), born at Antwerp, settled at Rome where he developed under the influence of A. Caracci and A. Elsheimer (who was a pioneer in landscape paint ing). He designsd classic frescoes for Pope Clement VIII., in which he used landscape as his sole theme. His influence dis turbed the ordered calm of the conventional art world and ush ered in the Franco-Roman school. It was Bril's pupil Tassi, who taught Claude.