Paintings, therefore, no longer limit themselves to representing places realistically, but become a manifestation of inner feelings, a means of communicating one’s moods and most intimate sensations.
A key word for understanding the approach that artists of the time had towards creation is ‘sublime’, a central concept of the Romantic period, which refers to a strong emotion, a mixture of terror and wonder, felt in the face of nature’s grandeur. Romantic landscapes, therefore, often depict towering mountains, raging rivers, dark forests and storms, which evoke a sense of the infinite and of mystery.
The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog that the painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) painted in 1818, now in the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, fully expresses this concept: the protagonist is a man contemplating nature, alone before its grandeur, which conveys to us a sense of melancholy and poignant beauty.
In contrast to this introspective strand, the Realist movement, which spread around the middle of the nineteenth century, concentrated on the objective and accurate description of places, often portraying the social aspects and living conditions of the people who inhabited them. An example is Shepherdess with Her Flock by Jean-François Millet (1814-1875), painted in 1864 and now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
The Impressionist landscape
With the advent of the Impressionist movement, which developed mainly in France during the 1870s and 1880s, the representation of landscape underwent a further transformation. The Impressionists sought, in fact, to capture the effect of light and colour in a spontaneous and immediate way, through rapid brushstrokes and contrasts of light, painting for the first time not in the studio but in the open air (en plein air).
Claude Monet (1840-1926), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919) and Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) are some of the most celebrated exponents of this movement, capable of representing the beauty and dynamism of nature through direct observation of its variations of light and colour.
They had an enormous impact on the way landscape was subsequently represented, revolutionising the artistic conventions of the time and rebelling against the tradition of academic art. The Impressionist technique, seeing nature as a dynamic subject in motion, contributed, in fact, to giving landscapes an idea of vitality and spontaneity.
An example of this is the numerous paintings, now scattered in museums around the world, that Monet made in his Japanese garden at Giverny, in France, capturing the play of light in the water-lily ponds and the flowering flowerbeds.
Landscape seen through the eyes of the historical avant-gardes
The twentieth century was, without doubt, a frenetic century, which broke with the past and projected the world into the contemporary age; several artistic movements, defined by critics as the ‘historical avant-gardes’, also moved beyond the nineteenth-century tradition to project themselves towards tomorrow.
Cubism, for example, was a movement of rupture, promoted by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) and Georges Braque (1882-1963), which revolutionised the representation of landscape, introducing a geometric and fragmented vision of reality. Cubist works express a multiple and simultaneous perspective, showing different points of view at the same time. This innovative style offers a dynamic and complex depiction of landscape, breaking with the traditional idea of the stasis of nature.
In Cubist art, forms are broken down into a combination of complex geometries, such as cubes, prisms and cones. Natural elements, such as mountains, rivers and trees, are represented through lines that overlap and intersect, allowing artists to capture the essence of the landscape and convey an abstract vision of it. An iconic example of a Cubist landscape is Houses at L’Estaque by Georges Braque, made in 1908 and held in the Kunstmuseum in Bern.
If Cubism sought to grasp reality in its substance, offering a 360-degree vision of it, Surrealism, a movement born in the 1920s, which took an interest in irrationality, the unconscious and dreams, created entirely imaginary and fanciful landscapes, the fruit of impulses and suggestions arising from our most secret self. Salvador Dalí (1904-1989) was one of the leading exponents of this trend: in The Persistence of Memory (now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York), the landscape merges with surreal and dreamlike elements such as the famous soft watches.
The genre has, therefore, passed through several phases over the centuries, evolving together with art itself, and giving rise to new forms of representation that continue to fascinate and inspire contemporary artists too, whose research, of a more experimental nature, explores and reinterprets the genre in ways never seen before, with works that also carry a social value. Landscape has, in fact, often become a means of raising awareness of sustainability, of the consequences of human action on the planet, and of the need to rediscover harmony with nature, thus constituting, even today, a source of reflection and introspection.
