13TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)MAKING CONNECTIONS
13(see Figures 14.15 and 14.16). By the thirteenth century,
the Chinese landscape had overtaken figure painting in
popularity. The genre soon spread to Japan and other parts
of East Asia. Typically vast and sweeping, Chinese land-
scapes achieve a cosmic unity of air, earth, and water that
dwarfs the human figure (see Figure 27.6). Such landscapes
are not literal imitations of reality, but expressions of a
benign natural harmony. Executed in monochrome ink on
silk, bamboo, or paper scrolls, they were intended as
sources of personal pleasure and private retreat. Whether
vertical or horizontal in format, they are “read” from a
number of viewpoints, rather than from a single vantage
point. In all of these features, Chinese landscapes differ
from those of European artists.
In Europe, it was not until the Renaissance—among such
painters as Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, and Brueghel—that the
natural landscape became a subject in its own right. Most
Renaissance landscapes were visual records of a specific time
and place (see Figure 19.12). During the seventeenth century,
French academic painters cultivated the ideal landscape, a
genre in which nature became the stage for mythological and
biblical subjects (see Figure 21.14). The composition was con-
ceived in the studio; key motifs, such as a foreground tree or a
meandering road (often drawn from nature), were then incor-
porated into the design. Seventeenth-century Dutch masters,
on the other hand, rejected the ideal landscape: Vermeer and
Rembrandt rendered empirically precise views of the physical
world as perceived by the human eye (see Figure 23.10).Chinese landscape paintings generally achieve a sweeping unity of air,
earth, and water that dwarfs the human figure. In one typically Chinese ink-
on-paper album leaf, the artist Shen Zhou (1427–1509) pictures a solitary
figure (possibly himself) atop a rugged cliff, overlooking a vast natural
expanse (Figure 27. 6 ). To the painting, he has added these lines:
White clouds encircle the waist of the hills like a belt;
A stony ledge soars into the world, a narrow path into space.
Alone, I lean on my thornwood staff and gaze calmly into the distance,
About to play my flute in reply to the song of this mountain stream.
The paintings of the nineteenth-century German artist Caspar David
Friedrich (1774–1840), while not directly influenced by Chinese art, share
some of its basic features. Friedrich’s views of wintry graveyards and
Gothic ruins usually show distant figures contemplating (with what the
artist called “our spiritual eye”) the mysteries of time and nature. In one of
Friedrich’s most notable paintings,
two men stand at the brink of a
steep cliff, overlooking an unseen
valley (Figure 27. 7 ). A craggy,
half-uprooted tree is silhouetted
against the glowing, moonlit sky.
Somber colors enhance a mood
of poetic loneliness. While Shen
Zhou’s cosmic vista makes nature
itself the subject matter, Friedrich’s
landscape—more closely focused
and detailed—draws our attention
to the figures. Nevertheless, both
artists capture nature’s power
to free the individual from the
confines of the material world. In
spaces smaller than 2 feet square,
they record the universal dialogue
between humankind and nature.
Translated by Daniel Bryant
Figure 27.6 SHEN ZHOU, Poet on a Mountain Top, from the
“Landscape Album” series, ca. 1495–1500. Album leaf mounted as a
handscroll: ink on paper or ink and light color on paper, 15^1 ⁄ 4 233 ⁄ 4 in.Figure 27.7 CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH,
Two Men Looking at the Moon, 1819–1820.
Oil on panel, 13^3 ⁄ 4 171 ⁄ 4 in.