Back on September 13, 2007, I posted a piece on the emergence of landscape as a subject in Belgian paintigs - Medieval Townscapes. I began a to collect little images that are cropped from religious paintings of the era when I worked at an urban planning agency. Artists in the 14th and 15th centuries began to lavish their skills on background scenes, painting what they knew and leading to anachronisms as seen here, where the Virgin Mary is magically transported to the Low Countries. These vignettes of landscape are charming and instructive when we recognize what they are.This image is a detail from Raphael's La Belle Jardiniere, from the collection of Louvre in Paris.
4 comments:
Hi, Jane. The subject of Belgian landscape painters reminded me of an exhibit I saw a few years ago at the Prado museum in Madrid on the painter Joachim Patinir, considered the forerunner of landscape painting as an independent genre. There is a good article at:
http://www.codart.nl/exhibitions/details/1337/
Thanks, Lorenzo, for the link to this informative artcle.
I am very interested in this subject - basically the background of Flemish paintings and have been trying for ages to find something exclusively on it, could you recommend any books/studies?
Thank in advance! (following your blog through bloglines)
Tia, two books that I like are "Flemish Cities: Their History and Art" by William Gaunt (Putnam - 1969) and, as an example, "The Story of Bruges" by Ernest Gilliant-Smith (J.M. Dent - 1901). The J. M. Dent series on Belgian cities is old, but many libraries have them and they complement newer books well, I think. Lots of early photographs and varied perspectives.
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