The Anthropomorphic Landscapes of the 17th Century

Enchant

The Renaissance included a fascinating transitional period in which the human form melted with the landscape only to give rise the pure landscape of later years.

The only realism in art is of the imagination.

William Carlos Williams

Today, it is commonplace. We are used to, above all, the enjoyment of natural landscapes in painting as if they were the natural outcome of painting. We ask nothing more. We don’t need a human and cultural context to feel that a painting speaks to us directly or includes us in its visual referent. We may not even want to feel included. But to get here, we’ve had to pass, as a cultured species, through a transition that was most charming (though arguably, not particularly aesthetic).

Before the Renaissance there was no landscape painting, at least, not as we understand it. If present at all, a landscape was mere background scenery that lent verisimilitude to the human forms. This gradually changed. As trees, mountains, fields and oceans started to gain prominence, a curious phenomenon occurred: the anthropomorphic landscape. Human forms actually merged with the landscape, as if nature were nothing without the human narrative. It was as if man could not appreciate an art that didn’t return a reflection of himself, in the most literal sense of the word.

These paintings generally included a face hidden in the landscape, as if to suggest that the earth is the one who works it, and its meaning is only in the use that its put to. This was particularly true for several 17th century artists in the Netherlands. They produced multiple works featuring the silhouette of a bearded man appearing in profile over mountains of rock. The beginning of the trend can be traced to an image created by the great scholar and polymath, Athanasius Kircher, published in his Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1645/6). It’s said that his design was inspired by a story told by Vitruvius on the plan of the architect Dinócrates to sculpt a colossal image of Alexander the Great on Mount Athos.

Kircher’s modest representation, a face instead of an entire body, was copied and enlarged numerous times over the following decades, until the landscape itself was positioned as the subject of art. It’s thanks to this curious aesthetic and ontological transition that we can now appreciate and even enjoy a picture of the sea, the trees, a wasteland of snow, and without asking for more.

Personification is prominent because it catches people’s attention. We tend to want to see our reflections everywhere. Perhaps what happened in this transition is that people could be included in the oceans and in terrestrial landscapes in new amorphous and metaphorical ways. Or perhaps people just wanted to disconnect from the figure within nature and rest for a while. To change the aesthetic experience is to go further.

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