A God's-Eye View of the World
In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Netherlandish painters had an uncertain relationship to perspective.
Properly speaking, of course, you shouldn’t be able to see all those details so far away in the distance, there over the shoulder of some stately patron or beneficent saint.
Properly speaking, of course, you shouldn’t be able to see all those details so far away in the distance, there over the shoulder of some stately patron or beneficent saint.
And of course they were aware of Italian innovations in perspective and realism (Bruegel, for one, had made the journey south, and was supposedly mocked for his attention to rustic scenes rather than the crumbling glories of antiquity).
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Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Italian Landscape (1554). Pen on ink, 18.35 in x 13.11 in. Saatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett
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But for many Netherlandish painters, realism doesn’t seem to be the primary goal. The function of a painting was not to provide an illusion of life glimpsed through a window.
No. In the busy lowlands, with those bustling and growing cities and that densely populated countryside…there was all that life and movement to be depicted.
No. In the busy lowlands, with those bustling and growing cities and that densely populated countryside…there was all that life and movement to be depicted.
And there was that flat terrain, and those maritime weather systems looming up over everything. And that horizon:
And so the lowland painters of the Northern Renaissance give us our saints, our patrons, the subject matter that was (nominally) the purpose of a painting. But they give us more: a perceivable world, alive with activity and incident, drawing the eye away from whatever gaze is trying to command it and sending it skittering over a vast, intricate world.
Joachim Patinir, Landscape with Saint Christopher (1520). Oil on panel, 49.2 in x 66.9 in. El Escurtial, Monasterio de San Lorenzo, Spain.
You're invited to read these paintings like a book.
You're invited to read these paintings like a book.
If this world comes at the cost of believable three-point perspective? Fine. The very function of a painting has begun to change – these paintings demand a different way of viewing than do those of the Italian Renaissance.
And so, in works by artists such as Breugel and Joachim Patinir, we get our first glimpse at a Weltlandschaft: A God’s eye view, taking in at once the vast span of the horizon and the smallest event and detail. Macrocosmic and microcosmic, together – at last.
There’s a high horizon line (two thirds of the way up the painting, or so). It called for a new orientation – hence Patinir’s innovation, making the painting wider than it is high (original at the time, now ubiquitous enough that we click “landscape” under page layout).
And how do you show distance? In these landscapes size won’t do it, since the painting zooms in wherever our attention is directed. Instead, we get color: brown tones in the fore, green in the middle, and – to indicate the vast distances our god’s eye can behold – the great blue beyond.