Introduction Renaissance landscape paintings evolved during the renaissance period. The Italian Renaissance turned out to be a very productive period in the history of art. It is regarded as the golden age of painting. The art of painting received a great fillip at the hands of many great Italian painters like Paolo Uccello, Pierodella, Leonardo Da Vinci. It is therefore crucially important to take a brief look at the historical developments during this period because without history we all are nothing but merely adolescent intellectuals.
Evolution of landscape painting during the Italian Renaissance- Landscape may be a common subject in art but landscape as a distinct European art form emerged only during the Renaissance period. There was a paradigm shift of focus from figures to natural surroundings and natural settings. The movement of the water, the rocky mountains and the blue sky with a distant horizon all became popular subjects during this period. The attitude towards projecting landscapes in painting underwent a radical change during the 15 th and 16 th centuries. Florence and Venice soon emerged as two major nerve centers for the emergence of landscape painting in Italy.
The Renaissance landscape paintings went on to comment on the mood of the protagonists and were not merely used as a backdrop.
There were several factors that contributed to this change. Some of the factors have been enlisted below-
- Technical innovations
- Ideological developments
- Increasing influence of classical poetry
The Renaissance periods conferred a different status to landscape painters and they were often compared with writers and poets. The Renaissance landscape painters were assigned the task of portraying the world through their work of art. A new tradition was set as painters started depicting carefully the natural objects like flowers, plants, sky etc. Northern painters especially those who came from Flanders and Netherlands proved themselves as efficient as the Italian artists in landscape painting. It was they who introduced oil painting as a new medium. Many artists like Giovanni Belenni , Annibale Carracci used landscape as the subject matter in their paintings.
Thus we see, in keeping with the mood of the Age of Enlightenment or Renaissance a new genre of painting emerged which had landscape as its subject matter in sharp contrast to the medieval ages when nature was considered unworthy of being glorified in paintings. A new class of enlightened souls of this period perhaps understood that only landscape paintings had the potentiality to depict human emotions in the right spirit and that nature is an integral part of human existence.
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