Landscape is traditionally known as the genre in which the 'art for art's sake' concept finds its prime reflection. Until recently, therefore, there was a virtually total lack of any iconographic approach in the study of Netherlandish 16th and 17th-century landscape painting. Where there was any allusion to it, the 'content' of a painted landscape was primarily identified with the artist's experience of nature. The realism exhibited by these landscapes - to a greater or lesser degree - was associated with an Intention on the artist's part to hold on to this aesthetic perception of the visible reality, so as to allow the spectator to share it. The broad compositional and spatial relationships in the picture were regarded as the formal bearers of this 'content', on which the spectator's reception ought also to be focused. Individual details, whether belonging to the landscape itself or consisting of human figures, were considered - literally and figuratively - only worth a glance in so far as they were the constituents of the se formal relationships. Hence the human element, small or sometimes very small-scale as it is and often consisting in the 16th Century of saints or biblical figures, was seen as completely secondary to the landscape as a whole. Rather than attention to the individual detail and its significance, an aesthetic 'holistic' perception of the picture was postulated as the correct response to this genre.

Of recent years, however, people have begun, albeit still only in dribs and drabs, to pay attention to other aspects of the content of these paintings. On the model of the iconographic approach of Panofsky and De Jongh to 15th-century religious painting and 17th-century genre painting respectively, they have also started to look at 16th and 17th-century landscapes on the premiss that an intellectual concept, such as an allegory, or a literary given, such as a story from the Bible, governs the scene down to its details. Some authors have thought it possible to trace a fundamental theme m large groups of landscapes by different artists, e.g. Raupp and Bruyn, who see the allegories of life's pilgrimage and the 'vanity', vanitas, of earthly life represented m many 17th-century landscapes from the Northern Netherlands. Others have concentrated on a sub-genre, like Goedde, who sees m 16th and 17th-century seascapes metaphors for the horror and disharmony of earthly existence as opposed to the harmony and peace of God's safe haven. Yet others have homed in on the oeuvre of a Single artist and managed to trace a certain basic theme, e.g. Wiegand in a study of the vanitas symbolism in the landscapes of Jacob van Ruisdael and Falkenburg in one on the allegory of life's pilgrimage m the pictures of the first painter to make the landscape into an autonomous subject in the 16th Century, Joachim Patinir. There are also art historians who, keeping more to the 'surface' of the scene, have opted for a descriptive approach to certain types of scene, e.g Van Straaten, who has written a history of the rendering of winter in 16th and 17th-century Netherlandish art. Just as in many another study, one finds here too indications of the symbolism of individual landscape and figure motifs, although the content of the scene as a whole remains unexplained. Sometimes a separate publication may also be devoted to the symbolic content of a single composition, as m the case of L. and G. Bauer's explanation of Pieter Bruegel's Winter Landscape with Skaters and α Bird Trap, Ellemus's Interpretation of a wooded landscape of 1590 by Lucas van Valckenborch or Kauffmann's analysis of Jacob van Ruisdael's ‘Windmill at Work’ bij Duurstede of c. 1670. Finally, there are relatively numerous art historical studies which, although admittedly about the iconography of different types of scene - genre paintings, for instance -, nevertheless contain interpretations of individual landscape and figure motifs in paintings of which a number could also be classified as landscapes.

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COPYRIGHT 1990 Prof. dr. R. L. Falkenburg , alle rechten voorbehouden
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