Nils Büttner
Landscape Painting: A History.
Abbeville, 416 pages, $135

A curious process began to afflict religious painting during the fifteenth century: their Biblical subjects began to atrophy and shrink even as the natural settings through which they moved grew larger. In the sixteenth century they would shrivel away entirely, leaving behind a world of tilled fields, distant mountains, and the proud parapeted skylines of towns. So was born landscape painting. And so I was taught, and over the years have taught my own students.

One can see why the notion of the religious origin of landscape painting should be so durable. Stories that explain the origin of things fulfill a psychological need and, even when palpably absurd, they are immortal, destructible only by a more satisfying story. And the traditional account of landscape painting is peculiarly satisfying. The absence of landscape painting during the Middle Ages expressed the indifference of the era to the pleasures of this world, while its emergence in the Renaissance reflected the birth of the humanist spirit. In fact, its rise seems the very embodiment of Renaissance humanism, letting us see medieval piety waning away before our eyes.

This account of landscape painting determined its relative position in the traditional hierarchy of art: somewhat below the lofty subject matter of narrative and history painting but above the portrait and still life. While landscape painting might occasionally rouse itself to make some larger statement about the fundamental order of things, as in Poussin’s sublime Et in Arcadia ego, in general it was regarded as a secondary affair. Great art was meant to instruct, while most landscape art merely served to divert.

Now I learn that this evolutionary model dates back at least as far as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I also learn that it is completely erroneous, which is but one of the many pleasures offered by Nils Büttner’s splendid Landscape Painting: A History. I know of no more intelligent and attractive treatment of this rich subject, and it is abundantly deserving of its disheartening purchase price.

Landscape Painting is a comprehensive and original account of western landscape painting, from classical antiquity to the present. Originally published as Geschichte der Landschaftsmalerei, it has been translated felicitously from the German by Russell Stockman and published in sumptuous form by Abbeville. (The only concession to the American market is in the change of the cover illustration, where Frederic Church’s The Oxbow has dislodged the Jacob van Ruisdael image of a windmill that had graced the original.) So sumptuous is it, in fact, that the casual browser might take it to be a coffee-table ornament. It is not; Büttner, a professor of art history at Dortmund, provides both an elegant narrative history of its subject as well as a catalogue of 220 paintings, reproduced at large scale and—with but two or three exceptions—with impeccable color fidelity. As a result, it can be read with pleasure from cover to cover, or from image to image (each of which is accompanied by useful notes).

Büttner rehabilitates landscape painting as an autonomous genre with its own distinctive pedigree and conventions. Such a rehabilitation is long overdue. The traditional academic hierarchy—in which the easel painting is the principal and most noble medium, and in which wall painting and tapestry are relegated to secondary positions—has skewed our understanding of the landscape tradition. It has produced a fragmented history and leaves a vast lacuna between the landscape art of antiquity (such as can be seen at Pompeii) and that of the early Renaissance. But this lacuna is only an accident of historical survival. The landscape tradition of antiquity was handed down intact, Büttner suggests, in the form of illusionistic wall decoration. With its breadth of scale and horizontal format, landscape was well suited for the treatment of a broad mural expanse. Walls were treated either illusionistically, so as to simulate views into gardens, or decoratively, with stylized renditions of plants and foliage; in either instance, the effect was to convert an architectural space into a fictitious outdoor room. In his Ten Books of Architecture, Vitruvius noted that lengthy corridors were particularly favorable for “landscape scenery … for example, harbors, foothills, shorelines, rivers, springs, seas, temples, forests, mountains, shepherds with their flocks.”

Büttner proposes that antique practice as described by Vitruvius persisted beyond antiquity, especially in palace and domestic architecture. The evidence is fragmentary, to be sure, but this only testifies to the loss of virtually all of the secular architecture of the early Middle Ages. The scattered examples that remain—he illustrates the fifth-century mosaics at Ravenna and those of the twelfth-century Palazzo Reale in Palermo—bear witness to a flourishing and sophisticated tradition of landscape art. Drawing on the whole range of secondary arts that depicted natural scenes, he shows that

landscape was by no means subordinated to narrative in Sienese frescoes, in Burgundian tapestries, or in Franco-Flemish books of hours. In an unbroken tradition since antiquity, landscapes in both monumental art and book illumination continued to depict the locus amoenus or earthly paradise, represent the domains of the wealthy, and allude to a “golden age,” altogether independent of narrative painting and its own traditions. And they would continue these same functions in later centuries in the medium of landscape painting.

Although primarily decorative in nature, this durable tradition formed the substrate from which the landscape art of the Renaissance emerged, under the combined impetus of the revival of classical antiquity and advances in descriptive geography and surveying. Shed of its courtly decorative function, it now emerged as an intellectual pursuit to produce works that were “valued as objects of religious or humanistic contemplation and as expressions of the new cosmography.”

It would take time for landscape painting to establish itself as a formal entity. Even the term itself, which arose in the course of the sixteenth century, did not pass into common usage until late in the seventeenth. Christoph Plantin’s 1573 Thesaurus theutonicae linguae presents nine Latin and French synonyms for the Dutch word landtschap, and all of them use the term in a geographic or territorial sense; none is used in the artistic sense. Büttner shows that the word first “came to be used descriptively in lists of properties and estate inventories in reference to pictures in which certain districts were depicted. It was from this sense of the term, developed over the course of the sixteenth century, that our modern use of it as the designation of a genre derived.”

Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, various local currents and regional schools flowed together to form a kind of international style of landscape painting. Although this grand synthesis would be achieved in Italy, where the legacy of antiquity was most palpable, its great creative figures were Frenchmen, Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. It is the advantage of Büttner’s spacious perspective that we can see how much the story of landscape is a collective achievement, dependent on the productive friction between the traditions of the north and south. Already in the middle of the fifteenth century, Italian humanists were praising the work of Jan van Eyck, whose meticulous oil technique rendered the minutest details of topography with extraordinary precision. Although we tend to disparage in our time what Edgar Allan Poe called “mere Flemish devotion to fact,” it was crucial to the mature landscape art of the seventeenth century. It was the achievement of Claude and Poussin to subject this “devotion to fact” to classical discipline, and to produce those ordered and balanced compositions that are the apogee of landscape art. They would remain authoritative well into the nineteenth century, until the invention of photography made possible topographic views of absolute fidelity, and disturbed the delicate balance between the ideal and the real in the grand Baroque synthesis.

Büttner commendably carries his story up to the present; his final image is a 2002 oil painting by Luc Tuymans, a Belgian painter who deliberately invokes the precedent of van Eyck. Thus while much of the creative force behind landscape painting has been diverted in recent decades into environmental art and Earthworks, the tradition continues in western art, even if it has been driven somewhat underground. Nonetheless, as Büttner’s book and the example of late antiquity suggest, the catacombs can be vital indeed.

It is significant that this book was written by a German historian of art. They tend toward evenhandedness when writing about international subjects, more so than their Italian and French counterparts. Perhaps that is because they, like Americans, have an inherited sense of being at the periphery of things. And perhaps it is because recent political history has made them chary about speaking from an explicitly German point of view. Whatever the reason, Büttner offers an exceptionally well balanced overview of his subject, which does justice to its international scope. He ranges beyond the well known figures, the familiar trajectory that proceeds through Giotto, Brueghel, Canaletto, Turner, and Cézanne, to include lesser known figures from Germany, Switzerland, and Russia, such as Hans Thoma, Ivan Ivanovich Shishkin, and Johann Christian Reinhart.

He is also excellent on the American landscape art of the nineteenth century and the Hudson River School. A generation ago, a European overview of landscape art would barely treat the American contribution; now figures such as Thomas Cole, George Inness, and Winslow Homer are presented as vibrant local manifestations of the same reinvigorated landscape tradition that produced such varied responses as the Barbizon School in France and the Worpswede Colony in Germany. He unaccountably downplays, however, the influence of Germany on American landscape painting, especially after 1848. The revolutionary events of that year sent German artists and architects fleeing in considerable numbers to the United States, resulting in an intimate network of German-American connections. Many of the most important painters of the period studied in Düsseldorf, such as Worthington Whittredge, George Caleb Bingham, and Eastman Johnson. We tend to think of France as serving as the great model for American artists, but this was an artifact of the late nineteenth century. At mid-century, the largely protestant culture of modern Germany was more accessible to American sensibility. Thus while Büttner points out the effect of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendentalist doctrine on American landscape painters, he neglects to mention how thoroughly that doctrine was saturated in modern German philosophy. (Here one wishes that Büttner had been less evenhanded and more appreciative of the German contribution.)

In every respect, in the quality of its writing and its reproduction, Landscape Painting is an exemplar of art history. It is certain to become a standard reference, provided that its sheer gorgeousness does not prevent readers from taking it seriously. It surely does justice to the significance of its subject. In fact, in stressing the broad continuity of the landscape tradition across the millennia, it recalls that other standard work, Kenneth Clark’s The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1953). Clark showed that the naked human form has been one of the central preoccupations of western art, depictions of the body changing along with change in social circumstance, and expressing these changes with a vivid poignancy; so, Büttner shows, the image of the landscape is likewise peculiarly expressive, embodying in legible form the certainties and anxieties of the day. If the one shows who we are, the other shows where we are, plotting our coordinates not only physically but metaphysically. It is a pleasure to have this story told so lucidly, so thoroughly, and—perhaps rarest of all—so free from agenda.