An intriguing aspect of China’s cultural history is that the development of landscape painting, as so much else, unfolded there in an unbroken trajectory spanning well over a thousand years. In the West, however, the continuity of the genre was interrupted for centuries despite a robust beginning in antiquity. This, of course, was due to the adoption in the Christian world of a conceptually ritualized iconography more concerned with matters of the supernatural than the earthly realm. Even a brief visit to the Metropolitan reveals that there is no direct link between the lovely landscape vignettes of the Boscotrecase frescoes in the Greek and Roman Galleries on the main floor and the sweeping Dutch panoramas of the seventeenth century, upstairs.

The depiction of landscape with verisimilitude resumed in the Renaissance, at first in Italy and somewhat later in the North. Perspective and foreshortening were the principal tools that artists used to create the fictive environment surrounding saints and heroes—spatial settings for a main event that was clearly in focus in the foreground. After 1600, however, pure landscapes and seascapes began to be considered legitimate themes for an artist to pursue. Annibale Carracci in Rome and Hercules Seghers in the Lowlands are remembered as somewhat timid precursors yet, by the mid-seventeenth century, a native of Lorraine named Claude Gellée (later known as Claude Lorrain) was filling commissions from his Rome studio for monumental, elaborately composed, and meticulously finished landscapes. They became treasured fixtures of every princely and ecclesiastical court