Looking around you, you can take in the entire scene that is playing out. However, an artist must redefine this vast view we see by perhaps taking a piece of that view and painting or focusing on certain things rather than the entire view. To ancient Egyptians, this was taking in the shape of a view (which they considered to be a kind of map)  and other things such as animals. The Greeks (along with Italians) used landscape to provide a background for their human figures. The Chinese considered landscape to be a significant aspect of their art considering it to be a representation of the moods of man and the infinity of God. Landscape/nature also seemed to be representations/reminders of God for medieval thinkers. Pieter Bruegel focused on the world rather than the man himself, thinking that man and his problems were relatively unimportant in this wide world. In his piece “Death of Saul”, this is shown. The anguish and troubles of the people along with the people themselves are centered off to the left rather than in the center. From this scene, the rest of the piece focuses on a valley and river leading to a city. The Dutch also focused more on the landscape. Skies and flat fields would fill much of the canvas. While landscapes became more popular, artists began using techniques that would allow them to more quickly churn out these images. Dark and light areas would be alternately used to carry the eye to the horizon. This process varied widely, but it was responsible for the brownish landscaped produced throughout Europe in the 18th century. Later on, paintings of estates became quite popular and so artists still used the techniques they used before to paint landscapes quickly. However, artists became more interested in color. John Constable expressed a new view of the brownish landscape through fresher color, moisture, and growth of grass. The United States was introduced to the detailed and brighter landscape that was emerging in Europe. Towards the 19th century, America became more interested in the countryside. A sense of bigness along with little facts were important for people proud of their nation. In the middle of the 19th century, artists began taking in gardens/fields and tried to express the colors they saw. Artists, however began to change their pieces to actually represent their ideas and feelings. An example of this can be shown in Vincent van Gogh’s piece “Starry Night”.

                Photographing people in action is sometimes difficult because some people might get in the way of others and someone’s shoulder might hide another person. Egyptian artists have tried to fix this by creating side by side figures and by having figures in the back with no bodies, just heads with shoulders and arms to create the illusion that they are farther away. The Greeks initially drew upon the same techniques the Egyptians were using, but then started creating bodies to represent three dimensional figures. These pieces did not represent depth or space. However, Italian figures modeled figures in light and shade. Trying to represent things as they look creates the problem of perspective. When viewing a railroad track, as our eye moves further down the two lines seem to come together at a point- this is the vanishing point perspective. This was observed, but wasn’t put into practice or thought about too carefully. The Egyptians painted things not as they saw them, but as they knew their structures to be. However, the Greeks and Romans did want to paint these things as they saw them. They observed that parallel lines had a tendency to come together, but they didn’t quite grasp the vanishing point perspective. By the 15th century, artists began to take a more scientific approach to painting these things by searching for laws of the relations of size/shapes and how they appear in space. This challenged Italian architects and painters. Uccello tried to use foreshortening to scientific accuracy, but he fell short. Renaissance artists were interested with perspective so much so that they began to change how the piece played off to the spectator. The Chinese and Japanese used isometric perspective. Isometric perspective is where parallel lines do not meet and instead continue as parallel lines. Our minds are adjusted to seeing the vanishing point perspective that we don’t realize that the two parallel lines aren’t actually coming together, but are apart. There is no “right” way to illustrate perspective. Instead, there are many different ways perspective can be illustrated.