Chapter 3 begins with Chase describing how a camera will capture what exists but how an artist must illustrate a landscape in a very personalized way – the artist must choose what part of the landscape to focus on and what particular details to hone in on. To an ancient Egyptian artist, emphasizing shapes and living organisms is immensely important. Ancient Greek artists used rocks and trees to set scenes for human figures. The Ancient Romans enjoyed landscape art that was based on legend and imagination rather than on actual landscapes – many private villas, for instance, were adorned with scenes of mountains and seas that are not real. The Chinese viewed landscape art as important because they thought it intertwined the emotions of people and the omnipotence of God. Chinese landscapes often had poems along with them on scrolls. Unlike Roman landscape art, Chinese landscape art is usually based on actual scenes from the Chinese countryside. Chinese artists also used different brushstrokes as a standard for expressing natural objects like rocks, tree trunks, foliage and grasses.
In the West during medieval times, there was little emphasis on landscape painting, as most of the focus was on saints. But by the fifteenth century, artists began to paint more landscapes in both Northern and Southern Europe. In Southern Europe, especially Italy, landscapes were used only as settings for characters. But in Northern Europe, the importance of landscapes themselves was made evident. Hubert van Eyck, for instance, painted the “Baptism of Christ,” in which the landscape setting is central to the subject of the painting. In the sixteenth century, Pieter Bruegel took an interest in depicting everyday life – a point of view similar to that of Flemish artists of the fifteenth century. But Bruegel also had the view that the everyday sorrows and ecstatic occurrences of people’s lives are relatively unimportant. He makes this clear in his “Death of Saul” painting, in which he illustrates the Israelites losing the battle against the Philistines and the suicide of a father and a son who feared capture. In the painting, the story is told by tiny figures in the background.
In the seventeenth century, Dutch artists focused on a warmer and closer view of the world. The Dutch artists loved to portray their countryside, as can be seen in the art of Jacob van Ruysdael. In the early nineteenth century, English noblemen ordered artists to paint their country estates with a focus on color and atmosphere. The most famous English landscapist of this period was John Constable, who used “fresh” colors to express a sense of moisture and growth. This English notion of landscaping was then brought to the United States after the establishment of large cities and after the Revolutionary War. Landscape painting at this time was seen as patriotic, enthusiastic and forward-looking. Ideas of vastness and of fertility were especially important to American landscape artists as part of the larger Manifest Destiny ideology. There was a great romantic vision of the ever-expanding West as peaceful, grand and untouched – and many artists, like Albert Bierstadt, portrayed the West in this way.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, landscape artists began to focus more on individual elements of a landscape – like a field or a stream. Artists also changed what they saw in landscapes to express new ideas. For instance, in “Starry Night,” Vincent van Gogh painted a world with stirring nighttime elements. Paul Cezanne’s “Mont Sainte-Victoire,” on the other hand, is based on an actual photograph and is a more realistic view, but still distorts certain objects within the painting to give a richer sense of relation.
In chapter 4, Chase begins by outlining the issues the photographers have – especially involving parts of the photo being hidden or blocked. Artists from different parts of the world and different time periods have tried to come up with solutions to these problems. The Egyptians tried to make the human into a “map” – people could overlap, but body parts would still be indistinguishable. For instance, in the Tomb of Ramose, people are easily distinguished because they are alternately painted light and dark. The Egyptians also adjusted spacing and distorted the size of certain body parts to provide context even if this is not necessarily representative of reality. This type of art was used in many different depictions of Egyptian life – especially everyday life.
In ancient Mesopotamia, artists portrayed a moment in an accurate way by drawing or painting people and objects in profile. These artists, like Egyptian artists, also often made people or objects bigger or smaller – variations in depth. Some of the first paintings found to use light and shadows to illustrate depth were found in ancient Italy. However, it is likely that the first to use light and shadows to portray depth were the ancient Greeks, since a lot of Roman art is based on Greek art. Roman paintings offer accurate depictions of architecture, but the perspectives in these paintings were not very accurate, partly because they did not use vanishing point perspective. Uccello was an artist who had many practice attempts when trying to paint with depth and perspective – it seemed to be very difficult to attain.
Sixteenth century German artist Durer had diagrams to demonstrate how he thought that accuracy according to science could be successfully incorporated into art. His methods work for smaller objects, but not for portraying things that are up close or at the periphery. Eventually Renaissance artists experimented with well-done pieces centered on perspective – for instance, Andrea Mantegna’s “St. James in the Church of the Eremitani in Padua.” These pieces were placed on the wall above eye level so the audience could look up at it as they passed under it. By the end of the seventeenth century, perspective was finally mastered and allowed for the creation of beautiful compositions of elements in space, as in Andrea Pozzi’s “St. Ignazio Entering Heaven.” The Chinese and Japanese use “isometric perspective” in which parallel scheme lines do not come together at a vanishing point. This type of perspective is used in the West to show the structure of a building. Finally, Chase concludes the chapter by noting that there is no correct way to represent space and that each system has its own advantages and disadvantages.
