Heroic landscape

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Nicolas Poussin : Landscape with Orpheus and Eurydice (around 1650), Louvre . Heroic landscape with characters from Greek mythology.
Claude Lorrain : Landscape with David and the Three Heroes (1658), National Gallery, London. Heroic landscape with biblical characters.

The heroic landscape is a type of painting in landscape painting . Pictures of this type mostly show unspoilt areas, for example with rugged rocks. The sky is often dramatically cloudy. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the people depicted in this landscape are often gods and heroes from Greek mythology or heroic figures from the Bible.

The heyday of this style was the 17th century, the first great master was the French Nicolas Poussin . The heroic landscape experienced a second bloom in Romantic painting . Their importance receded in the late 19th century.

Heroic and idyllic landscape

Gottfried Keller : Heroic Landscape (1842), Zurich Central Library. Without human figures.
Carl Rottmann : The island of Delos (1847), Kunsthalle Karlsruhe.
Concrete landscape, heroically stylized.

The opposite type to the heroic landscape is the idyllic or Arcadian landscape with a lovely area under a clear sky. Simple shepherds are the typical staffage figures .

Both types of landscape are ideal , that is , landscapes composed according to strict rules of art . Costume and architecture , if they appear in the pictures, are based on antiquity .

There are transitions and mixed forms between the heroic and the idyllic Arcadian landscape. The realistic tendency in the second half of the 19th century led landscape painters to increasingly forego mythological and biblical figures and the composition of ideal landscapes in order to devote themselves entirely to rendering the visible.

Further examples

  • Joseph Anton Koch : Landscape with Noah's offering of thanks (1803), Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt. Heroic landscape with biblical characters.

  • Joseph Anton Koch: Heroic Landscape with the Rainbow (1805), Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. Heroic landscape with idyllic features.

literature

  • Christian Kämmerer: The Classically Heroic Landscape in Dutch Landscape Painting, 1675–1750 . Berlin: Free University 1975

See also

  • Locus amoenus - the lovely area , the literary counterpart to the idyllic landscape
  • Pastorale (visual arts) - idyllic representation of rural life of shepherds and their grazing cattle

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