Pastoral (visual arts)
As pastorale , from Latin pastor ("shepherd"), a motif is referred to in the fine arts that depicts the life of the shepherds ( shepherd scene ), in particular that of the shepherds ( shepherd scene or shepherd piece ), or grazing cattle in an idyllic rural scene a landscape ( cattle ). Such motifs were literarily cultivated in the bucolic poetry of antiquity and revived in the Renaissance and Baroque as the ideal of rural simplicity and tranquility , as images of closeness or return to nature, and as the scenery of a romance ( shepherd's poetry ). As pictorial representations they can be found in particular in landscape , genre and animal painting of the Baroque , Rococo , Classicism , Early Romanticism and Romanticism of the 19th century .
history
Pastoral depictions can already be found in wall paintings of antiquity and also in painting from the Middle Ages , but these hardly idealize the life of humans and grazing cattle in nature. With the beginning of the modern era seal bestsellers emerged in the European Renaissance through the Arcadia of Jacopo Sannazaro a journalistic very successful recourse to the ancient myth of Arcadia at the under Building on the, Eclogae the Roman poet Vergil bucolic and other authors seal an ideal landscape as locus amoenus , inhabited by shepherds. This motif of a "place of longing" for the simple life in nature, which corresponds in religious thinking and feeling with ideas of the Garden of Eden , found rapid and widespread dissemination in Europe and influenced numerous authors, including William Shakespeare and John Milton . Renaissance and Baroque painters took up the subject in the visual arts, such as the Italians Giorgione and Tizian or the French Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin , and developed the concept of the heroic landscape in the process . The latter combined the subject in the painting The Shepherds of Arcadia with the motif of death .
As ideals of the European nobility , pastoral and Arcadian representations found their equivalent not only in painting, but also as shepherds' play on the stage, as well as in garden art , for example in the gardens of Villa Borghese or Villa Mondragone , later in close connection with Palladianism in the English country garden . In the Netherlands , citizens , wealthy merchants and politicians, as the social elite of their country, which had reached enormous prosperity, took over the preference for pastoral motives. They therefore also played a major role in the painting of the Dutch Golden Age , for example with Aelbert Jacobsz. Cuyp and Jacob and Salomon van Ruisdael . During the Rococo period, when pastoral painting reached its peak, Antoine Watteau created a special variant with depictions of a Fête galante . An example of this is the topic of embarkation for Kythera , which shows a courtly society at a festival in an ideal landscape.
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Until around the beginning of the 20th century, when modernism had largely developed a critical attitude towards idylls and new pictorial themes moved into the focus of the visual arts, the representation of pastoral scenes generally enjoyed high artistic recognition, especially in the course of its dissemination and popularization of landscape, genre and animal painting in the 19th century.
literature
- Friedrich Sengle : Forms of the idyllic image of man. A lecture . In: Walter Müller-Seidel , Wolfgang Preisendanz (Hrsg.): Formenwandel. Festschrift for Paul Böckmann . Hamburg 1964, pp. 156-171.
- Bruno Snell : Arcadia. The discovery of a spiritual landscape . In: Klaus Garber (Ed.): European Bukolik and Georgik . Darmstadt 1976, pp. 14-43.
- Klaus Bernhard: Idyll. Theory, history, representation in painting, 1750–1850 . Dissertations on art history, Volume 4, Böhlau Verlag, Cologne / Vienna 1977, p. 221 ff.
- Allan R. Ruff: Arcadian Visions. Pastoral Influences on Poetry, Painting and the Design of Landscape . Oxbow Books, Windgather Press, Oxford 2015, ISBN 978-1-909686-66-3 .
Web links
- Pastorale , website in the portal beyars.com (The large art dictionary by PW Hartmann)