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THE BENTSTONE ROCKER
BELL CANYON, UTAH
A Philosophical Hypothesis by Malcolm Graeme Childers
I sense that the landscape in art history and its modern offspring, fine art landscape photography, are indelibly linked to the larger growth saga of human consciousness. To get a broader view of the historic development of the fine art landscape, look at a timeline in any good art history book. Human art expression has had an animistic focus for at least the first 80% of the history of modern Homo Sapiens. Even a cursory examination of the topic will show that the dedicated art landscape is extreme a latecomer in the overall history of human aesthetic expression. The human figure along with its animal companions has been the prime focus of human artistic expression ever since we first began painting or pecking images on the walls of caves or fashioning idols and fertility icons from stone and clay, a span of in excess of 80,000 years.
Among the earliest surviving examples of a western landscape is a fresco of a coastal scene with swimmers. It dates from the fifth century BC and is located in the early Greco Roman settlement of Paestum in Southern Italy. There are vestigial garden scenes on the wall of Pompeii that date from the first century AD.
During the Romanesque, mosaics dominated wall art. Mosaics, though capable of depicting landscape, were by their very nature more conducive to figurative art.
The landscape in western culture reappeared with the rebirth of the fresco usually as filler behind a main figure or figures.
Oriental artists may have produced their first dedicated landscape centuries before their Occidental counterparts. If so, the exact dates are obscure. The first dedicated fine art landscape in Western Culture, however, has an exact date.
On the 5th of August 1473, Leonardo Da Vinci did an ink drawing of a vista in the Arno Valley. His sketch, Day of St. Mary of the Snows, was the first time anyone in the western hemisphere had devoted the entire content of an art expression exclusively to landscape. His sketch was just another first for the Renaissance progenitor of so many unique ideas.
Gradually, since that first drawing, Occidental artists began to see, not only just the places they lived in, but also the world in general as a subject worthy of their efforts. The Renaissance gave western culture other acts of gratuitous landscape awareness. Petrarch, the noble philosopher/writer, is generally considered to be the first man to have climbed a mountain simply because it was there. A fascinating new edge on human thought when you consider that the only reason such an endeavor would have been undertaken prior to Petrarch would have been to reconnoiter the land you were planning to conquer.
I would like to initiate thought, discussion, and debate. I will be developing and adding to my thoughts as your feedback and my schedule allow.
Thank you for whatever you bring to the discussion.
Respectfully, Malcolm Childers
