The World of the Landscape

Abstract

In his article \u22The World of the Landscape\u22 Bart Verschaffel analyzes the visual logic of the landscape genre in painting as it was developed from the sixteenth century onward. He argues that the structure of a minimal foreground, a middle ground cut off from the foreground, and a background that gives way to the distant, corresponds to a meditative attitude, proper to the nature of the image as such. The landscape is essentially a calm image. Second, Verschaffel puts forward that the middle ground in landscape images is not, as in history painting, a waiting room adjacent to the action in the foreground, but is rather oriented towards the horizon and beyond: a landscape always represents the world. Further, in the tradition of landscape for the Romantics the vagueness resting on the horizon comes to the fore and creates an \u22atmosphere\u22 that touches a lonely soul and transforms an image of the world into an intimate encounter