Letters on Landscape Painting

Discussions about the nature of landscape painting among other genres of visual art were not new in the beginning of the nineteenth century. What was at stake in these discussions was the value of the different genres. Historically epic paintings—of big battle scenes or actions by given rulers—were valued most highly, and portraits of various kinds less so as these were equivalents of personal or family memories rather than of wider societal functions. Last came landscape paintings—a genre that started to proliferate in Europe from sixteenth century onward. The emergence of “pure” landscape paintings in Renaissance can be seen as a secularizing “drop-off” of religious scenes from paintings that of course all had landscapes in the background. Now, the background became the foreground—and with the loss of religious value of such paintings, their social value was reduced to below epic and portrait painting. Why paint a landscape if one can go for a walk and experience it directly? In the social discourses in Europe in the seventeenth to eighteenth century, the different genres of painting had a dominance value hierarchy in which history (and religious history) painting was the highest value, followed by portraits, and finally—the lowest—of the landscapes. In fact, the latter emerged since 1520s through the gradual disappearance of main (religious) scenes from painting and leaving the background—often landscape—in place. In this chapter, each of the nine letters on landscape painting that cover Carus’ credo on the role of such paintings is elaborated.