05.04.2023-07.28.2023
PANORAMICS
Flemish landscapes of the 16th and 17th centuries
Witnesses of an imagined or vanished world, the landscapes painted by the Flemish masters are as much technical prowess as exceptional creations. Long considered a minor genre of painting, these expanses of nature served as a framework for great history painting before reaching their apogee in the 17th century.
In this, Joachim Patenier first reversed the relationship between the narrative, which until then had occupied the heart of the painting, and the landscape that served as its setting. Following him, the artists understood the interest of the exercise; to provide the viewer who observes the painting, the same pleasure as if he were looking at nature. For the whole issue of the genre lies in this semantic consistency. Whether in reality or in painting, the landscape designates "the territory that extends as far as the view can carry (1)".
Far from the uninventive imitation reproached to landscape artists, they have established an infallible recipe. Their work consists first of all of observing nature in its smallest details, sketching and memorizing its forms. They are then selected and assembled to create an ideal overview. Pieter Bruegel and his heirs, his predecessors Cornelis Massijs or Herri met de Bles, accompany these escapes.
These paintings are today the traces of the relationship maintained between the man and the nature: cohabitation, fear, admiration. These landscapes were and still are a way to understand and appropriate the world.
([1] FURETIÈRE, Antoine, Dictionnaire universel, La Haye et Rotterdam, Chez Arnout & Reinier Leers, 1690, p. 11. )
Image
Denijs VAN ALSLOOT (1570-1628)
avec la participation de l’atelier de Jan Brueghel l’Ancien (1568-1625) pour les figures
Paysage boisé s’ouvrant sur une chaîne de montagnes, première décennie du XVIIe siècle
Toile – 117 x 173 cm