page_title: Landscape painting
section_title: Persia and India
hierarchical_section_title: Landscape painting / History / Persia and India
caption_attribution_description: River scenery. Tabriz (?), 1st quarter of 14th century. Water colours on paper. Original size: 19.2 cm x 28.1 cm. Staatsbibliothek Berlin, Orientabteilung, Diez A fol. 71, p. 10.
context_page_description: Landscape painting, also known as landscape art, is the depiction of landscapes in art—natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, especially where the main subject is a wide view—with its elements arranged into a coherent composition. In other works, landscape backgrounds for figures can still form an important part of the work. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather is often an element of the composition. Detailed landscapes as a distinct subject are not found in all artistic traditions, and develop when there is already a sophisticated tradition of representing other subjects.
  The two main traditions spring from Western painting and Chinese art, going back well over a thousand years in both cases.
  The recognition of a spiritual element in landscape art is present from its beginnings in East Asian art, drawing on Daoism and other philosophical traditions, but in the West only becomes explicit with Romanticism.
  Landscape views in art may be entirely imaginary, or copied from reality with varying degrees of accuracy.
context_section_description: Though there are some landscape elements in earlier art, the landscape tradition of the Persian miniature really begins in the Ilkhanid period, largely under Chinese influence.  Rocky mountainous country is preferred, which is shown full of animals and plants which are carefully and individually depicted, as are rock formations.  The particular convention of the elevated viewpoint that developed in the tradition fills most of the vertical format picture spaces with the landscape, though clouds are also typically shown in the sky.  Usually, everything seen is fairly close to the viewer, and there are few distant views.  Normally all landscape images show narrative scenes with figures, but there are a few drawn pure landscape scenes in albums.
  Hindu painting had long set scenes amid lush vegetation, as many of the stories depicted demanded. Mughal painting combined this and the Persian style, and in miniatures of royal hunts often depicted wide landscapes.  Scenes set during the monsoon rains, with dark clouds and flashes of lightning, are popular.  Later, influence from European prints is evident.
caption: A rare pure landscape in a Persian miniature, with a river, Tabriz (?), 1st quarter of 14th century
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