page_title: World landscape
section_title: Influence on later landscape painting
hierarchical_section_title: World landscape / Influence on later landscape painting
context_page_description: The world landscape, a translation of the German Weltlandschaft, is a type of composition in Western painting showing an imaginary panoramic landscape seen from an elevated viewpoint that includes mountains and lowlands, water, and buildings. The subject of each painting is usually a Biblical or historical narrative, but the figures comprising this narrative element are dwarfed by their surroundings.
  The world landscape first appeared in painting in the work of the Early Netherlandish painter Joachim Patinir, most of whose few surviving paintings are of this type, usually showing religious subjects, but commissioned by secular patrons. "They were imaginary compilations of the most appealing and spectacular aspects of European geography, assembled for the delight of the wealthy armchair traveler", giving "an idealized composite of the world taken in at a single Olympian glance".
  The compositional type was taken up by a number of other Netherlandish artists, most famously Pieter Bruegel the Elder. There was a parallel development by Patinir's contemporary Albrecht Altdorfer and other artists of the Danube school.
context_section_description: Both the Netherlandish and Danubian approaches to landscape painting were greatly influential for later artists. Later generations of Flemish artists such as Jan Brueghel the Elder, Anton Mirou, Lucas van Valkenborch and Gillis van Coninxloo continued to produce late Mannerist versions of the full formula, as developed by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, before in the 1590s van Coninxloo let the trees move in like curtains from the sides to restrict and then eliminate a distant view, pioneering the Flemish development of the dense forest views of the Danube school.  Rubens had studied in the 1590s with his relative Tobias Verhaecht, an especially conservative artist who continued to use world landscape styles derived from Pieter Bruegel the Elder until the 1620s.  Though Rubens rapidly outgrew his influence, in some of his later landscapes, such as the Summer, Peasants going to Market (c. 1618, Royal Collection), "the tradition of the old 'world landscape' plainly lives on".
  Aspects of the particular formula of the world landscape, though no longer usually described by that term, continue to reappear in different versions until the 19th century.  In Dutch Golden Age painting the idiosyncratic paintings and prints of Hercules Seghers (c. 1589 – c. 1638), as rare as Patinirs, were great panoramic views, very often with mountains. In contrast, Philips Koninck (1619–1688) used the panoramic elevated view, and often included water, but showed vistas of flat farmland or town roofs with a low horizon.
  The Italian Niccolò dell'Abbate, part of the School of Fontainebleau, introduced the Flemish world landscape into French art in works such as the Orpheus and Euridice in the National Gallery, London and the Rape of Proserpine in the Louvre, both large paintings.  In French Baroque or classical painting many artists including both Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin painted "Landscape with ..." subjects, and for Claude wide panoramic views with mixed elements of mountains, water and small figures formed the bulk of his work, although both the viewpoint and horizon are generally much lower than in 16th-century works. Claude in turn became enormously influential, and until the early 19th century his style continued to have the advantage of giving a painting of a "landscape with" a higher place in the hierarchy of genres, and consequently a higher price, than a mere pure landscape.
  With Romanticism this changed, but panoramic views continued to be painted in the 19th century, and artists such as those in the Hudson River School, Edward Lear and Russian landscape painters took the compositional style to new landscapes around the world in works such as The Heart of the Andes (1859, Frederic Edwin Church), though often excluding all people and buildings. These still featured in the huge apocalyptic religious paintings of the English painter John Martin, which are often literally "end of the world landscapes", taking the history of the genre back to its origins with Bosch.
caption: Summer, Peasants going to Market, Peter Paul Rubens, c. 1618
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