World landscape
"They were imaginary compilations of the most appealing and spectacular aspects of European geography, assembled for the delight of the wealthy armchair traveler",[1] giving "an idealized composite of the world taken in at a single Olympian glance".
[4] The treatment of landscape backgrounds in Early Netherlandish painting was greatly admired in Italy, and Flemish specialists were employed in some Italian workshops, including that of Titian.
Patinir, "emboldened by the Italian taste for Northern rusticity, began as early as the 1510s to expand the backgrounds of his paintings out of all proportion" in a way that "violently reversed the ordinary hierarchy of subject and setting".
[5] By 1520 he was well known for these subjects, and when Dürer visited him in Antwerp he described him in his diary as "the good painter of landscapes" (gut landschaftsmaler) in the first use of Landschaft in an artistic context.
[8] Patinir (and Herri met de Bles) came from Dinant on the Meuse (in modern Belgium) where, in "a startlingly un-Netherlandish landscape", there are dramatic rock cliffs and free-standing crags along the river.
As well as connecting the style to the Age of Discovery, the role of Antwerp as a booming centre both of world trade and cartography, and the wealthy town-dweller's view of the countryside, art historians have explored the paintings as religious metaphors for the pilgrimage of life.
[12] The style is also an early example of the 16th-century artistic trend to "Mannerist inversion" (the term devised by Max Dvořák) or the "inverted composition", where previously minor or background elements come to dominate the picture space.
Their landscapes revel in the forests of the Upper Danube, and the place of a foreground figure is often taken by a single tree, a formula invented by Albrecht Altdorfer, the most significant artist of the group, and used, mostly in drawings and prints, by Wolf Huber and Augustin Hirschvogel.
[25] 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.
[28] 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.
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.
