World Landscape

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 (c. 1480–1524), 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. Although compositions of this broad type continued to be common until the 18th century and beyond, the term is usually only used to describe works from the Low Countries and Germany produced in the 16th century. The German term ''Weltlandschaft'' was first used by Eberhard Freiherr von Bodenhausen in 1905 with reference to Gerard David, and then in 1918 applied to Patinir's work by Ludwig von Baldass, defined as the depiction of "all that which seemed beautiful to the eye; the sea and the earth, mountains and plains, forests and fields, the castle and the hut".

Netherlands

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. The backgrounds to many of Albrecht Dürer's early prints were appropriated by a number of Italian artists. 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". 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.

The paintings are relatively small and use a horizontal format; this was to become so standard for landscapes in art that it is now called "landscape" format in ordinary contexts, but at the time it was a considerable novelty, as "portable panel paintings were almost always vertical in format before 1520" and "Patinir's landscapes were among the first small horizontal panels of any sort". He typically uses three base colours to articulate his compositions, with a brownish foreground, a blue-green middle zone, and blues in the distance. The horizon-line is relatively high on the picture plane. 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. These are frequently recalled in his paintings, and came to form a common feature of works by other artists.
With other vertical features, these are painted as though seen straight on even when in the lower parts of the landscape, and thus "reassert the integrity of the picture plane" in his works, against the sprawling horizontal impetus of the main landscape. Both Kenneth Clark and Simon Schama see these as "the last survivors of the landscape of symbols", relating them to medieval and even earlier "corkscrew" representations of mountains.

The style is related to the landscape backgrounds of Hieronymous Bosch, although in his main works these function as a backdrop to his crowds of figures and are not as concerned to include a variety of landscape elements; but those of smaller works such as his '' St. Jerome at Prayer'' anticipate the new style. In most respects the paintings retain the same elements as many 15th-century treatments of the same subjects but show, in modern cinematic terms, a long shot rather than a medium shot.

Most art historians regard the figure subject as continuing to be important in the works of Patinir and his followers, rather than mere staffage for a landscape, and most are of subjects where a wide landscape had relevance. Among the most popular were the Flight to Egypt, and the Netherlandish 15th-century innovation of the ''Rest on the Flight to Egypt'', and subjects showing hermits such as Saints Jerome and Anthony with the world from which they had withdrawn laid out beneath them. 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.

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. In the 1550s Pieter Aertsen began a style of large canvasses dominated by great spreads of food still life and large genre figures of cooks or market-sellers, while in the background small biblical scenes can be glimpsed. Some paintings by Jan Sanders van Hemessen place genre figures in the foreground of paintings on religious or moral subjects. In the 17th century all these subject areas became established as independent genres in Dutch and Flemish painting, and later throughout Western painting.

Patinir's invention was developed by Herri met de Bles (1510 – c.1555–1560), who was probably his nephew. He took the type into the new style of Northern Mannerism. Other artists were Lucas Gassel

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