Landscape art depicts scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather usually is an element of the composition. In the first century B.C., Roman frescoes of landscapes decorated rooms that have been preserved at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Traditionally, landscape art depicts the surface of the earth, but there are other sorts of landscapes, such as moonscapes.
The word landscape...
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Landscape art depicts scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather usually is an element of the composition. In the first century B.C., Roman frescoes of landscapes decorated rooms that have been preserved at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Traditionally, landscape art depicts the surface of the earth, but there are other sorts of landscapes, such as moonscapes.
The word landscape is from the Dutch, landschap meaning a sheaf, a patch of cultivated ground. The word entered the English vocabulary of the connoisseur in the late 17th century.
Early in the fifteenth century, landscape painting was established as a genre in Europe, as a setting for human activity, often expressed in a religious subject, such as the themes of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the Journey of the Magi, or Saint Jerome in the Desert.
The Chinese tradition of "pure" landscape, in which the minute human figure simply gives scale and invites the...
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