Romantic Landscape with Background Characters

The painter filled the center of the piece with two intertwined trees. Into the hilly landscape in the background he placed a village and told the story of this rural place through background characters. In the layout he used a system of several spatial plans by changing light and dark bands, ordered these in mutually crossing diagonals, and closed the depth perspective with mountains.

To record a country changing line by line with changes in the seasons and times of day was the primary effort of painters active in about the middle of 17th century, such as Claude Lorraine (Champagne 1604 – Rome 1682), Nicolas Poussin (Les Andelys 1594 – Rome 1665) and Gaspard Dughet (Rome 1615 – Rome 1675). They set the requirements which for a long time influenced the landscape painting discipline (Tyndall 1976; Blunt 1967).

It is obvious that the painted landscape is fictitious and has no clear pattern. It is also very distant from the classical ideal and has no formal relation to the main representatives of 17th-century landscape painting either. Activities performed by background characters are not particularly linked. The everyday activities of villagers are presented – one of them goes fishing, another drives cattle, another sleeps.

The most distinct effort of the painter of this decorative wall hanging painting lies in the captured image depth – even if in irregular spatial structure and using unbalanced composition – and perhaps also the independence from oft-repeated motifs.

Zuzana Ludiková ● ŠVANTNEROVÁ, Jana a kol.: Tieň minulosti / The Shadow of the Past, Bratislava: Neinvestičný fond židovského kultúrneho dedičstva – Menorah, 2013.