Description
Secular landscape painting emerged as a genre of painting during the Renaissance and Baroque, yet often could be interpreted on a spiritual level. Even earlier, Chinese and Japanese artists used brush and ink to express intangible relationships between man and nature. In this course, we will discuss spiritual associations within these early landscapes (Western and Asian), as well as explore the broad range of spiritualized landscape conceptions, from the 18th and 19th century images invested with notions of the sublime to the 20th century expanses of Newman and Rothko. Discussions will focus on issues of construction, artificial and natural boundaries, nature as moral exemplar, individual journeys and cultural memory.