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Landscapes of Fire In spite of the influence of the Flemish and Venetian schools on Spanish painting, the landscape genre was not widely practiced by Spanish artists in the 17th century. The widespread lack of social demand for such paintings was largely due to the anticlassical, antihumanist ideology of the Counter-Reformation, which regarded human nature and nature in general as contingent and corruptible. The hedonistic contemplation of landscape, the study of the scientific laws governing it, and its symbolic interpretation as a longed-for Arcadia were therefore considered paganizing or heretical. When landscapes were pictured, often as part of a painting devoted to another subject, they were given an agitated, tormented, and visionary quality. The cultural fuel for this vision came from mysticism, which proposed an emotional involvement with landscape through the medium of sacred lyric poetry in the 16th century, around the time El Greco first began to treat the subject. Although this tendency was soon curtailed, it left smoldering embers that were fanned back into a flame centuries later by artists like Francisco de Goya, Pablo Picasso, and Joan Miró. For Goya the agitation of his landscapes had a great deal to do with the cult of the sublime, and Picasso's long-standing interest in El Greco led him to bring the spirit of that artist's landscapes back to life. Surrealists such as Miró felt an almost doctrinaire obligation to reshape images of the Spanish landscape as exaltations of the fantastic and visionary, while maintaining many of its peculiarly national features. |
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