What we regularly label as “art” is the result of human creativity over millennia, the functions of which were not for giving their creators aesthetic pleasure but those myriads of reasons that would link the art maker with the world “out there”—
in the imaginary domain where ancestors are still alive and where they themselves join them, sooner or later. Being extensions from the meaning-making person on one’s own body (e.g., necklaces, beads, etc.), the creation of symbolic forms expanded to that of clothing, surrounding living quarters, and special places for the interchanges with the spirits. The making of symbolic objects—first for specific functions (e.g., masks) that later became “art” (at least in the occidental mind- set)—can be analyzed as a massive social practice of creation of catalytic devices for supporting different life problems’ solving in the future. A roadside shrine of any religious kind is a semiotic catalytic device once put there by some author, but in its existence over centuries enables the passing-by travelers to feel in some par- ticular ways—rather than others.
The emergence of the genre of pure landscape painting in Renaissance Europe in the sixteenth century and its continuation to our days are an extreme example of creating wholistic scenes of nature which are the result of the painter’s imagination (and drawing skills) and came to be of demand by paying collectors of paintings. In contrast to portrait paintings—where the function was to preserve the images of oneself and of one’s forebearers for next generations—landscape paintings did not
3 The psychology and sociology of religious feelings were an honorable research topic in the social sciences in its history, all through to the 1920s. After that it declined in favor of comparative per- spective—comparing various religious denominations with one another, without looking into the functions of particular religious rituals in human lives.
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have such personal connectivity with the objects painted. Many of the scenes painted were imaginary4—in the Netherlandish art of the seventeenth century, scenes of Dutch villages or towns on the foreground, with Italian-type mountain images in the background, abounded. The painters connected the immediately visible with the imagery—resulting in sublime paintings that would keep their new owners fasci- nated for long times as the paintings would hang in their ordinary living places.
The roots of landscape painting in Europe are in the depiction of imaginary landscapes of no physical referent as the background for depicting Biblical scenes.
The nature depicted in the paintings or graphic sheets of how the apple-eating cou- ple of Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden was lavish. Step by step in the history of painting arriving in Renaissance, the Biblical figures disap- peared or became kept less in focus (see Fig. 8.7), while the nature remained depicted as lavish as before or more.
Together with the avalanche of Protestant Reformation and its iconoclastic vicissitudes against Catholic images, the religious meaning in paintings became clandestine—resulting in the eighteenth-century gnoseognostic ideology of viewing the nature as the ultimate proof of divine creation. Religious figures in paintings
4 Painters painted mountains without leaving their studios. It was only on rare occasions that they were asked to paint from the nature itself.
Fig. 8.7 Claude Lorrain’s Coastal Landscape with Acis and Galatea (1657)
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were no longer necessary, but exaggerated geological formations acquired their functions in their sign values. Further transformation of the genre into Romantic landscape painting in the nineteenth century (e.g., German version started by Caspar David Friedrich and the Norwegian counterpart of Johan Christian Dahl) grows out of turning the religious feelings into secular-aesthetic enjoyment of the painted landscapes in Romantic terms.
Referring to the paintings by Claude Lorrain (Fig. 8.7) and Jacob van Ruysdael (Fig. 8.8), which were both in Dresden galleries in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Carl Gustav Carus reflected upon them in his classic 1820s sequence of Nine Letters About Landscape Painting:
… before which you and I could never stand without involuntarily drawing a deep breath, filled with the sense of a cheerful, warmer, southern air; but you also remember the waters, both rushing and still, and the grave beech and oak trees, which Ruysdael pres- ents to us with such infinite freedom and truth that our beloved native landscape seems almost to speak to us directly. Here we may say that the artist’s inner meaning has assumed objective form; both artists’ work convinces us that they had absorbed the life of nature into themselves, in all its beauty and grandeur, and that it pulsed through their veins and sinews, enabling him to speak to us in nature’s language, and to reflect its forms in all their pristine beauty. Hence the feeling of freedom and well-being that over- comes us when we stand before these paintings: we are aware of a beautiful, human individuality that allows us to contemplate its inner essence reflected in the mirror of the true divine world—that is to say, in the truth of nature—and does so freely and calmly, making no attempt to direct us toward any particular view, but at ease in its own blissful contentment; thereby moving us to lay aside all our petty, one-sided concerns…. (Carus, 2002/1831, pp. 108–109, added emphasis)
Fig. 8.8 Jacob van Ruysdael Waterfall with a Ruined Castle (1665–1670)
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Two aspects of the landscape paintings are important to emphasize in the present discussion of catalytic process of the human psyche. First, the paintings are second- order (semiotic) catalysts—they are depictions of real or imaginary views of the nature and its modifications. In contrast with the first-order catalysts—the totality of the meaning field of the person who experiences the natural scene—the paintings have limited dimensions (Lorrain’s is 102 × 136 cm, Ruysdael’s 119 × 180 cm in canvas size). Yet the deep experience that a viewer can generate within oneself is comparable despite this contextual miniaturization. The paintings—like original landscapes—act as catalysts in the viewer’s own creation of their own affective states in the given setting. The paintings do not cause feelings in the viewers, but the act by the viewers to look at them makes it possible for the viewers to arrive at new feelings.5