“All foreground without distance”: The Rise of Landscape in Late Medieval Painting
“All foreground without distance”: The Rise of Landscape in Late Medieval Painting
This chapter discusses the topographical landscape of the fifteenth century and the so-called world landscape of the early sixteenth century as exemplified in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescoes of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. It shows how Lorenzetti’s vision is distinct from the “topocosmos” of the Middle Ages, as shown in the study of the history of the pictorial imagination. In Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy Jacob Burckhardt coined the memorable phrase “all foreground without distance” that applies to the visual conventions used to represent nature and landscape in the pictorial arts of the Middle Ages. However, there can be no landscape without a horizon in the distance; therefore, the discovery of perspective becomes the sole criterion for the development of landscape painting.
Keywords: topographical landscape, world landscape, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Palazzo Pubblico, topocosmos, pictorial imagination, Jacob Burckhardt, perspective, landscape painting
MIT Press Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
