Synopsis
Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorrain were the masters of ideal, or heroic, landscape painting in the 17th century. In this book, Margaretha Lagerlof interprets these paintings in a new way, examining them from four perspectives relevant to their contemporaries - those of drama, rhetoric, utopianism, and metaphysics. She first discusses the emergence of the genre of landscape painting, its essential principles, and its position in the theoretical structure of classicism. Next she views the genre of ideal landscape through the "filters", as she calls them, of drama, rhetoric, utopianism, and metaphysics. Through the filter of drama she sees ideal landscape as a setting for man's emotions, actions, and ultimate fate. She uses the laws of classical rhetoric as an analogy for the way in which an ideal landscape is constructed, showing how content and style were adapted to produce a desired effect. She explains how utopianism evokes the dream of a perfect life, and how metaphysics leads us to ask whether the order visible in the pictures springs from the eternal verities of ideas or of God.
In a concluding chapter, Lagerlof closely analyzes four paintings by Carracci, Poussin, and Lorrain, exploring how the various patterns she has described interact with one another.
