The term “landscape,” originally a painter’s term of Dutch derivation, was first used in the late 16th century to describe the rendering of natural scenery in painting. Elements of landscape and natural features were of course, from a very early time, incidental background accessories of historical, mythological, commemorative, anecdotal and other types of painting. In the hieratic art styles of Egypt. Byzantium and Romanesque Europe, landscape elements introduced as a setting for the main theme of a picture were usually highly conventionalized and standard formal conventions were used to indicate mountains, rivers, trees, etc. Landscape as the principal theme of a picture, however, painted for its own sake, was not possible until artists and their patrons had learned to "see" landscape. This happened slowly and very gradually. Until recent times, we looked at Nature as an assemblage of isolated objects, without connecting trees, rivers, mountains, roads, rocks and forest into a unified scene. The ability to see Nature as a “scene” may have been developed largely by artists and spread to the general public. The slow growth of perspective was not merely a matter of mastering a difficult technique; it was the expression of a way of seeing. Thus conventional formulas rather than naturalistic transcripts of Nature were the starting-point of pictured landscape. The artist who sits down in front of a subject presupposes a long evolution in which the vocabulary of rendering natural scenery gained shape side by side with the power to see Nature as scenery.

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