A New Look at Landscape
The 16th Century was a period troubled by religious wars, iconoclasm and the painful separation of the Low Countries from the Spanish in the South and the United Provinces in the North. This complexity is reflected in the art of the period, which is also characterized by fertile exchanges with Italy and France. This is the era when all the possibilities offered by landscape were being discovered, both in religious scenes and independently. A good example of this can be seen in the Paysage avec scène de brigandage (Landscape with Robbery Scene) by Joos II de Momper painted at the beginning of the 17th Century, which shows the persisting atmospheric perspective and inhospitable mountain theme so dear to 16th Century painters. A dark, mysterious forest, a topos in Northern Renaissance painting, is associated with a religious scene in Abraham Govaerts' Paysage avec bûcherons (Landscape with Woodcutters).
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