Description

Landscape into Art gathers together Clark’s Oxford lectures on the origins and development of landscape painting. With his prodigious knowledge and passionate, plain-speaking style, Clark is a superb guide. Though his approach is chronological, his aim was not to set down the history of the art form but to explore our changing relationship with nature and evolving attitudes towards its visual representation – from admiration in ancient Greece and Rome, through aversion and fear in the medieval era, to a renewed ardour in the 19th century. In each themed chapter, he considers the narrative, formal and intellectual factors underlying key developments, such as ‘The Landscape of Symbols’ and the ‘Landscape of Fantasy’.