Landscape paintings are not based on reality in a heroic setting. Instead, paintings are inspired by the painter’s imagination and are meant as a critique for the painter’s imperfect surroundings. Landscape with Man killed by a Snake 1648 (Figure 4) depicts higher forms of landscape evoking strong emotional feeling such as terror and worry. Nicholas Poussin achieves this effect as the painting explores a terrifying impact of natural events on human life and integrates a dramatic affect and fear in subtle ways to elevate the subject matter. This painting is contradictory ranging from anguish and violence of the tragic action in the foreground to a chaotic landscape. This painting specifically, and many we have discussed throughout class, explores the powerful emotional effects of which landscape can play a role. In most cases the people are not the subject of the painting in a heroic landscape. Rather they are positioned in the foreground and remain smaller in scale than other aspects of the landscape. In a majority of the heroic landscapes we have looked at, people remain small, as colors make them recede into the actual landscape, giving the portrait an
Landscape paintings are not based on reality in a heroic setting. Instead, paintings are inspired by the painter’s imagination and are meant as a critique for the painter’s imperfect surroundings. Landscape with Man killed by a Snake 1648 (Figure 4) depicts higher forms of landscape evoking strong emotional feeling such as terror and worry. Nicholas Poussin achieves this effect as the painting explores a terrifying impact of natural events on human life and integrates a dramatic affect and fear in subtle ways to elevate the subject matter. This painting is contradictory ranging from anguish and violence of the tragic action in the foreground to a chaotic landscape. This painting specifically, and many we have discussed throughout class, explores the powerful emotional effects of which landscape can play a role. In most cases the people are not the subject of the painting in a heroic landscape. Rather they are positioned in the foreground and remain smaller in scale than other aspects of the landscape. In a majority of the heroic landscapes we have looked at, people remain small, as colors make them recede into the actual landscape, giving the portrait an