Concerning Landscape

Rainer Maria Rilke

WE know so little about the painting of Antiquity; but it is safe to assume that it saw people
as later painters have seen landscape. In the scenes of their vases, those unforgettable
memorials of a great art of drawing, the surroundings (house or street) are only mentioned,
as it were in abbreviated form, only indicated by their initial, but the naked human beings
are everything, they are like trees bearing fruit and wreaths of fruit, and like shrubs in
blossom, and like springs in which the birds are singing. In that age the body, which was
cultivated like a piece of land, tended carefully like a harvest, and which one owned as one
owns a valuable property, was the thing looked upon, was beauty, was the image through
which all meanings passed in rhythmic movements, gods and animals, and all life's senses.
Man, although he had existed for thousands of years, was too new to himself, too delighted
with himself, to look beyond or away from himself. The landscape was the road on which he
walked, the course which he covered, it was all the places of sport and dance where the
Grecian day was spent; the valleys in which the armies assembled, the harbours from which
one set forth on adventure and to which one returned full of unheard-of memories and older;
the days of festival and the garlanded silver-sounding nights which followed, the processions
to the gods and the encircling of the altar: that was the landscape in which he lived. But the
mountain, on which no gods in human likeness dwelt, was foreign, the foothills where no
statue, visible from afar, was to be seen, the slopes untrodden by any shepherd-these were
undeserving of mention. All was but a stage and empty so long as man did not appear to fill
the scene with the cheerful or tragic action of his body. Everything awaited him and, when he
came, everything withdrew to give him room.

Christian art lost this connexion with the body, without gaining thereby any real approach
tolandscape; in it men and things were like letters and it formed long, painted sentences with
an alphabet of initials. Human beings were garments, and bodies only in hell; and the
landscape was rarely the earth. It was almost always made to represent heaven when it was
pleasing, and when it aroused terror and was wild and inhospitable, it stood for the place of
the damned and the eternally lost. It was already seen; for human beings had become
attenuated and transparent, but it was natural for Christian art to feel landscape as a slight,
transitory thing, as a strip of green overgrown graves beneath which hung hell and above
which the great heavens opened as the actual, deep reality, desired of all Being. Now that
there were three regions, three dwelling places, which were much talked of: heaven, earth,
and hell--a definite indication of the region became urgently necessary. It had to be seen and
depicted; in the early Italian masters this depiction developed to great perfection, beyond its
immediate purpose, and one has only to recall the paintings in Campo Santo at Pisa to feel
that the idea of landscape for its own sake had by this time definitely emerged. It is true, they
thought to indicate a region and nothing more, but they did this with such warmth of feeling
and devotion, they told of the things attached to the earth, to the despised earth, denied by
man, with such moving eloquence, revealing so much love: that this kind of painting seems
to us today like a song in praise of earth, in which the saints join. And all the things seen were
new, so that constant wonder was mingled with the beholding of them and joy over endless
discoveries. Thus it followed naturally that they praised high heaven together with the earth
and became familiar with it, for their whole longing was to know it. For a deep piety is like the
rain: it always falls back again on to the earth, whence it came, and brings blessing to the
fields.

Without intending to, they had so felt the warmth, the happiness, and the glory which can
radiate from a meadow, a stream, a flower-covered slope and from trees standing fruit-laden,
the one beside the other, that when they painted Madonnas, they surrounded them with this
wealth as with a mantel, crowned them with it as with a crown and unfurled landscape like a
banner in praise of them; for they knew not how to prepare for them any more ecstatic
festival, they knew no offering comparable to this: to bring to them all the newly found beauty
and make it part of them. They no longer indicated any region by it, not even heaven, their
landscape broke into song like a hymn to Mary, the music of which sounded in clear, bright
colours.

But therewith a great development had taken place: the painter depicted landscape, and yet
in doing so was not concerned with it but with himself; it had become the pretext for human
emotion, a symbol of human joy, simplicity, and piety. It had become art. And Leonardo took
it over in this form. The landscapes in his pictures are the expression of his deepest experience
and knowledge, blue mirrors, in which hidden laws reflectingly behold themselves, distances
large like the future and like it unfathomable. It is no accident that Leonardo, who was the
first to paint people as experiences, as destinies which he had explored alone, felt landscape
to be a medium of expression for almost inexpressible experience, depth, and sadness. To
this man, who overtook many yet to come, it was given to use all the arts in a manner infinitely
great; he spoke in them, as if in a variety of languages, of his life and of his life's discoveries
and distant vistas.

No one has painted a landscape which is so entirely landscape and yet so much confession
and the painter's own voice as is the depth of background behind the Madonna Lisa. It is as if
all that is human were present in her infinitely quiet portrait, but as if everything else, all in
front of man and beyond him, were in this mysterious complex of hills, trees, bridges, sky,
and water. This landscape is not the picture of an impression, not a man's view of quiescent
things; it is Nature which came into existence, a world which grew and was as foreign to man
as the untrodden forest of an undiscovered island. To see landscape thus, as something
distant and foreign, something remote and without allure, something entirely self-contained,
was essential, if it was ever to be a medium and an inspiration for an autonomous art; for it
had to be distant and very different from us, if it was to be capable of becoming a redemptive
symbol for our destiny. It had to be almost hostile in its sublime indifference, if it was to give
a new meaning to our existence with its things.

And it was in this sense that that art of landscape developed, which Leonardo da Vinci
anticipated. It developed slowly throughout the centuries in the hands of isolated artists. The
way to be traversed was very long, for it was difficult to wean oneself from the world to such
a degree that one no longer saw it with the prejudiced eye of the native, referring everything
to himself and to his own needs when he looks at it. We know how ill we see the things
amongst which we live and that it is often necessary for someone to come from a distance to
tell us what surrounds us. And so they had to remove things to a distance, that they might be
able later to approach them with greater justice and calmly, with less familiarity, observing a
reverend distance. For men only began to understand Nature when they no longer
understood it; when they felt that it was the Other, indifferent towards men, without senses
by which to apprehend us, then for the first time they stepped outside of Nature, alone, out
of a lonely world. And this was necessary, if man was to be an artist in dealing with it; the
artist must not think of it any longer in its practical significance for man, but look at it
objectively as a great, present reality.

It was thus that man was thought of in the period when he was painted great; but man had
become hesitant and uncertain, and his image melted away in transformations, almost
eluding any further portrayal. Nature was more permanent and greater, all movement in it
was broader, and all repose simpler and more solitary. There was a longing in man to speak
of himself with the sublime means which she offered, as of something equally real, and so we
have the pictures of landscape in which nothing happens. Empty seas were painted, white
houses on rainy days, roads on which no one is walking, and inexpressibly solitary water.
Pathos was increasingly absent, and the better this language was understood, the more
simply it was used. The artist immersed himself in the great quietness of things, he felt how
their existence was passed within laws, without expectancy and without impatience. And the
animals passed quietly amongst them and suffered, like them, the day and the night and were
full of laws. And, later, when man appears in these surroundings, as shepherd, as peasant, or
simply as a figure emerging from the depth of the picture, all presumption has fallen away
from him, and one can see that he desires to be a thing.

In this growth of landscape-art into a slow transformation of the world into landscape, there
is a long human development. The content of these pictures, resulting so unintentionally from
observation and work, speaks to us of a future that has begun in our own time: tells us that
man is no longer the social entity, moving with poise amongst his like, nor is he any longer
one for whom evening and morning, for whom proximity and distance exist. It tells us, that
he is placed amongst things like a thing, infinitely alone, and that all which is common to them
both has withdrawn from things and men into the common depth, where the roots of all
growth drink.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Works. Volume 1: Prose, trans. G. Craig Houston (Norfolk, CT:
New Directions, 1960), pp 1-5.