Flemish school; 17th century.

Flemish school; 17th century.
"Landscape".
Oil on copper.
It presents faults in the pictorial surface.
It has a frame of the nineteenth century.
Measurements: 17 x 22,5 cm; 23,5 x 29 cm (frame).
Landscape scene that has a chromatic range, based on ocher tones that provide a great vitalism. The work presents a person kneeling and praying in the foreground, but due to the reduced dimensions of this the protagonism of the scene falls on the landscape. In the Baroque period, the representation of landscapes without resorting to the costumbrista theme was rare, since landscape painting as a genre was not fully established until the nineteenth century. In the West, landscape did not appear as a completely independent genre in art until, practically, the 17th century and thanks to Dutch painting (especially Jacob van Ruysdael). It was treated as a mere backdrop in the Middle Ages, until the Renaissance began to show interest in it. The great production of the time is striking, whose recipients were the increasingly wealthy urban bourgeoisie, an abundance of works to which goes hand in hand with the proliferation of pictorial genres. One of them was the landscape, which acquired a great development since the seventeenth century, a time until which it had not appeared as an independent theme, without needing the presence of an anecdote to exist. Like other genres that acquired great popularity during the 17th century in Flanders, landscape painting has its roots in the Dutch pictorial tradition of the 15th century. The background landscapes of the religious works of Van Eyck, de Bouts or van der Goes occupy a much more important place in them as an artistic element than that occupied by the landscape in Italian painting of the same period.