Landscape art depicts scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests. Sky is almost always included in the view, and weather usually is an element of the composition. In the 1st century A.D., Roman frescoes of landscapes decorated rooms that have been preserved at Pompeii and Herculaneum.
The word landscape is from the Dutch, landschap (the German cognate is Landschaft) meaning a sheaf, a patch of cultivated ground. The word entered the English vocabulary of the connoisseur in the late 17th century.
Early in the 15th century, landscape painting was established as an art genre in Europe, as a setting for human activity, often a religious subject, such as the themes of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt, the Journey of the Magi, or Saint Jerome in the Desert.
An EASEL is an upright support used for displaying and/or fixing something resting upon it.
The word is an old Germanic synonym for donkey (compare similar semantics); its equivalent is the only word for both animal and apparatus in various languages, such as Esel in German and earlier ezel in Dutch (the easel generally in full schildersezel, 'painter's donkey'), themselves derived from Latin Asinus (hance ass), interestingly in Danish the word is staffeli and donkey is ?sel.
Easels are known to have been in use since the time of the ancient Egyptians. In the 1st century, Pliny the Elder makes reference to a large panel placed upon an easel. |