Woodland Scenery with Hermits

 

 Pieter Stevens, Woodland Scenery with Hermits, 1614

This beautiful, atmospheric landscape painting is just 6.9 x 12.8 cm, as you can see from the photo with my hand below.  What makes it so enchanting is the silvery light on bark and leaves, and the way trees frame an opening onto sunlit space, suggesting a whole other world beyond the green shadows of the forest.  You can zoom in on this at the Frankfurt Städel Museum website, but all you see is Pieter Stevens' brushstrokes.  When you look at the real painting your eyes don't register this - it really feels like you are peering into a miniature world.  This approach to painting in the early sixteenth century can be seen in various forms, most notably the cabinet paintings on copper of Paul Bril, Adam Elsheimer and others.  Here, though, it is on a significantly smaller scale.  This landscape is the size of a playing card, because it was actually painted on the back of one.  When the museum bought it in 1869, it was possible to turn the painting over and see the front of a playing card.  Annoyingly, this got removed, but there are still traces and modern curators have worked out that it was a court card used in the game of Trappola.    

As noted a few weeks ago, I'm going to keep a lot of my blog posts short from now on, so I won't say more here about the work of Pieter Stevens, a Flemish artist mainly based in Prague, or riff on the subject of landscape and playing cards.  Miniature portraits were sometimes painted or mounted on cards (there is one of Henry VIII, for example) but I don't know of any other landscape views.  I have written before about many kinds of miniature landscape but the way this one opens up a whole world for the imagination reminded me particular of the Raymond Roussel poem 'The View', a description over 2000 lines long of a tiny beach scene set into the lens of a pen-holder.