Cheerful, smiling vistas

 Landscape in the film A Few Days from the Life of I. I. Oblomov (1980)

Can there be such a thing as an indolent landscape? Ivan Goncharov's Oblomov includes a whole chapter in which its hero, unable to rouse himself from bed, falls asleep and dreams of his childhood home, the estate of Oblomovka. Goncharov describes this gentle idyll in order to explain how Oblomov has come to be so incapable of engaging actively with the world beyond his comfortable flat. As he drifts off, 'we find ourselves transported to a land where neither sea nor mountains nor crags nor precipices nor lonely forests exist—where, in short, there exists nothing grand or wild or immense.' Here, on the contrary, there is nothing threatening and the heavens seem to enfold the earth in a loving embrace.

The sun shone warm and bright during half the year, and, withdrawing, did so so slowly and reluctantly that it seemed ever to be turning back for one more look at the beloved spot, as though wishing to give it one more bright, warm day before the approaching weather of autumn. Also the hills of that spot were no more than reduced models of the terrible mountains which, in other localities, rear themselves to affright the imagination. Rather, they resembled the gentle slopes down which one may roll in sport, or where one may sit and gaze dreamily at the declining sun. Below them, toying and frisking, ran a stream. In one place it discharged itself into a broad pool, in another it hurried along in a narrow thread, in a third it slackened its pace to a sudden mood of reverie, and, barely gliding over the stones, threw out on either side small rivulets whereof the gentle burbling seemed to invite sleep. Everywhere the vicinity of this corner of the earth presented a series of landscape studies and cheerful, smiling vistas. The sandy, shelving bank of the stream, a small copse which descended from the summit of that bank to the water, a winding ravine of which the depths were penetrated by a rill, a plantation of birch-trees—all these things seemed purposely to be fitted into one another, and to have been drawn by the hand of a master. Both the troubled heart and the heart which has never known care might have yearned to hide themselves in this forgotten corner of the world, and to live its life of ineffable happiness. Everything promised a quiet existence which should last until the grey hairs were come, and thereafter a death so gradual as almost to resemble the approach of sleep.

Lenin, who shared a birthplace with Goncharov, the town of Simbirsk, often complained that Russia was full of Oblomovs. As Galya Diment wrote in an introduction to a 2006 translation, Simbirsk was itself 'one of the “quietest, sleepiest and most stagnant” towns in all of Russia, its legendary sloth rendered immortal in an 1836 poem by one of Russia’s greatest poets, Mikhail Lermontov: “Sleep and laziness had overtaken Simbirsk. Even the Volga rolled here slower and smoother.” Goncharov, though fond of Simbirsk, described it in similarly somnolent terms. “The whole appearance of my home town,” he said in 1887, “was a perfect picture of sleepiness and stagnation… One wanted to fall asleep as well while looking at all this immobility, at sleepy windows with their curtains and blinds drawn, at sleepy faces one saw inside the houses or on streets..."'    

Oblomov is a famous example of the 'superfluous man' in Russian literature but, as Michael Wood pointed out in a 2009 LRB article, 'Goncharov has taken away all the Byronic glamour, the touch of aristocratic nonchalance that comes with supposed superfluity in Pushkin, Lermontov and Turgenev.' In the same way, the landscape of Oblomovka 'is a trope aimed at the horrors of noisy Romanticism'. I'll conclude here with another passage from Oblomov's dream which makes this explicit.. 

Even the general aspect of this modest, unaffected spot would fail to please the poet or the visionary. Never would it be theirs to behold a scene in which all nature—woodland, lake, cotter’s hut, and sandy hillside—is burning with a purplish glow, while sharply defined against a purple background may be seen moving along a sandy, winding road, a cavalcade of countrymen in attendance upon some great lady who is journeying towards a ruined castle—a castle where they will find awaiting them the telling of legends concerning the Wars of the Roses, the eating of wild goats for supper, and the singing of ballads to the lute by a young English damsel—a scene of Scottish or Swiss flavour of the kind which has been made familiar to our imagination by the pen of Sir Walter Scott. 

 Of this there is nothing in our country.

Under the trees, where the light air stirs the shadows

I once wrote for myself a guide to the trees and plants in Virgil's Eclogues, drawing on the Clarendon Press commentary by Wendell Clausen.  I won't bore you with the whole thing, but will give here a brief summary to indicate how these details help create a landscape for the ten pastoral poems. Virgil's Arcadia is more artificial than the Sicily in which Theocritus set his Idylls, but I think this makes it all the more rewarding to try to picture the details of his settings.  In the course of the poems Virgil refers to both Greek and Italian places; it could be said that the Eclogues are partly set in the North Italian countryside near Mantua, where the poet grew up, and partly, overlaid on this, in an ideal, pastoral Greece of the mind. 

Tityrus and Meliboeus in the 5th century Vergilius Romanus

Eclogue One

The first Eclogue begins under the cool shade of a beech tree.  Meliboeus, exiled from his farm after the land confiscations that followed the Battle of Philippi, encounters Tityrus, playing his reed pipe and teaching the woods to repeat his song 'Fair Amaryllis'.  I have described this scene before, in a post that goes on to talk about the reappearance of Tityrus in Paul Valéry’s ‘Dialogue of the Tree’ (1943).  Virgil's beech woods would not have been dense, since the hills would need to have allowed grazing to take place.  Meliboeus has been driving goats through the hazel thickets and cannot let them remain to graze on the bitter willow and clover.  He pictures Tityrus, recently freed, happy on his farm, with bees in the willow boundary hedge and wood pigeons and turtle doves in the tops of the elms.  Tityrus takes pity on Meliboeus and invites him to stay the night for a meal of apple, cheese and chestnuts.  The poem ends with the sun setting and the mountains casting lengthening shadows.

Eclogue Two

It is the heat of the day and the sun is driving cattle into the shade and lizards into thorn thickets.  The shepherd Corydon seeks the shade of a beech plantation to contemplate his thwarted passion for the handsome boy Alexis.  The harvesters enjoy a refreshing pottage but Corydon trails after Alexis in the heat, his hoarse voice accompanied by the cicadas.  He imagines a life together with Alexis, herding kids with switches of green mallow.  He offers him gifts: a reed pipe made of hemlock stalks, two roe deer, a garland created by the nymphs, a simpler offering of his own: quinces, chestnuts, plums and branches of laurel and myrtle.  The sun goes down and Corydon thinks of his own half-pruned vines.  He decides that if Alexis rejects him, he can always find another love.

Eclogue Three

The setting for this singing match is an old beech plantation.  The judge, Palaeomon, remarks on the beauty of the wider landscape: crops growing, orchards full of fruit and woodlands in leaf.  The two shepherds sing of various imaginary loves.  In the course of their songs, Menalcus likens his feelings for Amyntus to the way crops love the rain, goats love the arbitus tree and breeding herds love the willow; Damoetus describes a love-sick bull who is pining away even though he is surrounded by vetch to eat.  The contest is declared a draw and Palaeoman asks them to stop their songs, because the meadows have had their fill.

Eclogue Four

This fourth poem is not set in a landscape, its subject is politics - probably the Pact of Brundisium between Anthony and Octavian.  Virgil excuses himself for leaving his pastoral theme, saying that not everyone likes the 'tamarisk' and that he will now sing a 'forest'.  He evokes a Golden Age that will come with the birth of a child (possibly the future child of Antony and Octavia), when grapes will hang from thorn trees and honey will be secreted by the oak trees.  Soil will need no harrowing, vines will need no pruning and - a detail that sounds rather less appealing - sheep will grow their wool in various bright colours.

Eclogue Five

Menalcus, the older of the singing shepherds in Eclogue Three, meets Mopsus and suggests that they sit down in a grove of hazel and elm.  But Mopsus has an alternative to sitting 'under the trees, where the light air stirs the shadows,' and proposes a cave, its entrance hanging with wild vines.  He wants to share a song that he had inscribed onto a beech trunk (it has been pointed out that the song is rather long to have been written out in full on a tree...)  He sings of the death of Daphnis, mourned by Nature so that where once there were fields of barley there now grew only darnel and wild oats, whilst violets and narcissi were succeded by thistle and thorn.  Menalcus then sings his own elegy for Daphnis, saying that he will be praised as long as boars love the heights, fish love streams, cicadas drink dew and bees suck thyme.

Eclogue Six

In this poem the god Silenus sings to two shepherd boys so beautifully that the oak trees bow their heads.  Among the myths he recounts is that of Pasiphaë, wandering in search of the bull who rests under the ilex among soft hyacinths.  The bull is described as pale, pallentis, a word that may represent the greenish yellow of summer grass.  Silenus tells of Phaeton's sisters, transformed into tall alders after lamenting his death on the banks of the Eridanus.  He sings all the songs that Apollo once composed and made the laurels along the river Eurotus learn.  It was at Eurotus that Apollo mourned the loss of Hyacinthus.  Finally evening comes and the young shepherds leave for home to count their sheep.

Eclogue Seven

The narrator is Meliboeus, from Eclogue One, who remembers being approached one day by Daphnis when he was busy protecting his myrtles from frost damage.  Daphnis persuaded him to go down to the river, fringed with reeds and the sacred oak, a-drone with bees.  There they witnessed a singing contest between Corydon and Thyrsis.  Corydon longed for a nymph sweeter than thyme and fairer than pale ivy.  He sang of the beautiful pastoral landscape: springs, soft grass, arbitus trees, vines, chestnuts and juniper bushes.  He concluded by listing plants associated with the gods and heroes but saying that above these is the hazel, loved by Phyllis; Thyrsis in turn said that if only his lover Lycidas were with him more often, the ash and pine would mean nothing to him.

Eclogue Eight  

This is another singing match in which the shepherd Damon laments his lost love while leaning against the trunk of an olive tree (or possibly on an olive-wood staff, like the one owned by Polyphemus in the Odyssey).  He sings of a world gone awry, of alders that bear sweet narcissus and tamarisks that shed tears of amber.

Eclogue Nine

The landscape here is that of the first Eclogue, and the conversation is between Lycidas and Moeris, a dispossessed landowner who is suffering the indignity of looking after the new owner's goats.  Lycidas thought that the land, which stretches down to a river where beeches grow, had been saved by the poetry of Moeris's friend.  But poetry wasn't sufficient to spare this countryside; the beeches by the river have their tops broken off.  The two men recall various poems, including one addressed to Galatea, which I have referred to here before.  Seamus Heaney translated this and in his version the grotto of Cyclops is an undermined riverbank with swaying poplars and vines in thickets 'meshing shade with light.'  Lycidas wants to hear more but Moeris is in no mood to continue.

Eclogue Ten

In this last poem Virgil himself appears in Arcadia, surrounded by his goats.  He sings of his friend Gallus, who was lying love sick under a crag, while the laurels and tamarisks wept for him, when Pan, stained with the juice of elderberries, arrived with Sylvanus, wearing a coronet of fennel and Madonna lilies.  Pan told Gallus not to weep over his love, but Gallus, inconsolable, vowed to live alone in the forest or by wandering in the mountains.  Virgil says that he hopes this song will not displease Gallus, for whom he expresses a love that is growing hourly, like alders shooting up in the spring.  He notices a chill in the air, under the shade of a juniper tree, so he gathers together his goats and heads for home.   

Arcadian Landscape with Resting Shepherds and Animals

 Adriaen van de Velde, Arcadian Landscape with Resting Shepherds and Animals, 1664

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I feel in need of a little escapism at the moment, so I went down to Dulwich to look round the exhibition Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape.  His drawings and paintings are so detailed that you feel you could disappear into them, although quite where you would then be I am not sure: a landscape that isn't quite Holland or Italy.  His pastoral scenes are bathed in warm Mediterranean sunlight but their animals, shepherdesses and herdsmen look as if they are enjoying unusually fine weather, surrounded by verdant trees under high Dutch skies.  The exhibition shows how carefully composed these landscapes were, with rough ideas sketched in the open air and detailed preparatory drawings done back in the studio.  However, Van de Velde also painted recognisable views, including several of the beach at Scheveningen.  I always think Scheveningen looks like quite an unprepossessing place in old paintings, but the sheer concentration of artists working nearby turned it into something more significant (culminating in 1881 in the Mesdag Panorama - see my earlier post on this). In the video clip embedded below the curator, Bart Cornelis, talks about these Scheveningen paintings in more detail, commenting in particular on their figures.

Adriaen van de Velde, The Beach at Scheveningen, 1658

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I have reported here several times on exhibitions whose curators make much of changing tastes, particularly the rediscovery of previously undervalued painters (for example Peder Balke or Francis Towne).  In the case of Van de Velde, the tone is more of surprise that these charming but hardly spectacular paintings were so highly valued in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Among collectors there was a particular desire for Van de Velde's rare 'coloured drawings', unusual sketches done painstakingly with the end of a brush in muted shades.  In 1833 the Teylers Museum paid a huge sum, 1730 guilders, for one of these, Landscape with livestock crossing a river.  As you can see below, there are parts of it like the foreground reeds that have the delicacy of a Chinese ink painting. It could be said that the smaller the works, the more impressive Van de Velde is -  a couple of larger paintings in the final room are not very appealing.  I was particularly taken with one small painting that is said to look surprisingly modern, Figures in a Deer Park, from the 1660s.  It is hard to convey just how beautiful these trees are - realistic and poetic at the same time - a little reminiscent of Corot.  Looking at it I found myself thinking how pleasant it would be to escape 2016 with its relentlessly bad news headlines and wander instead into this tranquil scene.
    

Adriaen van de Velde, Landscape with livestock crossing a river, 1666
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Source: Art History News

 

Adriaen van de Velde, Figures in a Deer Park, c.1665

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Edward and Sally Speelman Collection

Source: Art Daily 

Kräuterblätter

Writing in The Sunday Telegraph last month, Andrew Graham-Dixon gave a four star review to the British Museum's Landscape, heroes and folktales: German Romantic prints and drawings, an exhibition 'drawn entirely from the holdings of an extremely discerning English private collector, Charles Booth-Clibborn. On this showing, if his collection could be kept together and perhaps, one day, found a permanent home here, it would transform the representation of German art in Great Britain.'  A week later Richard Dormer left the exhibition 'fuming', disappointed not to find 'passion, excess, sweeping emotion' and regretting that the display left 'what must be enormous gaps': his review for The Telegraph gave it just two stars.  I found it fascinating, even though I only had a brief amount of time to look round, and like Andrew Graham-Dixon I was particularly intrigued by the work of Carl Wilhelm Kolbe (1759-1835).

Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, Woodland pool with a man fishing and bystander, detail, 1793

Kolbe was born in Berlin (his father was a gold thread embroiderer) and pursued a career in philology alongside his artistic activities, composing a long book on the French and German languages.  It wasn't until 1789 that he decided to train in art at the Berlin Academy and had to put up with being 'a bearded man in his thirties among a flock of boys, ten to twelve years in age'.  He then obtained a post as court engraver in Dessau, publishing prints in Leipzig and Berlin and acquiring the nickname Eichenkolbe (Oak Kolbe) because he was so fond of depicting oak trees (he said 'trees have turned me into an artist').  The exhibition includes several examples of pastoral and woodland scenes with some impressive oak trees  My photograph above shows a detail from an early etching with some doodles in the margins (the face in profile is possibly a self-caricature).

Carl Wilhelm Kolbe, Et in Arcadia Ego, 1801

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I've always thought it would be fascinating to compile a dictionary of the many sub-genres of landscape art - sous-bois for example, the French term for woodland scenes of the kind shown above.  Such a book might include micro-genres particular to specific artists and one of the strangest of these would be Kolbe's Kräuterblätter (cabbage-sheets) - scenes featuring over-sized plant life, like his 1801 version of Et in Arcadia Ego.  As Andrew Graham-Dixon writes, these etchings 'plunge the eye into vertiginous screens of foliage, spectacularly sculptural blasted trees and writhing, threateningly enlarged clumps of wild vegetation.  It is hard to say if these are dreams of oneness with nature or fantasies of being consumed by it.'  Kolbe himself came to rather regret these later in life, admitting in his autobiography that he had invented these plants 'completely out of my head, and I acknowledge that I was wrong - very wrong - to do so.  Their perhaps not entirely unattractive forms may seduce the eye of the unlearned; the critical gaze of the naturalist cannot bear them.'

The Peach Blossom Spring

Having described the poetry of Hsieh Ling-yün last time, I now feel the need to refer to his contemporary T'ao Yüan-ming (also known as T'ao Ch'ien or Tao Qian), who is traditionally seen as the founder of 'fields-and-gardens' poetry.  According to David Hinton, both poets 'embody the cosmology that essentially is the Chinese wilderness, and as rivers-and-mountains is the broader context within which fields-and-gardens operates, it seems more accurate to speak of both modes together as a single rivers-and-mountains tradition.' (see his introduction to Mountain Home: The Wilderness poetry of Ancient China).

Portrait of Tao Qian by Chen Hongshou

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry (1984) Burton Watson devotes a whole chapter to T'ao (whereas Hsieh only gets three poems).  Watson writes that the poetry of T'ao is ambiguous - 'exclamations upon the beauties of nature and the freedom and peace of rustic life, set uneasily alongside confessions of loneliness, frustration, and fear, particularly of death.  He sought solace in his zither, his books, and above all in wine, about half of his poems mentioning his fondness for "the thing in the cup," though in one of the poems he wrote depicting his own funeral, he declares that he was never able to get enough of it.'

T'ao Yüan-ming is probably most famous for the 'Peach Blossom Spring', a story told first in a preface and then as a short poem.  It concerns a fisherman who lost his way in a valley stream and came upon a forest of blossoming peach trees.  At the end of the forest was a hill with a spring, and an opening through which the fisherman squeezed, coming out onto a broad plane with houses, rich fields, pretty ponds, mulberry and bamboo.  Everyone he saw seemed happy and when they noticed the fisherman in their midst they invited him for a meal.  The villagers explained that people had first come to this secluded place during the troubled times of the Ch'in dynasty and had been cut off from the world since then.  The fisherman stayed several days before taking his leave, whereupon the villagers asked him not to tell the people outside about them.  However after making his way home, the fisherman did tell the local governor about the Peach Blossom Spring, who sent men to find it only to have them return unsuccessful.  Nobody since then has been able to find it.

Among later poets inspired by this tale was Wang Wei, who wrote his 'Song of the Peach Tree Spring' at the age of 19.  He tells the same story as T'ao, but ends with the fisherman mistakenly thinking he will be able to find the place again (from G. W. Robinson's translation):

He was sure of his way there
                             could never go wrong

How should he know that peaks and valleys
                             can so soon change?

When the time came he simply remembered
                             having gone deep into the hills

But how many green streams
                             lead into cloud-high woods -

When spring comes, everywhere
                             there are peach blossom streams

No one can tell which may be
                             the spring of paradise.

Belvedere castle

"The time will come when New York will be built up," Frederick Law Olmsted wrote in his design proposal for Central Park. "The picturesquely-varied, rocky formations of the Island will have been converted into formations for rows of monotonous straight streets, and piles of erect buildings. There will be no suggestion left of its present varied surface with the single exception of the few acres contained in the Park. Then the priceless value of the present picturesque outlines of the ground will be more distinctly perceived." So Olmsted rejected the standard lawns and copses of 'civic pastoral' and instead left woods and outcrops of rock that create a series of local horizons. However, this isn't the case everywhere, as is evident from the fact that the park contains a belvedere tower.


"Sitting high atop Vista Rock (the second highest natural elevation in the park) Belvedere Castle provides a panoramic view in almost every direction. It is also perhaps the most magical monument in Central Park, one that combines function, form and romance - all in one convenient, central location." This photo, which I took on a rather misty morning earlier this year shows what the Central Park website describes as a "breathtaking" view. Maybe I was feeling jaded but I wouldn't describe the view as breathtaking. Perhaps in many cases the prospect tower or belvedere itself is more important than the view - this one is a kind of folly designed by Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould. (I looked up belvederes on Wikipedia and see that in addition to places with beautiful views, the word Belvedere crops up as a type of vodka, a helicopter, a cartoon dog, a car and a Canadian punk band.)


Simon Schama's discussion of Central Park in Landscape and Memory ends with a memorable description of it's dark side (I wonder if he would have written it in quite the same way today?) 'Olmsted could have had no inkling, of course, how the very features that made his park unique - the sunken roads, the gullies and hollows that closed off views to the streets - would shelter a savagery at which even Pan himself might have flinched. The woods and trails of Upper Manhattan are certainly not the only lair where ancient myths and demons, best forgotten, or left to academic seminars, have returned to haunt the modern polis. In fact Central Park divides its arcadian life by the hours of the clock. by day it is all nymphs and shepherds, cupids and fêtes champêtres. But at night it reverts to a more archaic place, the realm of Pelasgus where the wolf-men of Lykaon prowl, satyrs bide their time unsmiling, feral men, hungry for wilding, postpone their music.'

Landscape with Satyr Family

The catalogue to the current Adam Elsheimer exhibition is published by Paul Holberton. Holberton himself knows a lot about early landscape painting and it would be good if he could publish a book based on his own PhD researches in this subject. One of the many interesting things in his thesis is a classification of images according to the characteristics of the figures in the landscape, arguing that a typology based on format or place would be less practicable. So for example Albrecht Altdorfer's Landscape with Satyr Family (1509) would come under the heading of landscapes featuring satyrs and centaurs. Other possibilities are landscapes featuring: hermits and anchorites; lovers at odds with society; vagrants or the homeless (including Biblical examples like Adam and Eve after the expulsion); woodsmen or woodhouses; 'natives' on the borders of the known world (e.g. Scythians or New World Indians); and primitives before the rise of civilisation. These varoius characters might all be termed 'landscape beings.'

Albrecht Altdorfer, Landscape with Satyr Family, 1509

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Promisingly, it says on his website, 'Paul Holberton is currrently writing a book on the history of Arcadia in art and literature (working title: Sex in the Bushes).'

Under a beech tree

Virgil’s first Eclogue opens with the farmer Meiliboeus addressing Tityrus, who is reclining under a sheltering beech tree, playing his reed pipe. Meliboeus is envious of Tityrus, who has the leisure to sit in the shade and teach the woods to repeat his song ‘Fair Amaryllis’ and is amazed that Tityrus can be so relaxed when the countryside is full of troubles (the land confiscations following the Battle of Philippi). But Tityrus has recently been granted his freedom by Augustus and can afford to sing of love and celebrate the pastoral scene. Tityrus takes pity on Meliboeus and invites him to stay the night for a meal of apple, cheese and chestnuts.

Tityrus reappears in Paul Valéry’s ‘Dialogue of the Tree’ (1943), this time in conversation with the philosopher-poet Lucretius, author of On the Nature of the Universe. Valéry contrasts the desire of Tityrus to celebrate a simple unreflective idea of nature, with Lucretius’s search for a more profound underlying truth. Lucretius finds Tityrus gazing at the beech tree, drawn upward to the ‘leaf-woven air’ and inspired to give this beautiful moment a musical form. Tityrus only wants to know the tree in its ‘happy moments’ and fuse its fleeting nature and the voices of leaves, birds and animals into a single form. Lucretius by contrast seeks the Nature of Things and has a more profound understanding of the tree. He feels that Tityrus only loves his own song, not the true beech tree that is its source. Lucretius sees through fleeting appearance to the hard wood of a thirsty plant, gripping its rock and drawing sustenance from the earth. In meditating on the natural order, Lucretius goes so far as to liken himself to the tree it in its structured growth and natural rhythms. Tityrus sings of the tree, but for Lucretius the tree itself is a song. They feel the cool of evening approaching and part with Lucretius lost in radiant rapture.

Lucretius might be seen in this guise as reflecting some of the attitudes of modern post-pastoral poetry. And yet at the end of the dialogue there is something almost too serious and profound in his words, and the reader feels like leaving Lucretius under the tree to follow the modest shepherd Tityrus, as he goes to gather his flock.

Incidentally, the beech tree that Tityrus sits under in both dialogues was native to north Italy, where Virgil was born. It was not known in Greece and therefore it had no established poetic resonances when Virgil was writing: beech trees were mentioned by Catullus but do not appear in Greek poetry like Virgil’s model, the Idylls of Theocritus. It would seem that Virgil drew it from his own landscape experience. After the Eclogues the beech tree would often be associated with the artificial landscape of pastoral poetry. As in Valéry’s dialogue, the beech tree can seem real or poetic, depending on the poet.

Scenes from an Eclogue

Nobody has proved any direct link between Giorgione’s mysterious Tempesta and the pastoral poems of his contemporaries. The art historian Terisio Pignatti, for example, once wrote that there was nothing in the Venetian writer Pietro Bembo’s Gli Asolani that could not be read into the paintings of Giorgione, but he didn’t imply that the artist was actually illustrating anything in Bembo’s book. All that can be said is that Giorgione’s creations - mythological figures in landscape settings and Arcadian figures like the Shepherd with a Flute – share some of the same atmosphere as the pastorals written by Boiardo, Mantuan, Sannazaro et al.

However, one artist at this time did paint Giorgionesque pastoral landscapes based directly on a work of contemporary literature. He was Andrea Previtali, and his Scenes from an Eclogue of Tebaldeo (circa 1505) are now in the National Gallery, London (two of them are shown above). The poem is the popular second eclogue of the Ferrarese poet, Antonio Tebaldeo (1502), in which Damon laments his lost love and then takes his own life. These pictures may have been painted for the cover of a musical instrument, thus uniting poetry, art and music.