Articles

Abstract

People belonging to different cultures differ in their aesthetic perception and landscape preferences as a result of a number of ethnocultural, social, and environmental factors. Analyzing the development of national landscape painting, which reflects a landscape image created by a culture, we can understand the evolution of landscape perception and appreciation by the representatives of this culture. The study examines the evolution of natural landscape appreciation in Russian painting and reveals the main features of landscape image in each stage of its development and transformation from the 17th century. Each historical epoch has its own social and cultural characteristics that determine the specific vision and image of nature. Until the 18th century, landscape images were rather schematic, although some of them represented real landscapes of Russia. In the 18th century, landscapes were depicted only as a background for the main plot of a picture. The first natural sceneries in Russian painting were topographical views of imperial palaces and parks. Italian landscapes were recognized as a classic example of beautiful landscapes in contrast to landscapes of the own country considered ordinary and uninteresting. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Russian culture began to increase the rejection of foreign exotics; Russian art discovered the real living nature and the national landscape. The concept of «national landscape» assumes the image of a certain geographically specific nature. For Russian artists, it was the middle stripe of the European part of Russia. «Impression of nature» and «landscape of mood» were the next steps in the development of landscape image in the late 19th to early 20th century. Drastic changes in the perception of nature occurred in the 20th century. Special emphasis in Russian landscape painting was given to natural hazards and phenomena such as volcanic eruption, earthquake, flood, storm, thunderstorm, rain, and others.