Landscape Painting as an Expression of the World Picture of the New European Subject

Abstract

The current study focuses on landscape painting as a genre, which could reveal itself only in the Modern Era because of the particular qualities of the worldview. In order to identify the relationships between philosophy and art, the background of the genesis of the worldview has been analyzed through the M.Heidegger’s theory. According to him, there are five main aspects of the Modern Era: science, machine technology, shaping art as a subject of human sensibility, considering culture as the realization of the highest goods of man, the loss of faithe in gods or desacralisation. Also the concept of the ’worldview‘ which underlines the value of visual perception has been determined so that we could ascertain that this term is more appropriative to describe this aspect of mentality of the Modern Era. Therefore, the subject is similar to an artist who highlights essential features of an object and represents it in a picture. The study provides strong evidence that landscape painting illustrates that the subject separates the object from itself as well as a human is taken from the nature. In this case, landscape art can be explained as a scheme of the external world, which an artist wants not only to know and to systematize, but also to transform in accordance with his own needs. The conclusions demonstrate the significance of landscape painting as a reflection of the ideological attitude of the Modern Era, which is aimed at the objectification of the nature.

Keywords:

worldview, landscape painting, the new European subjectivity, Heidegger, the image of the world