Karel van Mander: "On Landscape Painting"
You young painters, who have sat for a long time bent double, so wrapped up in your incessant work in art that you have become almost half blind, and have almost deadened and closed your senses because in your eagerness to learn, you always want to know more: Stop! You have pulled the plough long enough. Free yourself today from the yoke of work, for the strongest man needs rest and the bow cannot always be stretched taut.
Look yonder, how swiftly the golden ball of the sun rises! It is already aflame as we stand looking elsewhere. See, before us the hunters with their hounds run through the green, bedewed fields, and see how the falling dew reveals in deeper green the marks of their footsteps and the direction in which they are going.
Look there, the distant image of the landscape has the appearance of air, and almost dissolves in air, and the lofty mountains look like moving clouds. From both sides we see the ditches and furrows of the fields run, as in a river bed, towards the background from the point of vision, and fade away. Do not let it trouble you to observe this, for it lets your background recede in strong perspective. . . .
You should not put in the background too faintly, or be as delicate with the shadows as with the lights. You must think about the masses of blue air, which lie between them and paralyse the eye, and bring to nothing the effort for clear comprehension. You should make it seem as though the sun shone through the clouds only thinly here and there and diffused its light over the cities and mountains.
You should, moreover, render darkness, and let the cities be shadowed by clouds, sometimes completely, sometimes only half; you should take care that the mirrorlike surface of the water is not deprived of the colours of the heavens; besides, it is pretty to let the dispersing clouds above dissolve after the old fashion and sometimes to show the sunshine.
You must also seek to portray with colours snow, hail, rainfall, frost, rime, steaming, and dreary fogs, all the things that are necessary to depict melancholy winter days, in such a way that the eye will not often be drawn further than one can throw a stone, to see gateways, houses, towns, and villages.
It is proper that our foreground should be strong, in order to let the other grounds recede, and that we take care to bring something large towards the front, as did Brueghel and other painters of great fame, to whom one may award the palm in what concerns landscape. For in the work of these men who are worthy of honour, there are often powerful tree trunks in the foreground. Let us follow them enthusiastically in this. . . .
There are few Italians who paint landscapes; these, however, are of consummate artistic skill and have almost no peers. They often let us see a vista of perspective effect and grounds firmly fitted into one another.
. . . Besides these, I might name as a competitor which respect to beautiful colours and the artistic content of painting and engraving, the gifted Brueghel; in these pictures he shows us, when he was in the cragged Alps how, without much trouble, to portray the view downward into valleys which make one dizzy, the sheer cliffs, the cloud-kissing pines, the far and distant prospects and rushing streams. . . .
It would be good if you would learn your story from books or poems beforehand--in whatever way pleases you--so as to arrange your landscape in accordance with it. Yet above all do not forget to place small figures next to the great trees, and to set your little world in motion, here to ploughing, there to mowing, there to loading a wagon, here and there to fishing, walking, running, and hunting.
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