In 1521, Albrecht Dürer climbed to the top of St Bavo’s cathedral in the Flemish city of Ghent. From 90 metres up in the sky, the travelling artist looked down at a world stretching into infinity. The view, however, offered something else too, a look inside the mind of a new friend, Joachim Patinir.
It was Patinir (circa 1480/85 – 1524) who could claim to be the first painter to make landscape the real subject of his art. Although all his surviving paintings have a biblical or classical theme, what they really treat is the great sweep of nature. Using a then novel horizontal format and adopting a raised foreground – which Dürer emulated from the top of the belfry – they show endless vistas in which man, however holy, is just another detail in God’s wide creation. They depict setting more than subject.
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