Mountain - Forest - River

The emergence of landscape painting has long been a subject of interest in art history, and the general consensus is that the first autonomous landscape paintings were created in Germany in the early 16th century. Yet we still understand little about what the reasons for this were. The idea of older research that a new feeling for nature was expressed in the sheets and that this marked the dawn of the modern age is no longer convincing.

Albrecht Altdorfer and Wolf Huber in particular produced landscape graphics that did not serve to prepare landscape backgrounds but were intended for the commercial market. What interested contemporaries in these sheets is still unclear. It has not even really been investigated what kind of landscapes were designed by the artists. In addition to media-historical questions, environmental and agricultural-historical perspectives are also of importance here.

In order to get closer to answering these questions, the interdisciplinary workshop Der Wald in der Frühen Neuzeit zwischen Erfahrung und Erfindung (The Forest in the Early Modern Period between Experience and Invention) was held at the University of Stuttgart from 14-16 November 2019, kindly funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung.