A Remarkable Painting About Journeying to the Afterlife
The boat ride between Patinir’s paradise and underworld
Let me introduce you to a wonderful term in art history: Weltlandschaft.
It’s a German word meaning “world landscape” and refers to paintings that present imaginary panoramas made up of grand topographical features like mountains, rivers, valleys, forests and buildings.
The painting shown above, by the Netherlandish artist Joachim Patinir, is a fine example of a Weltlandschaft.
In fact, the Flemish painter was a pioneer of the world landscape form. Working in the first decades of the 1500s, his paintings seem to lay out the whole Earth before us — whilst often offering a fictive realm where fantastical architecture are just as likely to spring up alongside towns and farmland.
Meanwhile any figures, either earthly or fabled, are dwarfed by the expansive surroundings.
In an age when Flemish cartographers like Gerardus Mercator and Abraham Ortelius were making the first modern maps — and kick-starting the Golden Age of Dutch cartography — Weltlandschaft paintings emerged as an artistic counterpart.
They are interesting not only for their high vantage point, but also because they reveal a new-found fascination…
