Landscapes from the collections of the Lithuanian National Museum of Art

Landscape is a work of painting or graphics that depicts a landscape which can be natural or influenced by a person. Landscapes are most often composed of forests, meadows, mountains, water, sky, ruins, city, various times of the day or natural phenomena. In the paintings you can recreate real or fictional places.
The four most common types of landscapes are divided according to what they represent: puristic – nature, marinistic – water motifs, urbanic – cities or villages, and animalistic – animals.
Elements of the landscapes were also found in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, ancient Greek wall paintings and decorative pieces of art – mythological, batal (battle or war) or hunting genres of composition. In the 16th century, the landscape began to exist as an independent genre, and the significance of its status was made more significant by the ideas of the Reformation, theories of the landscape set by L.B. Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci which provide principles of perspective, and depth of space. In Lithuania, the landscape as an independent genre began to develop only at the end of the 18th century.