1554
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Landscape with a Road to a Castle on an Island in a River is a 1554 by Hanns Lautensack, a Renaissance work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a tall, narrow painting of a winding river, a tiny castle on an island, and steep hills covered in trees. Lautensack turned the usual wide landscape sideways—like a phone held upright. The vertical format makes the hills feel taller and the sky feel squeezed. Other artists in the Danube valley did this too, but most later painters stuck to horizontal views. Look up the subject of germany to find more landscapes like this.
Like Augustin Hirschvogel, Hanns Lautensack populated his images with traces of human activity that serve to characterize the features of the land rather than suggest a narrative. In several of his etchings, Lautensack used a vertical, rather than horizontal, format, emphasizing the strong verticals of mountainous terrain. This verticality was a particular feature of artists working in the Danube River valley and not often repeated by landscape artists in later centuries.
The print demonstrates the qualities of etching that appealed to Lautensack, namely, the freely drawn lines and spontaneity that was similar to drawing.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Hanns Lautensack (sometimes erroneously referred to as Hans Sebald Lautensack) (1524 – c.
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