I found a great book called Landscape into Art, by Kenneth Clark at the library. In the chapter called “Landscape of Fantasy”, Clark explains that fifteenth century artists, such as Grunewald, Altdorfer, and Bosch, began to explore the “mysterious and the unsubdued” and that they used the landscape to “excite a pleasing horror.” He continues to describe their methods as romantic and even compares them to J.M.W. Turner’s. Pictured below images that are directly and indirectly related to the reading. I found some of them through searches in http://www.wga.hu and http://www.artstor.org. I was specifically looking at how each artist depicted the landscape and architecture, as well as the overall composition and the sky.

In order from left to right:

  1. Scenes from Monastic Legends. Paolo Uccello or the Karlsruhe Master
  2. Saint Barbara (unfinished panel). Jan van Eyck
  3. The Two Hermits from the Isenheim Altarpiece. Grunewald
  4. Saint Nicholas of Tolentino Saving a Ship. Giovanni di Paolo
  5. View of Toledo. El Greco
  6. Mount Sinai. El Greco
  7. Scenes from the Life of Saint Ursula. Meeting of the Betrothed Couple and the Departure of the Pilgrims. Vittore Carpaccio
  8. Journey of the Magi. Benozzo Gozzoli

Bibliography:

Clark, Kenneth. Landscape into Art. Britain: HarperCollins, Publishers, 1991.