UNIT 7. The World of Painting » Стр.190 (5)

I prefer landscape to other genre. Landscape is a picture showing an area of countryside or land. A drawing of a landscape is a drawing of land, nature, and usually shows the beauty or sodality of nature. Landscape painting depicts the physical world that surrounds us and includes features such as mountains, valleys, vegetation, and bodies of water. The sky is another important element shaping the mood of landscape paintings. Landscape art ranges from highly detailed and realistic to impressionistic, romantic and idealized. Nowadays, landscape is a very popular subject-matter in art but it has not always been highly esteemed. Landscape was traditionally considered lower in status than portraiture, which patrons would pay much more for. The depiction of landscape in art has its roots in Greqk and Roman times, with murals of landscapes painted, on the walls of expensive villas. However, it was in the Renaissance when landscape gained in popularity. By the -17th century there were two main centres, of landscape painting in Europe: Italy, where landscape did not-enjoy high status and paintings of landscapes tended tobe idealised; and classical, and the Netherlands. In the modern period, landscape has come to mean niny things as artists, embrace new media in addition to the more traditional media to create, environments using light and colour. As the world becomes more built up, urban landscapes also feature more heavily as well as artwork which reflects the plight of the landscape in the face of industrialisation and population growth.