[ART] Weather Through the History of Art 🎨

The most common weather in art history seems to be identical to that of a mild summer day: blue skies, often with some light clouds. A faint to moderate breeze. Comfortable temperature. This is at least how it has been in the landscape tradition, from the early Renaissance - with a few exceptions: the snow of Bruegel, a sky that is lit by a sudden flash in Giorgione's famous tempest, a storm of Tintoretto and El Greco. And the beautiful weather remains throughout the Baroque and Rococo. 

Cloud formations have always been of interest to people. Already in the 4th century BC, Aristotle tried to explain and describe the characteristics of the clouds in his work "Meteorologica". Leonardo da Vinci, another great scientist, continued in the 15th century with the meteorological study of the clouds, but he also used them as an aesthetic expression in his art. Da Vinci's paintings aren't profuse with clouds though, and the background of Mona Lisa looks more like smog than clouds. His drawings of clouds almost seem as if sprung from the expressionist school.

It's not until the 17th century that the clouds get a prominent role in art. During the Dutch Golden Age, landscape painting was one of the most common genres. Since the Dutch landscape is very flat and has a low horizon, large parts of the paintings were occupied by sky and there was also room for a lot of clouds. As an example, two thirds of Jacob van Ruisdael's painting "De molen bij Wijk bij Duurstede" (1670) consists of a sky filled with dark cumulus clouds. For the painters of Renaissance and Baroque, clouds had an equally practical and symbolic function. Literally, they brought forth the gods of ancient mythology, and gave the angels of Christianity something to sit on.

Clouds have also been used to visualize the approaching Judgment Day as in Dürer's woodcut "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (1498), where the four horsemen ride in full speed over the picture with a thundering cloud formation behind them, a raging storm that follows their tracks.

During the Romantic period the clouds generally begin to become more threatening: Goya's and Gericault's skies are dark and their trees bend in the storm. It's also now that the interest in weather really awakens due to scientific progress. In England, Luke Howard develops a classification of clouds, used to this day, which inspires artists to engage in careful studies of weather phenomena: the balanced John Constable paints clouds in all shapes, but mostly in dry weather just before or after the storm, while the more rebellious Turner allows fog and rain and snowstorms to violently ravage the canvas.

By the mid 19th century, the cloud cover of the Romantic period lightens and starts to dissipate. Impressionists, especially Monet, are happy to paint beautiful weather. But when I look for blistering suns during the most scorchingly hot days of the summer, I realize that there are very few examples of them in the history of art. Of course, artists have been more interested in the effects of the sun - of light and shadow, of the many colors sunlight may have, of the changing light during the day - than of the sun itself.

But eventually I recall that you can find such suns where you least expect them; in the paintings of the great Norwegian melancholic Edward Munch. Most of them are setting, and their reflections drip like syrup into a calm sea on a bright Nordic summer evening. But some of them radiate with intense and flickering colors over rugged rocks and a clear blue sea in the middle of the day. Strange counterpoints to his otherwise neurotic inner and outer landscapes.

 @SteemSwede

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