JAN VAN GOYEN'S LANDSCAPES: EVOLUTION OF LANDSCAPE AS COMMON KNOWLEDGE AND PRECURSOR TO THE AWARENESS OF DEEP TIME

Jan van Goyen’s (1596-1656) landscapes of the Leiden, Holland area are landscapes in flux. Sand dunes emerge from the sea and engulf dilapidated houses and aged beech trees inland. In some cases the artist distinguishes gentle upwind from steep downwind slopes, but other dunes are more haphazard as if blown by unpredictable gusts of wind. People are few and transient, walking around dunes or resting and chatting momentarily near eroded berms. Nothing is static. The landscape is continually evolving.

None of this would earn the sobriquet, “founder of modern geology,” for van Goyen or his Dutch contemporaries who shared his aesthetic; it is difficult to mark the history of geologic thought with a “golden spike” denoting the growth of common knowledge commonly conceived. (DaVinci, who earlier drew images of dynamic scenery, also drew scientifically valid conclusions from them).

But such scenes do portray a growing awareness of a modern sense of time and landscape evolution quite different from medieval renditions that were static and canonical. Interestingly, dynamic landscapes became “common knowledge” at the same time that vanitas paintings (moralizations on the brevity of life) enjoyed great popularity. Overt moralizations are typically not the subject of seventeenth century Dutch landscapes but the sense that landscape has a history grew simultaneously with the obsession with the lifespan of the human body. This parallel is consistent with the anthropomorphic analogy of landscape and was of interest to Steno (1638-1686). Certainly the growing awareness of the dynamic landscape in the 17^th century was a precursor to the subsequent comprehension of deep time by paradigmatic geologists such as Hutton (1726-1797) in the 18^th century who, like Steno, studied medicine (anatomy) in Leiden and compared Earth to a living organism.