[In the following review, Fremantle artfully chronicles Clark's Landscape Painting through the centuries.]

The beauty of God, Aquinas states, is the cause of the being of all that is. This is a theme Sir Kenneth Clark, long Director of the National Gallery in London, clearly illustrates and amplifies.

“Facts become art through love, which unifies them, and lifts them to a higher plane of reality, and, in landscape, this all-embracing love is expressed by light,” Sir Kenneth writes. His study of man's relation to nature, reflected through the centuries in the history of landscape painting, considers in detail four ways in which man has attempted to convert the complexity of natural appearances into the unity of an idea. He shows both the simultaneity, and the sequence of these four modes, from neo-classical times to our own: the acceptance of descriptive symbols, curiosity about facts, the creation of fantasy as an escape from fears, and a belief in what W. H. Auden would call a “pre-lapidarian order,” all of which are as implicit in a French sixteenth century tapestry of the lady with a unicorn, as in the douanier Rousseau's landscape with monkeys.

As a pilgrim's progress this is a most satisfactory book [Landscape Painting], for Sir Kenneth follows light, the hero of every picture, as it illuminates the visible world, down the centuries from a hellenistic fresco illustrative of the Odyssey, to an underwater abstraction by Underhill. There are 115 admirable illustrations.

Beginning with the time when the horrors of Grendal's Mere were depicted by Beowulf, Sir Kenneth shows symbolism instead of clouding vision, rather provided it with an “unusual intensity” which gave the earliest naturalism of the Middle Ages a unique beauty. But he goes on to add “… the leaves, flowers and tendrils, which in the later twelfth century, break through the frozen crust of monastic fear, have the clarity of newly-created things. Their very literalness and lack of selection is a proof that they have been seen for the first time.” Fie, fie, Sir Kenneth! Surely Saint Bernard, hiding from his eyes the beauty of the Alps, lest he love them too much; surely the continual, abiding tenderness between beasts and saints, so exquisitely shown by Helen Waddell; surely the delight in flowers and in natural beauty, which placed an image of Our Lord or Our Lady wherever in all Europe there was a lovely view, so that creature and Creator might share in the “very good” He made, are evidences of something else than a “frosty crust of fear”? When darkened Europe was Hun-ridden, anarchic, the loveliness of her landscapes still glowed serenely from the margins of monastic manuscripts.

Sir Kenneth finally arrives at the ideal landscape, at Giorgione, and at Claude. But the nineteenth century is beckoning, and the classical must grow less. As he turns to English painting, Sir Kenneth points out that “the idea that an appreciation of nature can be combined with a desire for intellectual order has never been acceptable in England;” indeed, even to enjoy the ordered landscape of cypress and stone pine has, from earliest days, been suspect. “An Englishman Italianate, is a devil incarnate,” though said in the fifteenth century, was as true when Ruskin wrote.

How integrally the artist creates nature, and how integrally art creates life, and fiction, fact, as Oscar Wilde insisted, is shown by Constable and Turner. “I never saw an ugly thing in my life,” Constable said, and in his great landscapes of the Stour, as in Wordsworth's poems, “The passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”

With Van Gogh and Cézanne, the ages of faith ended. For “landscape painting, like all forms of art, was an act of faith, and, in the nineteenth century, when the more orthodox and systematic beliefs were declining, faith in nature became a form of religion.” It is, indeed, the average religion of the Englishman of yesterday.

Now we are once more in the grip of millennial fears. Can we escape from them by creating once again the image of an enclosed garden? Sir Kenneth replies emphatically, No. “The artist may escape from battles and plagues, he cannot escape from an idea. The enclosed garden of the fifteenth century was based on the idea that nature was friendly. Science has taught us that nature is the reverse.” And by fear we can only destroy.