Horizon and Horizontality in Pictorial Space. A Comparison between the Landscape Painting of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Hasegawa Tōhaku

Abstract

In its origins, landscape painting in Europe and East Asia created different natural settings, reflecting a cultural understanding of their societies’ relationship with the natural environment. In this context, the aim of this article will be to elucidate the sense of space in these two settings through a comparative study of the depiction of nature in Hasegawa Tōhaku’s the Pine Tree screen (ca. 1595) and Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow (1565). To do so, we will compare both pictorial spaces, their distinctive characteristics and their two systems of representation: the European perspective and the far-eastern moving focus. Thus, taking into account Panofsky’s description of perspective as the «symbolic form of the West», we will assess whether this definition can be extrapolated to the moving focus as the «symbolic form of the East». From these premises, we will examine whether the development of both pictorial spaces can respond to this hypothesis.