Page of Scenes of Country Life by UNKNOWN MASTER, French in the Web Gallery of Art, a searchable image collection and database of European paintings and sculptures (1100-1850)

Pixel Size(1010,732)

Scenes of Country Life

1343
Fresco
Chambre du Cerf, Papal Palace, Avignon

By the fourteenth century the garden had become a subject that could transform even interior spaces into sunny simulacra of nature. The Chambre du Cerf in the palace of the popes at Avignon, painted in 1343, is not a representation of landscape for its own sake, as is sometimes claimed. It shows the activities that took place in nature for privileged groups that were not, like the peasant, bound to the land. Figures engaged in hunting and fishing stand out against the deep green of a forest. For popes, kings, and nobles, the untamed forest was usually something beautiful to be enjoyed in itself, but space to be exploited for the hunt and for its rich resources. The natural in nature was too wild, too loaded with negative associations to be a subject for artists, who always sought to tame nature by making it artifice. This urge to domesticate the wild is an important aspect of secular decoration, in wall paintings and tapestries of the period.