Landscape painting did not, however, become an independent genre in Ukrainian art until the 19th century. In Mary and Elizabeth in the iconostasis of the church in Sulymivka, Poltava gubernia (ca 1830), the foliage and trees dominate the composition. Vasyl Hryhorovych-Barsky popularized landscape art through his drawings of his travels (1723–47) in Europe and the Near East.Īt the beginning of the 19th century landscapes became an integral part of icon compositions. Terensky (the town of Dubets as seen through a window in his Krasytsky Family Portrait ). One of the earliest attempts to convey the local scenery was made by M.

In the 18th century, landscapes gained greater prominence in religious pictures (eg, the depiction of Mount Sinai in the mural in the west wall of Saint George's Church in Drohobych). Ifika iieropolitika (1712) contained Zubrytsky's engraving of a windmill on a river bank. Levytsky engraved a realistic panorama of the land and architecture for the thesis dedicated to Metropolitan Rafail Zaborovsky (1739). Depictions of churches and secular buildings appeared in the engraved theses produced in the 17th and 18th centuries by the Kyivan Cave Monastery Press. In 1674 Nykodym Zubrytsky engraved the siege of the Pochaiv Monastery, and in 1699 Dionisii Sinkevych engraved the architectural ensemble of the Krekhiv Monastery both were from a bird's-eye view. Similar engravings by Leontii Tarasevych showed an even greater preoccupation with local scenery. In 1669 Master Illia depicted the Dnipro River in his engraving The Coming of Iconographers from Constantinople. At first they were variations on landscapes borrowed from Western European models, but later, local elements emerged. Some of the earliest landscapes were settings for religious engravings. Landscapes also appeared as backgrounds to portraits (portrait of Yevdokiia Zhuravko ). Architecture and local scenery were important elements in the icons of Ivan Rutkovych ( Road to Emmaus in the iconostasis of the church in Skvariava Nova, near Zhovkva, Galicia) and Yov Kondzelevych (the landscape on The Dormition in the Bilostok Monastery ). During the Renaissance landscapes in icons became less schematized and began looking more like the surrounding Ukrainian countryside (eg, in The Dream of Jacob in the iconostasis of the Church of the Holy Ghost in Drohobych).

Architectural settings became part of the separately enclosed scenes in icons illustrating the lives of saints (eg, in the icon of Saints Cosmas and Damian from Tylych in the Lemko region). In Ukrainian art highly conventionalized landscape elements were used in icons (eg, The Transfiguration in the Church of the Mother of God in Busovysko, near Turka, Galicia).

Landscape art