ABSTRACT
In pictorial representation, the opposed dynamic and expressive characteristics, which are present in every epoch and culture, and can be ascribed to the two broad qualitative categories of “forms that lean” and “forms that fly”, are in large part precisely due to directed tensions produced by condition of orthogonality and obliquity. The investigation of the pictorial representation of windmills has been inspired by some remarks by R. Arnheim on the way in which, in Dutch landscape painting of the seventeenth century, windmills are indeed represented. The content of pictorial representation of landscape can concern, then, uncontaminated nature but also the cultivated land, rivers but also the bridges to cross them, seas but also the ships that plough them. The landscape genre of Dutch art of the 1600s has frequently and unanimously been called realistic to qualify its representational intents, which in this case seem to be, almost entirely, free from any form of idealisation of nature.
