ABSTRACT
Rosa, and the Scandinavian landscapes of Allart van Everdingcn (regarded as a kind of Salvator Rosa of the North), were still more obviously 'romantic' in the eighteenth-century meaning of the word. Friedrich Wilhelm Basilius von Ramdohr's classification of landscapes is an instance of the eighteenth-century desire to categorize, to treat art and nature as orderly structures, divided and sub-divided in such a way that even disorderly elements could be isolated and kept firmly under control. Joseph Mallord William Turner, the most personal and revolutionary of ail Romantic landscape painters, seems to have been obsessed by the history of his art. A type of landscape painting had in fact been developed in the eighteenth century for the accurate representation of subjects of scientific or historical interest, mountains, glaciers and volcanoes; classical, medieval or modern buildings. In paintings of the least dramatic types of view, without any explicit literary or historical associations, early nineteenth-century artists made their most decisive break with tradition.
