Staffage
They are there, in the bottom left hand corner of nearly every landscape painting of a certain era.
Albert Christoph Dies, Leopoldinentempel mit Teich, (1807)
Or on the lower right, hugging the edge: tiny human figures, trudging about, engaging in the minutia of daily life. Enacting a tiny fragment of some larger story.
What's that guy in the lower right doing...? Yup, that's right. Francesco Albotto, The Grand Canal, Venice, Looking East from the Campo San Vio (1740's)
Jacob Van Ruisdael, Extensive Landscape with Wheatfields (c. 1670's)
Or like us, they just gaze at the scene depicted, directing and transforming our attention.
Peter Birman, Blick von isteiner Klotz (c. 1830)
The technical term for the use of these figures in Staffage. It comes from the Old French, I’m told (estoff, “stuff”) or possibly German (staffieren, “to decorate). I associate the word with a staff held up to measure perspective and to afford a sense of scale. So often these figures are used to implicate us into vastness, insinuate us within the sublime.
Peter Breugel, Landscape with Pilgrims at Emmaus (1555-56)
They are watchers, teaching us to recognize new subjects worthy of our attention, targeting our gaze. (“Everyone is looking up, and so do I…”)
Adolf Kosarek, Winter Night, (c. 1850)
Early on, they are used to introduce little stories into the landscape (“storykens” the Flemish biographer and artist Karel van Mander called them endearingly in 1604). In these paintings, they draw us into the landscape, asking that we complete the narrative of which they are a moment’s relic. We lean in, squinting, to peer more closely at these little figures, at the painting itself. [See my notes on how this works in the landscapes of Patinir, here].
Storykens in the paintings of Joachim Patinir, above and below (1530's)
In periods when human relationships to nature are changing, however, these little figures take on a vital new role.
When artists and engravers use their new technology to depict their world from new perspectives, those little figures are there, pausing at the gates of some fabulous town to regard it, inviting us to do the same. [See how Matthäus Merian uses new tech to create a new genre here]
When artists and engravers use their new technology to depict their world from new perspectives, those little figures are there, pausing at the gates of some fabulous town to regard it, inviting us to do the same. [See how Matthäus Merian uses new tech to create a new genre here]
Caspar Merian, Engraving of Stadt Einbeck, (c. 1660s)
As viewers of Roman ruins came to see the rubble not as quarries for new buildings, but as sources for wonder (spolia of a different sort), old wisdom and new treasure, those minute staffage figures appear, gazing intently at the ruins, teaching us to do so.
Giovanni Piranesi, Avanzo del Tempio della Speanza Vecchia, (1756)
When Northern artists journeyed to those fabled and alien Southern lands, they included tiny figures in their landscapes, to teach us of their warmth and beauty.
Johan Jacob Frey, Ansicht von Tivoli (c. 1830's)
Ivan Aivazovski, View of Constantinople, (1846)
Hendrik Voogd, Italian Landscape with Umbrella Pines (1807). Close up of staffage figures, below.
In the late 18th century, attitudes towards European landscapes were shifting. From the dreary and oppressive wastes that they had been regarded as, mountainous regions, whether of the north or in the Alps, were becoming manifestations of the sublime, suggestions of infinitude, offering the possibility of some terrible transcendence. Diminutive humans are present, to underscore our own awe, our own insignificance.
Caspar David Friedrich - Landschaft mit Gebirgssee, Morgen (1823)
Arnold Schulten - Eine bergige Landschaft mit einem schnell fließenden Fluss (1845)
Ernst Ferdinand Oehme - Das Wetterhorn (1829)
Johan Christian Dahl, View from Stalheim (1842)
And as Romantic artists headed out into the American west, encountering such new wilderness, those figures are there, to domesticate the landscape perhaps, or if not, to direct our wonder at it.
Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm (1846)
Staffage figures share and thus guide our view into the depicted world. They form the conduit that enables us to enter the world that they view. Their perspective bounces off ours, aligns with and against it. Together, their gaze and ours, form a closed circuit that sparks the image into life and burns it into our consciousness.
Carl Georg Adolph Hasenpflug, A Medieval Town (1830)
Eventually, in the work of some Romantic artists, the landscape becomes more and more an expression of the inner world of the viewer. And the Staffage figures increase in size, climb to higher ground, move to the center of the image.
Asher Brown Durand, Kindred Spirits (1849). The painting depicts Durand's friend, Thomas Cole (see above) discussing with his friend, William Cullen Bryant. Kindred spirits? The pair of staffage figures, the landscape, and our viewing selves.
The act of paying attention to the landscape itself becomes the subject of the painting.
Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1825-30)
Carl Friedrich Schinkel, Landscape with Pilgrim (1813)
Caspar David Friedrich - Gartenterrasse (1812)
And a parity between the human figure and the landscape can be achieved – a harmony, one hopes.
Sanford Robinson Gifford, A Gorge in the Mountains (1862). We become Staffage.