Interpretation of Spatial Models of Forest Landscape in Book Graphics of the Late 19th and Early 20th centuries

Abstract

The article analyses the peculiarities of construction and symbolic meaning of forest scenes in book graphics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in their connection with the selected examples of the interpretation of forest motifs in the history of art of previous periods – the Late Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Romanticism. Iconographic research treats the dark space of the legendary “wild” forest in its spatial and semantic meaning as similar to a wall, a curtain, the boundary of the “other worldˮ. The paper highlights sustainable compositional techniques of forest imagery, and points out the differences in forest images of Romanticism and Symbolism emphasising the psychological dramatisation of perception of the woodland scenes in the book graphics of the turn of the 20th century. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the location of the coordinate axes of forest space, such as the horizon line and the trail, refusal to depict the sky and emphasis on the tier of tree roots.