Relief From Nature

Ground in this study is described as a basic premise for the emergence and retreat of images, in architecture, sculpture, painting, and landscape. Examples from different places and periods are examined, the latter ranging from the recent past, to the time of early modernism, the baroque and renaissance periods, remote antiquity, and the beginnings of human art in paleolithic times. The relationships between images and their grounds are variously described as confrontational, congenial, alternating, and ambiguous, in the positive sense of excessive or saturated content. Physical and environmental conditions are described, as are practical and cultural situations, as they have been disclosed in the arts. Ground, remembered and envisaged, is shown to be as much an outcome of creative work as its basic resource.