Natural Landscape as the Great Visual Raconteur: A Reading of The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah

Written by Jasmine Lam
Edited by Thierry Jasmin

Herri met de Bles’ The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (c. 1545) captures the Old Testament’s emotionally visceral display of God’s divine power and discontent unleashed upon the cities, engulfing the sinful townspeople in flames.¹ The Flemish Renaissance artist’s depiction of this Biblical tale sears the image of Sodom’s urban landscape trapped in a fiery haze into the psyche of its beholders (fig. 1). In spite of its small scale, the painting communicates the gravity of sin and monumentalizes the intrinsically topographical impact of God’s wrath.² The cities’ vast domains and the surrounding untouched fields are the dominant subjects, as the figure of Lot’s wife escaping the city is hidden in the bottom foreground. This painted landscape composition serves as a conduit for the expression of biblical narrative and religio-moral contemplation, effectively superimposing these abstract features onto terrestrial imagery. By placing this scenery at the forefront, Bles imagines a novel frontier through the overlooked ‘set-pieces’ of Northern Renaissance paintings—one where nature acts as a primary narrative-emotive device that conveys the Lord’s wrath.

Figure 1. Herri met de Bles (Flemish, 1510-1572), The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, c.  1545, Oil on canvas, 29.8 x 43.2 cm, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

The evolving visual dialects of Flemish artists reflect wider ingenuities within and beyond sixteenth-century Northern European existence. The rise of landscape painting as a distinct and coherent tradition in the Low Countries came to be through migration and cultural exchange, although widely overlooked in terms of popular prestige until the seventeenth century.³ In the interim, religion dominated Northern Renaissance life, yielding an inclination toward Christian iconography that transcended language barriers and cultural heterogeneity.⁴ Jesus and other divine subjects largely dominate the composition whilst landscape occupies complementary roles in the periphery.⁵ Although it was not the centerpiece of these works, the natural world was valorized by 16th-century Christians who saw nature as being closely connected to human life.⁶ The rise of Bles and his contemporaries, along with preceding Western landscape painters, reflected patrons’ revived embrace of the narrative and aesthetic qualities of nature that were albeit tied to an impenetrable sense of devotion. Renaissance art came into closer proximity with the natural world during the evolution of formal inquiries into natural history. Early sixteenth-century German artist Hans Weiditz’ illustrations of discovered plant species marked a consequential development in the cataloging of the natural world. This interest in nature was rooted in the Classical pursuit of employing visual mediums as didactic resources. The influence of Weiditz and other contemporaries who blended scientific inquiry and art is seen in Bles’ landscape through detailed depictions of the centrally-located rock formations and surrounding shrubbery.⁷

The Language of Natural Landscape

Biblical narratives are embedded into The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, composing the trajectory of artistic conscience. Religion thus supplies visual character and irrevocably bridges landscape scenery with storytelling. The painting locates its origins in Genesis 19:24-26, capturing a mere moment of the cities caught in “brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven.” It depicts Lot’s wife in her final moments, fleeing annihilation only to disappear into a “pillar of salt” whilst curiously catching a glimpse of destruction.⁸ The strengths of the painting’s narrative capabilities are not solely determined by its erudite rendering of biblical text but its supplemental, performative elements that are not originally present in-text.

The distinct features of Bles’ landscape terrain, in combination with visualizations of man-made structures, provide a vivid, comprehensive narrative. In a sense, it also offers a visual canon to what otherwise exists only as a mental interpretation shrouded in obscurity and overtaken by selective reading. Although there are segment distinctions within the composition, its formal qualities exist in harmony and in relation to one another to service the piece’s content. A most rudimentary dissection of the composition divides the picture plane into three identifiable segments: Sodom and Gomorrah in flames eclipsed by towering rocky centrepieces, the bottom foreground comprised of low rolling hills and the petite figure of Lot’s wife peeking behind her, and the far-distant town caught in flames as the fields remain untouched.⁹

As noted by nineteenth century American landscape painter A.B. Durand, however, the exaggeration of certain segments and elements may be necessary to represent their “real importance,” which in the case of this painting’s narrative quality, is drawn to the rock formations themselves. Bles positions the chaotic and angular rocks in central view, slicing through the biblical city with its imposing structure.¹⁰ In lieu of contextual imagery to contemplate the cause and ultimate effect of sin, these natural formations imitate a gate to a town of sinners: Hell on earth. Strategic and rather unnatural attention imposed upon these rocky gates thus renders nature as an essential account of religious history. Landscape becomes not only a raconteur of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, but of the destruction of human immorality.

Bles’ landscape composition evokes an enduring sense of disaster, awe, and isolation, effectively creating and manipulating natural imagery into an emotive language to strengthen viewers’ resonance with this episode derived from the Book of Genesis.¹¹ Upon immediate visual inspection, the subject matter appears too grand for the small pictorial bounds from which it was composed. Plummets of smoke arise chaotically from the burning towns below, yet viewers are unable to entirely comprehend the gravity of destruction as it travels eastward into complete darkness in the upper-right corner of the picture plane. The nearly opaque discolouration of accumulating smoke compiles in this corner restrained by the oppressive edges of the composition. Here, the viewer is limited by the observable, serving as a reminder that from this vantage point, they are neither occupying the position of an omniscient God nor of the hands responsible for such carnage. Therefore, they are helpless in contemplating the unwavering, tragic fates of Sodom and Gomorrah. Bles’ attention to colors, textures, and spatial perspective produces a complete whole that is conducive to internal contemplation and dialogue.

Nature is not deficient of the abstract narrative and moral properties expressed in portrayals of personage. Granted with perennial familiarity, beholders across time may access the artist’s intended history with immediacy. Northern Renaissance landscape painting may be categorized by its overarching pursuit for the communication of moral abstractions and conventions through visual treatment – a perspective view of humanity’s moral position in the material world.¹² The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah undergoes this treatment to serve as a visual aid to the titular scene and revisit, reiterate, and reinforce familiar concepts of humankind’s rightful delegation of moral authority to the Creator and pictured consequences of deviance to sixteenth century Northern European viewers.¹³ Bles opts to communicate these themes through the “shock-and-awe” of humanity’s failure and unwillingness to be moral rather than through the explicit portrayal of the impure spiral of Sodom and Gomorrah, which would perhaps issue an overly complex and undecipherable picture plane. The landscape—an elevated survey of the burning biblical towns and surrounding fields before and beyond it—illustrate a moral dichotomy between the pious unravaged by the flames of Eternal Damnation and those who must now suffer for their sins. Portraying contrast through the use of opposing colors and towering rock formations that clearly establish the boundaries of destruction, the artist provides the two nuanced sides of moral landscape painting, binding the observers’ internal contemplation with Bles’ contrasting natural and artificial landscapes. The readable durability of natural landscape paintings predisposes audiences across time to meaningfully engage with its messaging. Bles’ visual language and portrayal of far-spanning fields along with his combination of mountainous and hilly terrain is fundamentally known amongst all observers, equally facilitating meditations on the observable, yet abstract dichotomy. The observers’ readings are thus not limited by period-specific garbs, customs, or behaviors.

Bles as an Archivist

Tonal variation in Bles’ rendition captures the diametrically opposed wrath and mercy of the Lord, providing a nuanced account of destruction and divine protection in comparison to Joachim Patinir’s 1520 landscape (fig. 2). Landscape with the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1520) predates that of Bles’ and adopts a “micro-depiction” of an identical subject matter. Contrastingly, Patinir’s version appears as though it was the revealing vision where the edges of the city forged the borders of his composition. Although there are various identifiable segments to illustrate a degree of variability, there remains relatively low color contrasts and topographical distinctions that divide the sinners from the retreating figures of Lot and his daughters, accompanied by angels.¹⁴ Tonal homogeneity centers all perception on God’s wrath and ignores the explicitly recorded dichotomy between damaged and spared plots.¹⁵ In comparison, Bles’ landscape employs varying color tones — amber, browns, grays, and varying shades of green—to “accurately” visualize the Book of Genesis and God’s rationale in solely targeting sin on a grand scale.

Figure 2. Joachim Patinir (Netherlandish, Dinant or Bou vignes, active by 1515-died 1524 Antwerp), Landscape with the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, c. 1520, Oil on panel, 30 x 22.5 cm, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Netherlands.

Bles issues The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as a record of biblical tale, simultaneously offering visualization of tenets of Christian morality and stoking reactionary resonance within his viewership through a composition nearly devoid of humanity, in both terms of figural representation and righteous piety. The image employs landscape scenery as the primary mode of communication in intimate dialogue with the observer, who can only watch helplessly as the two biblical cities return to ash before them. Bles’ use of natural landscape as a raconteur of anthropocentric religio-moral narrative, affect, and theology demarcates a disruption within the Northern Renaissance genre. Bles’ 1545 painting is an exemplary showcase of the versatile power of natural landscape, not in substitution for iconic imagery but as an ever changing field of its own.

Endnotes

1. Stuart A. Irvine, “’Is Anything Too Hard for Yahweh?’: Fulfillment of Promise and Threat in Genesis 18-19,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 42, no. 3 (2018): 286-7. 

2. “Herri met de Bles; The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,” Montreal Fine Arts Museum, mbam.qc.ca/en/works/8713. 

3. Xiaojing Wen and Paul White, “The Role of Landscape Art in Cultural and National Identity: Chinese and European Comparisons,” Sustainability 12 (2020): 9. 

4. Wen and White, “The Role of Landscape Art in Cultural and National Identity: Chinese and European Comparisons,” 8. 

5. Wen and White, “The Role of Landscape Art in Cultural and National Identity: Chinese and European Comparisons,” 8. 

6. Wen and White, “The Role of Landscape Art in Cultural and National Identity: Chinese and European Comparisons,” 8. 

7. Lucie Čermáková and Jana Černá, “Naked in the Old and New World: Differences and Analogies in Descriptions of European and American herbue nudae in the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Biology 51, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 70. 

8. Gn 19:24-26 KJV. 

9. “Herri met de Bles; The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah,” Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. 

10. A.B. Durand, “Letters on Landscape Painting. No. IX,” The Crayon 2, no.2 (1855): 16. 

11. Irvine, “’Is Anything Too Hard for Yahweh?’: Fulfillment of Promise and Threat in Genesis 18-19,” 286. 

12. A.A. Witte, “The Artful Hermit. Cardinal Odoardo Farnese’s religious patronage and the spiritual meaning of landscape around 1600” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2004), 11. 

13. Joseph L. Lombardi, “Worship and Moral Autonomy,” Religious Studies 24, no. 2 (June 1988): 103.

14. Larry Silver, “God in the Details: Bosch and Judgment(s),” The Art Bulletin 83, no. 4 (2001): 626. 

15. Silver, “God in the Details: Bosch and Judgment(s),” 626.

Bibliography

Čermáková, Lucie and Jana Černá. “Naked in the Old and the New World: Differences and Analogies in Descriptions of European and American herbue nudae in the Sixteenth Century.” Journal of the History of Biology 51, no. 1 (Spring 2018): 69-106. jstor.org/stable/44980375. 

Durand, A.B. “Letters on Landscape Painting. No. IX.” The Crayon 2, no. 2 (July 1855): 16-17. jstor.org/stable/25527080.

Irvine, Stuart A. “‘Is Anything Too Hard for Yahweh?’: Fulfillment of Promise and Threat in Genesis 18-19.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 43, no. 3 (2018): 285-302. Lombardi, Joseph L. “Worship and Moral Autonomy.” Religious Studies 24, no. 2 (June 1988): 101-119. jstor.org/stable/20019271.

Paden, Roger. “Picturesque Landscape Painting and Environmental Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 49, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 39-61. jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jaesteduc.49.2.0039. 

Silver, Larry. “God in the Details: Bosch and Judgment(s).” The Art Bulletin 83, no. 4 (December 2001): 626-650. jstor.org/stable/3177226. 

Wen, Xiaojing and Paul White. “The Role of Landscape Art in Culture and National Identity: Chinese and European Comparisons.” Sustainability 12 (2020): 1-19. 

Witte, A.A. “The Artful Hermit. Cardinal Odoardo Farnese’s religious patronage and the spiritual meaning of landscape around 1600.” PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2004.