Ode On Solitude Analysis

Locus Amoenus is an idealized place of safety and comfort with a hint of charm and beauty. This is a pleasant place usually a shady lawn or open woodland, or a group of idyllic islands that is quiet and beautiful. Elysian Fields and Happy Isles are two traditions that have shared concepts and mythological ideal places. This idealized “paradise” is relaxing and rejuvenating to the mind. This term became a staple of the pastoral works of poets becoming a rhetorical commonplace. Pope, Alexander. Ode on Solitude. Explains a happy man’s ease and simplicity along a farm with cattle, winter fire and long fields with bread. Usually a Locus Amoenus will have three specific elements: trees, grass and water. Essentially, gardens can be used to …show more content…
Landscape paintings are not based on reality in a heroic setting. Instead, paintings are inspired by the painter’s imagination and are meant as a critique for the painter’s imperfect surroundings. Landscape with Man killed by a Snake 1648 (Figure 4) depicts higher forms of landscape evoking strong emotional feeling such as terror and worry. Nicholas Poussin achieves this effect as the painting explores a terrifying impact of natural events on human life and integrates a dramatic affect and fear in subtle ways to elevate the subject matter. This painting is contradictory ranging from anguish and violence of the tragic action in the foreground to a chaotic landscape. This painting specifically, and many we have discussed throughout class, explores the powerful emotional effects of which landscape can play a role. In most cases the people are not the subject of the painting in a heroic landscape. Rather they are positioned in the foreground and remain smaller in scale than other aspects of the landscape. In a majority of the heroic landscapes we have looked at, people remain small, as colors make them recede into the actual landscape, giving the portrait an