Landscape

In addition to the commissioned etchings, Callot made drawings and etchings of landscape for its own sake. These works follow the Mannerist tradition as it had developed in the Low Countries from the inventions of Bruegel, whose engraved landscapes Callot must certainly have known. The convention is fairly rigid and can be seen in this illustration: a dark tree in the very foreground, the recession based on an alternation of light and dark passages, arranged in wings as on a stage, aided by an exaggerated perspective established either by the sharply converging lines of buildings or the sudden diminution in the scale of the figures.