Joachim Patinir

World Landscape

In his painting Landscape with Charon Crossing the Styx, Patinir employs a bird's-eye view over an expansive landscape encompassing both heaven and hell. This type of composition is known as a Weltlandschaft ("world landscape.") Patinir depicts the famed boatman of Virgil's Aeneid and Dante's Inferno as he ferries a dead soul across the river Styx. Patinir symbolizes heaven and hell through his color choices. On the lefthand side, heaven is represented in vivid blue skies, sparkling turquoise rivers, and green, lushly forested hills. On the righthand side, a dark sky filled with ominous clouds and fiery flames hints at the horrors waiting behind the gates of Hell guarded by the sleeping three-headed dog Cerebus. The placement of Charon's boat in the center of the painting emphasizes the uneasy fate of the passenger caught between these two worlds. Based on observations of landscapes native to Patinir's native homeland the Netherlands, this work represents a synthesis of the local, national, and universal.