Rocky landscape with trees drawn on top of a fragmented male nude bending to the right 1630 - 1691

Lieven Mehus created this drawing of a rocky landscape with trees with pen and brush on paper sometime in the latter half of the 17th century. The fragmented male nude faintly sketched in the background makes this a curious piece. Mehus was working at a time when the Academy was becoming a powerful force in defining what was considered ‘good’ art. The nude form had become a central tenet of academic art, representing the idealization of the human form and a connection to classical antiquity. Landscape, on the other hand, was considered a lower genre. The superimposition of the nude over the landscape suggests a tension between these two categories, perhaps even a commentary on the hierarchy of genres within the Academy. Was Mehus perhaps questioning the established norms of artistic training? To understand this piece more fully, we could examine the records of the Florentine Academy, where Mehus trained, and study the treatises and debates around genre painting at the time. Ultimately, this artwork reminds us that meaning is always shaped by the institutions and social contexts in which art is made.