e painting required some means of investing the depiction of nature with meaning. One of the earliest examples of such an idealization of nature occurs in Annibale Carracci's Landscape with the Flight into Egypt (c. 1603). But what is remarkable about Carracci's setting is that it is painted almost entirely for its own sake. There is nothing about it that suggests the Biblical story and this vision of nature as an impressive, but ultimately civilized, domain, is a forerunner of the development of landscape painting in Flemish Art. Rubens' Landscape with the Château Steen (1636) is similarly interested in the total prospect rather than the activity taking place in the foreground. But Rubens' painting presents his newly acquired chateau and lands which represented a rise in status for the successful painter. Thus the house, almost hidden to one side of the painting, is, in fact, the source of the alteration of the landscape that surges from the foreground toward the horizon. This type of assertion of ownership was not typical of
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