The hidden means in nature

In 1917, Toribio Mejía Xesspe, a Peruvian archeologist, was flying over the Nazca Plateau, when he noticed something incredible. Massive line drawings — known as geoglyphs — stretching 175 square miles. Turns out these artworks, which depicted a monkey, a spider, plants, and more, were created around 500 BCE. What had compelled people thousands of years ago to work so hard to create images of the natural world? Some believe it may have been part of a spiritual practice, while others think it was functional — showing the locations of water sources. But whatever the purpose, this much is clear: human depictions of nature reveal as much about the people and the societies who made them, as they do about nature itself. Hi! I'm Sarah Green, and this is Crash Course Art History. [THEME MUSIC] We often think of art about nature as sort of…unbiased. A reflection of what is. Often beautiful. Sometimes, clichéd. But not political, usually, or deep, or containing hidden meanings. And yet, representations of the natural world are just that: re-presentations. Somebody had to pick which part of nature to include: what to highlight or exaggerate, and what to leave out. And usually those choices reveal something about the artist— both personally, and in the cultural context they’re coming from. Like, let’s look at some art from the Chinese landscape tradition. These two artworks display many of the same details. This visual repetition has served as a sort of code that let people read the works across centuries almost like you’d read a poem. And even the colors themselves were part of the code. Since as early as the 400s C.E., soft blue and green color palettes have been associated with dreamlike, magical environments, where humans live in balance with nature. An aspirational state in the religion of Chinese Daoism. Over time, Chinese painters built on this tradition, using the blue/green color palette to create natural landscapes that, while not magical, do invoke a sense of tranquility that can feel just as dreamlike.