The Large Forest

Magnasco built this forest to swallow the people in it. Look for the figures and you do eventually find them, a few monks and hermits no bigger than the underbrush, dwarfed by trees that heave and twist as if the wood were breathing. He worked in Milan and Genoa in the early 1700s, went by the nickname il Lissandrino, and had a method to match it: quick, flickering strokes and sudden flashes of light that leave everything unsettled. This is not a landscape you could walk into and map. The hermits have gone into the wild to be alone with God's creation, and the painting takes their side, letting the sheer overgrown force of the place press down on them. Those tall, frond-heavy trees are the real subject, painted with almost no interest in how a real tree actually looks.