If the presiding metaphor of the landscape experience was that of God as supreme artist, it need only be a short step to the idea that artists were seers or priests-- if they fulfilled their mission as teachers, and behaved properly. They had privileged information. They were trained to read the Book of Nature, in which God's will was inscribed, as surely as in the Bible.
So writes the late great Robert Hughes in his American Visions (pg. 139) as he unpacks the nation's relationship with landscape painting. Anyone familiar with Hughes as a personality and art critic would perhaps not be surprised at the rather pointed follow-up sentence. . .
But these high responsibilities gave art a certain fragility. If it slipped, it fell a long way, like Lucifer.
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