Do you see the face in this image by Wenceslas Hollar? At first, it looks like someone just painted what they saw in the countryside. But it’s a made-up landscape with an illusion embedded. These pictures became somewhat of a fad in the Netherlands during the 1600s.
Prior to the Renaissance, landscape was principally used as a scene-setting backdrop for figurative art. Trees, fields, mountains, and storm-tossed seas were only present to add verisimilitude to the human activity contained within the frame. It seemed as if landscape was nothing without a human narrative. But this gradually changed. Landscape painting soon became an artistic form of its own. During the transitory period between the two forms there was a moment when figurative art and the desire to depict landscape briefly coalesced in anthropomorphic etchings and paintings.