Rivers and canals as art elements: observing the paintings in a geomorphological perspective

Which is the most famous painting in the world? ‘Monna Lisa’ by Leonardo da Vinci, ‘The Fighting Temeraire, tugged to her last berth to be broken up’ by William Turner, or again the ‘Starry Night Over the Rhône’ by Vincent van Gogh? Obviously, art is subjective but, certainly, it is a way to communicate cultural messages, and it can be a means to represent and explore beauty, even nature, through the representation and interpretation of landscape forms and features. Waterways have been historically represented in thousands of paintings, highlighting both complex natural and anthropic systems, fully showing the intrinsic geomorphological value of the landscape. An evocative painting that illustrates the beauty of the natural geomorphological landscape is 'View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm. The painting shows a meander of the Connecticut River (Massachusetts) with a thinned neck, surrounded by cultivated fields, forests, and hills. However, a few years after its realization, the area depicted in the painting underwent an important morphological evolution, which subsequently led to the renaming of the painting into ‘The Oxbow’. Channelized rivers are part of the urban geomorphic system and have been often painted due to the socio-economic impact on human life as well as their natural appeal in an anthropized context. Whilst cities like Venice, Burges, or Amsterdam have always depended on artificial waterways, cities like Milan or Bydgoszcz like hundreds of others, which were deeply influenced by canals in the past, are nowadays less dependent, even if the urban architecture is clearly linked to an aquatic development of these cities. Artists represented the peculiarities of these waterways in significant paintings from centuries, showing urban geomorphic conditions as well as the applicative usages of these channels. Therefore, in this work, we explored the historical evolution of pictorial representation of rivers and canals, from the Sixteenth Century up to nowadays. Thus, landscape features painted in famous, as well as less famous, pieces of art have been described and interpreted from a geomorphological viewpoint, using remotely sensed data, GIS technologies, as well as historical documentation and maps. Based on the geomorphological interpretation of painted landscapes, this work aims to highlight the importance of artworks in landscape change assessment on a historical timescale.