Featured on PDR in the collection The Art of Hidden Faces: Anthropomorphic Landscapes

Although commonplace today, the landscape as a distinct category in painting only really began to establish itself in Western art during the Renaissance, a period in which natural views began to make their way to the fore of focus, no longer merely backgrounds to human figures. Perhaps an interesting quirk of this "transition" were the images which seemed to fuse the two: anthropomorphic landscapes. These images — particularly where landscapes are given the form of human heads — appear to be somewhat of a meme of the 17th century, with examples cropping up again and again, especially in Netherlandish painting. Below we've compiled a collection of such images available online (sadly not all of them openly licensed), with a big debt owed to a great…