The pastoral genre of literature, art, or music depicts an idealised form of the shepherd's lifestyle – herding livestock around open areas of land according to the seasons and the changing availability of water and pasture. The target audience is typically an urban one. A pastoral is a work of this genre. A piece of music in the genre is usually referred to as a pastorale.
Alvan Fisher, Pastoral Landscape, 1854
The Young Shepherd, engraving using stipple technique, by Giulio Campagnola, c. 1510
Georgics Book III, Shepherd with Flocks, Vergil (Vatican Library)
Romantic artist, illustrator and poet William Blake's hand painted print illustrating his pastoral poem "The Shepherd" depicts the pastoral scene of a shepherd watching his flock with a shepherd's crook. This image represents copy B, printed and painted in 1789 and currently held by the Library of Congress.
A landscape is the visible features of an area of land, its landforms, and how they integrate with natural or human-made features, often considered in terms of their aesthetic appeal. A landscape includes the physical elements of geophysically defined landforms such as mountains, hills, water bodies such as rivers, lakes, ponds and the sea, living elements of land cover including indigenous vegetation, human elements including different forms of land use, buildings, and structures, and transitory elements such as lighting and weather conditions. Combining both their physical origins and the cultural overlay of human presence, often created over millennia, landscapes reflect a living synthesis of people and place that is vital to local and national identity.
A prairie: Badlands National Park, South Dakota
Tropical rainforest, Fatu Hiva Island, Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia
Tundra in Siberia
Taiga (boreal forest), Alaska