The word landscape is from the Dutch, landscape originally meaning a patch of cultivated ground, and then an image. The word entered the English language at the start of the 17th century, purely as a term for works of art; it was not used to describe real vistas before.
Traditionally, landscape art depicts the surface of the earth, but there are other sorts of landscapes, such as moonscapes.
- Vedute is the Italian term for view, and generally used for the painted landscape, often cityscape
- which were a common 18th century painting thematic.
- Sky capes or Cloudscapes are depictions of clouds, weather forms, and atmospheric conditions.
- Moonscapes show the landscape of a moon.
- Seascapes depict oceans or beaches.
- Rivers capes depict rivers or creeks.
- Cityscape or towns capes depict cities.
- Hard capes are covered over areas like streets and sidewalks, large business complexes and housing developments, and industrial areas.
- Aerial landscapes depict a surface or ground from above, especially as seen from an airplane or spacecraft. This genre can be combined with others, as in the aerial cloudscapes of Georgia O'Keeffe, the aerial moonscapes of Nancy Graves, or the aerial cityscapes of Yvonne Jacquette.
- Ins capes are landscape-like artworks which seek to convey the psychoanalytic view of the mind as a three-dimensional space.