The art that inspired Mordor

The visual style of the multi-Oscar nominated Lord of the Rings is heavily influenced by early 19th-century Romantic painting, writes Robert O'Byrne

Smoke drifts in heavy clouds across a billowing sky as molten lava spumes from a mountain towering over the landscape. In the foreground, a handful of figures huddle together, dwarfed by their surroundings. There are brilliant flashes of light, but otherwise much of the vista has been plunged into the bleakest gloom.

A scene from the first film of the Lord Of The Rings trilogy? Actually, it's The Great Day Of His Wrath, one of the immense canvases produced during the first half of the 19th century by the English painter John "Mad" Martin. Like J.R.R. Tolkien, Martin enjoyed immense popular success during his lifetime and immediately after his death. But then he was almost forgotten, his work, if recalled at all, the subject of widespread ridicule.

Martin deserves to be remembered again, however, because his hyperbolic canvases bear an eerie similarity to the design of The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring, especially whenever the film portrays the land of Mordor and Mount Doom. Albeit the most extreme, Martin was just one of a school of painters working in England during the first decades of the 19th century whose Romantically-charged pictures were classified as sublime.

Born in Northumberland in 1789, Martin had the chance while living in London to see paintings by other artists in which dramatic landscape overwhelms human figures. Typical of these works were James Ward's view of Gordale Scar, in Yorkshire, and Turner's Snow Scene: Hannibal And His Army Crossing The Alps. Both dating from around 1812, the two canvases deliberately distort the scale of natural features in order to make them seem more massive and threatening than is the case.

As did the design team of The Lord Of The Rings, Martin took this process a stage further by inventing the scenes he painted, although insisting his images were based on close study of geology, architecture and archaeology. In his Belshazzar's Feast of 1821, for example, he argued that his Babylonian palace - which bears more than a passing resemblance to the great hall of the Dwarves in Peter Jackson's film - was derived from biblical sources. Although dismissed as a pantomime by Constable, the painting was so popular that it was viewed by more than 50,000 people when exhibited at the British Institution.

Martin's nearest rival in this style of work was the Wexford-born painter Francis Danby, one of whose most celebrated pieces, The Opening Of The Sixth Seal, from 1828, is on show in the National Gallery of Ireland. Again, it is the extreme nature of Danby's pictures - the manner in which rocks loom precipitously on either side of the canvas, the use of an explosive light in the distance and the appearance of looming clouds overhead - that makes them so reminiscent of Mordor in The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring.

The film and the paintings of Martin and Danby use the same handful of means to achieve an immediate effect on the viewer. One is simply a differential of scale - the vastness of the landscape compared with the tiny size of the figures in its midst. The contrast between light and shade is also greatly exaggerated.

Just as important is the deployment of certain elements to suggest evil. The most obvious of these is fire, which during the 19th-century Romantic period was often understandably equated with industrialisation and its consequences. One of the first depictions of such an industrial scene, Philippe de Loutherbourg's 1801 view of the ironworks at Coalbrookdale, in Shropshire, uses methods not unlike those of Danby or Martin to hold the viewer's attention. In order to increase the impact of his picture, the artist chose to represent the foundry at night, so that flames belch into the sky and throw into silhouette the workers and buildings in the foreground.

This is the pictorial equivalent of the "dark satanic mills" described by William Blake in Jerusalem and, indeed, for many late 18th- and early 19th-century artists the industrial movement appeared to be devilish in intent. So, too, in the film of The Fellowship Of The Ring, in which, curiously, the inhabitants of the pre-industrial Middle-earth are all dressed in mid 19th-century costume and - aside from the Hobbits' excessively hairy feet - look as though they were performing in a cinematic version of Cranford, Elizabeth Gaskell's fictional portrayal of an unspoilt rural community from the same period.

On the other hand, Gaskell's North And South, as well as many other novels of the time, such as Disraeli's Sybil, tend to argue that industrialisation was entirely negative in its consequences, not least for the dehumanising effect it had on workers.

Similarly, the Orc workers shown in Saruman's foundry - which looks very much like Loutherbourg's painting of Coalbrookdale - are brutalised by their circumstances. Compare their appearance and behaviour with that of the Elves led by Galadriel; in the film she looks extraordinarily like a Madonna painted by one of the Nazarenes, the group of German artists led by Friedrich Overbeck and Peter von Cornelius, who settled in Rome in the early 1800s and there attempted to popularise the pre-Renaissance style. For the Nazarenes, as for their slightly later English equivalents, the Pre-Raphaelites, a primary intention was to escape from the grubby industrial present into an imaginary and pure past.

Despite more than a century and a half's having passed, the same aesthetic informs the imagery of The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring. The film is suffused with early 19th-century concepts of beauty - invariably a "natural" landscape in which the weather is always balmy - and evil, the latter involving nature turning against and overwhelming people who have already been dehumanised by the decadence of industrialisation.

But despite the commercial success of the Lord Of The Rings film, whether this approach will stay popular with audiences must be open to question. The experiences of Danby and Martin are not encouraging.

The former died impoverished and embittered, after his style of painting had fallen from favour. Martin, meanwhile, continued to enjoy widespread fame, and a final triumvirate of vast canvases based on the Last Judgment, including The Great Day Of His Wrath, toured Britain and the United States for some 20 years. But then taste turned against the work, and when the three pictures were offered for sale in the 1930s, they made a mere £9.

Lord of the Rings is on general release

Michael Dervan on Schoenberg will appear tomorrow