Landscape and the human being

Abstract

Let us begin with the landscape 1 we encounter on the stage of various dramas by William Shakespeare. It is a landscape filled with movement: the various playing and performing by the characters lay out for us a diverse and ever-changing scene. The stage scenery is an inseparable part of this. We might say that no landscape is more spectacular than the one on stage. Indeed, all the world's a stage, as Jacques said in As You Like It (II. vii). And it is not a one-man show. As we turn our eyes to Shakespeare's plays and their performances, the phrase theatrum mundi, the theatre of the world, inevitably enters into our field of vision. We do not merely gaze at Shakespeare's plays on stage: on the stage of everyday life, we ourselves act as role-players. It is rare, however, that each scene in daily life is clearly demarcated, as is the case on the dramatic stage. The scenes are often intertwined and occasionally continuous. Thus it would be wrong to consider the dramatic stage and the stage of everyday life to be entirely identical. Nonetheless, the social world into which we are born, and within which we continue the journey of life while interacting with others, is indeed a theatrical world: all of us stand as performers on the stage of theatrum mundi. What a variety of masks and personas are prepared for us! At the center of the landscape of theatrum mundi, we see these various masks come into focus. It seems that nothing touches the heart more than the mask as landscape. Let us next turn to landscape as a genre of painting. When we trace the history of landscape painting, a diverse array of spectacles enter into our field of vision: various landscapes painted by Pieter Bruegel, by Johannes Vermeer, by Caspar David Friedrich. Landscapes by Claude Monet, Paul C6zanne, Vincent van Gogh. Those by J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, Andrew Wyeth. Landscape paintings deserve our attention because we may