Prospect, perspective and the evolution of the landscape idea

Abstract

The landscape concept in geography has recently been adopted by humanistic writers because of its holistic and subjective implications. But the history of the landscape idea suggests that its origins lie in the renaissance humanists’ search for certainty rather than a vehicle of individual subjectivity. Landscape was a ‘way of seeing’ that was bourgeois, individualist and related to the exercise of power over space. The basic theory and technique of the landscape way of seeing was linear perspective, as important for the history of the graphic image as printing was for that of the written word. Alberti's perspective was the foundation of realism in art until the nineteenth century, and is closely related by him to social class and spatial hierarchy. It employs the same geometry as merchant trading and accounting, navigation, land survey, mapping and artillery. Perspective is first applied in the city and then to a country subjugated to urban control and viewed as landscape. The evolution of landscape painting parallels that of geometry just as it does the changing social relations on the land in Tudor, Stuart and Georgian England. The visual power given by the landscape way of seeing complements the real power humans exert over land as property. Landscape as a geographical concept cannot be free of the ideological overlays of its history as a visual concept unless it subjects landscape to historical interrogation. Only as an unexamined concept in a geography which neglects its own visual foundations can landscape be appropriated for an antiscientific humanistic geography.