THE INTERPRETATION OF ORDINARY LANDSCAPES Geographical Essays D. W. Meinig, Editor ]. B. Jackson Peirce F. Lewis David Lowenthal D. W. Meinig Marwyn S. Samuels David E. Sopher Yi-Fu Tuan OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS New York 1979 OxfordIntroduction Landscape és an attractive, important, and ambiguous term. It is attractive because it may bring immediately to mind some pleasant prospect: a piece of the countryside, the particular setting of some memo- rable place; it has an earthy, out-of-doors connotation, it may remind us of, environmental or ecological matters; it may suggest special attention to the design and care of our surroundings, or the depiction and interpretation of interesting scenes; to some it may even be regarded as a way of viewing man as well as of admiring nature. It is an important term because it does carry all these connotations and more, and is thereby involved in major matters of professional interest, and of public concern. Landscape is a technical term used by artists and arth scientists, architects and planners, geographers and historians. It is also an important dimension of many issues relating to the development, alteration, and management of our cities and towns and countrysides. But2 Introduction beyond all these, it is important because it is a common word which is increasingly used to encompass an ensemble of ordinary features which constitute an extraordinarily rich exhibit of the course and character of any society, As Peirce Lewis spiritedly argues, if we want to understand our- selves, we would do well to take a searching look at our landscapes. Because landscape is used by so many different people for such a variety of purposes, it is inevitably an ambiguous term. There are prob- lems of translation between fields and often uncertainties of exact mean- ing even within any one. When J. B. Jackson, our most catholic and dis- cerning spokesman, who bound a good portion of his life directly to the very word, confesses (as he does in this book) that after twenty-five years he still finds the concept of landscape elusive, we are fairly warned not to aspire to a clean and clear definition, and not to be surprised at some variation in usage among the seven authors of this volume. Nevertheless, the reader deserves some indication of the general sense of the term which informs these essays. In the hope of clarification we shall begin by differ: entiating landscape from some closely related concepts; to say first of all what it is not. This is done not to establish rigid restrictions to its use, but ‘can be put to good and to distill something closer to an essence w! varied service. Landscape is related to, but not identical with, nature. Nature is a part of every landscape, but is no more than a part of any landscape which hhas felt the impact of man. In this view landscape is always inclusive of man and nature, rather than a way of distinguishing, or at least emphasiz- ing, nature, as is still not uncommon in some fields, such as art and earth science. Indeed, the idea of landscape runs counter to recognition of any simple binary relationship between man and nature. Rather, it begins with 1a naive acceptance of the intricate intimate intermingling of physical, bio- logical, and cultural features which any glance around us displays. Land- ‘scape is, first of all, the unity we see, the impressions of our senses rather than the logic of the sciences, Thus every landscape is a scene, but landscape is not identical with scenery. The very idea of scenery is limited, a conscious selection of certain prospects, locales, or kinds of country as having some attractive aesthetic ‘qualities. Scenery has connotations of a set piece, a defined perspective, a focus upon certain features, a discrimination based upon some generally received idea of beauty or interest; whereas landscape is ubiquitous and more inclusive, something to be observed but not necessarily admired. In- not defined by it. AS terest in landscape may involve aesthetics but Introduction 3 landscape art, the study of landscape is necessarily reflective in some de- agree of philosophies and taste and subject to shifts in styles and emphasis, bbut the landscape is ever with us and we are ever involved in its creation, Landscape is all around us. It is related to, but not identical with, environment, as several of the authors make explicit. Environment is an Inherent property of every living thing, it is that which surrounds and sustains; we are always environed, always enveloped by an outer world Landscape is less inclusive, more detached, not so directly part of our or- ganic being. Landscape is defined by our vision and interpreted by our minds. Its a panorama which continuously changes as we move along any route, Strictly speaking, we are never in it, it lies before our eyes and it becomes real only as we become conscious of it. AS Tuan says, “We can think, therefore we are able to see an entity called landscape.” Environment sustains us as creatures; landscape displays us as cultures. As discerned sectors of our environments, landscapes are related to, yet not identical with, places. Place commonly refers to a definite area, a fixed location; events “take place” and we can be in a place. But place, t00, hhas its ambiguities. There is, most basic of all, the difference between gen- eral recognition of certain areas as places, and a personal sense of place. The one is a public concept, the other private: we all live intimately with both. The first kind of place depends upon some public agreement as to name, location, and character; some legibility, some identity commonly understood. Our personal sense of place depends upon our own experiences and sensibilities. It is unique to each of us in its content and in the way it relates to general social definitions of places. Thus each of us creates and accumulates places out of living whenever we pierce the infinite blur of the world and fix a piece of our environment as something distinct and memo- rable, Such memories of place almost certainly depend in some degree upon landscape, upon the external visible character of localities. Yet the two are not the same. As David Sopher suggests, for some people the sense of home asa place may be grounded much more upon human relationships than upon the memory of landscape. In this way place is experiential to a degree landscape is not, although the way we see landscape does depend upon experience and purpose. Still landscape tends to be something more exter- nal and objective than our personal sense of place; and something less individual, less discrete, than the usual named place; it is a continuous surface rather than a point, focus, locality, o defined area. Landscape is a portion ofthe earth’s surface, related to, but not identi- cal with, region, area, or geography. There are complexities and ambigu-We regard all landscapes as symbolic, as expressions of cultural values, social behav for, and individual actions worked upon particular localities over a span of time. (PL. Hugill) ities here which have been important and at times vexing in the field of geography. Such problems grow out of its long and rich heritage, they reflect shifts in Western intellectual history, differences in emphasis among nations, difficulties of translation between languages, and the differential impact of allied fields. These matters are well covered in standard refer: ences! and are far too complicated to review here. We may note that there ‘was a period between the World Wars when many American geographers tried to define their discipline in terms of landscape. That proved to be a stimulating but not, in the longer run, satisfying concept and it is obvious from current professional literature that while landscape remains an impor- tant focus of geographical interest the field itself could not possibly be comfortably encompassed within the bounds of common concepts of land scape. And this is so not just because of a recent emphasis upon geography as a more theoretical spatial science, but because of the special analytical perspective which has always been characteristic of the field. That oldest Introduction 5 In its focus upon the vernacular, cultural landscape study is a companion of that form of social history which seeks to understand the lives of ordinary people. (PJ Hugill) badge and basic tool of geography, the map, is a symbolic abstraction of spatial relationships and is applied by geographers to the study of many phenomena which are not directly part of the visible landscape. On the other hand, maps may be useful in the study of landscape but they cannot be sufficient, for the landscape must be visualized and if not directly by our ‘own eyes then by means of the best substitutes. The photograph or drawing, the depiction of the surficial totality of a scene, provides a more revealing illustration than a map. Nevertheless the relationship between landscape and geography remains intimate even if noncommensurate, As David Low- enthal has noted, “beyond that of any other discipline ... the subject mat- ter of geography approximates the world of general discourse; the palpable resent, the everyday life of man on earth, is seldom far from our profes: sional concerns.” On the basis of logic, tradition, and product, we may fairly claim that geographers have a special vocation for landscape study6 Introduction Our concern in these essays for that everyday life of man on earth is, indicated in our title. We specify ordinary landscapes to indicate our pri mary interest in that continuous surface which we ean see all around us. We cannot, of course, study everything, but we can try to see those elements we do study in context, as being parts of an ensemble which is under continu ‘ous creation and alteration as much or more from the unconscious pro- cesses of daily living as from calculated landscape design. Insofar as we focus on particular landscapes, we are dealing primarily with vernacular caupuge. In this serse, Iandseape study is a companion of that form-of Social history which secks to understand the routine lives of ordinary people. And indeed, the relationship with social history is even closer for although we begin with the “palpable present,” with that which we can see, intenreta- tion will demand more than ean be seen in a mere glance and a concern for tore than the palpable objects themselves. For the meaning of the ordinary is rarely obvious. We regard all landscapes as symbolic, as expressions of cultural values, social behavior, and individual actions worked upon par- ticular localities over a span of time. Every landscape is an accumulation, and its study may be undertaken as formal history, methodically defining the making of the Jandscape from the past to the present, as in the great ‘work of W. G. Hoskins and his associates. And every landscape is a code, and its study may be undertaken as a deciphering of meaning, of the cul- tural and social significance of ordinary but diagnostic features, as shown in numerous revealing essays by J. B. Jackson. It is not, however, the intent of the essays in this book to prescribe ‘any exact form of study but to explore possibilities and to invite others to do the same. It is an immense realm which needs many kinds of explorers Any landscape is so dense with evidence and so complex and cryptic that we can never be assured that we have read it all or read it aright. The landscape lies all around us, ever accessible and inexhaustible. Anyone can look, but we all need help to see that it is at once a panorama, a composi- tion, a palimpsest, a microcosm; that in every prospect there can be more and more that meets the eye. Notes 1, Preston B, James, All Possible Worlds, A History of Geographical Ideas (New York Odyssey Press, 1972), pp. 229-32, 399-402; Marvin W. Mikesell, “Landscape, Introduction 7 International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 8, (New York: Crowell-Collier and Macmillan, 1968), pp. 575-80. David Lowenthal, “Geography, Experience, and Imagination; Towards a Geo- graphical Epistemology,” Annals, Association of American Geographers 51 (1961). 241Introduction: iconography and landscape STEPHEN DANIELS AND DENIS COSGROVE ‘A landscape isa cultural image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings. Thisis not to say that landscapes areimmater- ial. They may be represented in a variety of materials and on many surfaces ~ in paint on canvas, in writing on paper, in earth, stone, water and vege- tation on the ground. A landscape park is more palpable but no more real, nor less imaginary, than a landscape painting or poem. Indeed the ‘meanings of verbal, visual and built landscapes have a complex interwoven history. To understand a built landscape, say an eighteenth-century English park, itis usually necessary to understand waitten and verbal represen- tations of it, not as ‘illustrations’, images standing outside it, but as consti tuent images of its meaning or meanings. And of course, every study of a landscape further transforms its meaning, depositing yet another layer — of cultural representation. In human geography the interpretation of land- scape and culture has a tendency to reify landscape as an object of empiricist investigation, but often its practitioners do gesture towards landscape as, 2 cultural symbol or image, notably when likening landscape to a text and its interpretation o ‘reading’ ? This essay, and the collection which it intro- duces, explicate more fully the status of landscape as image and symbol and in doing so establish common ground between practitioners from a variety of different disciplines concerned with landscape and culture: geography, fine at, literature, socal history and anthropology. The dscus- sion here is structured around the fertile concept of iconography: the theore- tical and historical study of symbolic imagery. Teonographies ‘The interpretation of symbolic imagery reaches back to Cesare Ripa’s Ico- rnologia, the first of many Renaissance handbooks acting as guides to an art which made systematic use of symbols, allegories and images from the Classical repertoire.‘ The terms iconography and iconology were revived 12 Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove this century, intially again in the interpretation of Renaissance imagery, by the school of art history associated with Aby Warburg. In opposition tothe purely formalistic tradition of art interpretation associated with Hein- rich Wolflin (which analysed pictures purely in terms ofthe surface patterns of colour, chiaroscuro, line and volume, relating them principally to other ‘works of art), iconographic study sought to probe meaning in a work of art by setting it in its historical context and, in particular, to analyse the {ideas implicated in its imagery. Weil, by definition, all ar history translates the visual into the verbal, the iconographic approach consciously sought to conceptualise pictures as encoded texts to be deciphered by those cogni- sant of the culture as a whole in which they were produced. The approach ‘was systematically formulated by Warburg's pupil, Erwin Panofsky. ‘Panofsky distinguished between iconography ‘in the narrower sense of the word’ and iconography ‘in a deeper sense’. Initially he labelled these two approaches ‘iconographical analysis’ and ‘iconographical interpretation [or] synthesis’ but eventually revived the term “conology’ to describe ‘icono- graphy tured interpretative’ Iconography ‘in the narrower’ sense was the identification of conventional, consciously inscribed symbols, say @ lamb signifying Christ, or the winged lion of St Mark signifying in Venetian art the Republic and its power. Iconology probed a deeper stratum of meaning. It excavated what Panofsky called the ‘intrinsic meaning’ of a work of art ‘by ascertaining those underlying principles which reveal the basic attitude of a nation, a period, a class, a religious or philosophical persuasion ~ unconsciously qualified by one personality and condensed {nto one work’. There were no established conventions or specific methods that would ascertain these principles; they were to be reconstructed by aa kind of detective synthesis, searching out analogies between overtly dis parate forms like poetry, philosophy, social institutions and political life: To grasp these principles’, wrote Panofsky, ‘we need a mental faculty comparable to that of a diagnostician.’ It was here in the interpretative ‘earch for such principles that ‘the various humanistic disciplines meet on ‘common plane instead of serving as handmaidens to each other.” Tin a reference to the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, Panofsky's colleague at the Warburg Library and author of The philosophy of symbolic forms (1923-9), Panofsky contended that iconology involved the identification fof symbols, not in ‘the ordinary sense e.g. the Cross, or the Tower of Chastity’ but in the *Cassirerian’ sense; it involved the search for ‘what Ernst Cassirer has called “symbolical” values’ For Cassirer symbols were not mere figures which refer to some given realty by means of suggestion or allegorical renderings, but in the sense of forces, each of which produces and posits a world Of its own. The question as to what reality is apart from these forms, and what fare its independent attributes, becomes irelevant here. For the mind, only that Introduction: iconography and landscape 3 ‘can be visible which has some definite form; but every form of existence has its source in some peculiar way of seeing, some intellectual formulation and intuition of meaning? In the same year, 1925, as Cassirer made this case in the Studien der Biblio- tek Warburg, Panofsky deployed the concept of symbolic form in his own ‘essay: Die Perspektive als “symbolische Form”, astudy of changing modes, ‘of perceiving and representing space, not as mere ‘conventions’ (to be taken up or not at will) or as true or false beliefS, but, much as Cassirer held language or mathematics to be, as ‘symbolic forms’ which structured the world according to specific cultural demands." As an example of the interpretation of perspective as symbolic form Panofsky compared two pic tures in which the subjects ‘seem to hang loose in space in violation of the laws of gravity’: The Three Magi, painted in the fifteenth century by Roger van der Weyden, in which the infant Jesus hovers in mid-air, and {an Ottonian miniature of around 1000 AD in which ‘a whole city is repre sented in the middle of an empty space while the figures taking part in the action stand on solid ground’. An inexperienced observer might assume that the town is meant to be suspended in mid-air by some sort of magic. Yet in this case the lack of support does not imply a miraculous invalidation of the laws of nature ... In a miniature of around 1000 ‘empty space’ does not count asa rea, three-dimensional medium, as it does in a more realistic period, but serves a8 an abstract, unreal background ... Thus while the figure inthe van der Weyden counts, as an apparition, the foating city in the Ortonian miniature has no such miraculous ‘connotation. |As experienced observers we may grasp this ‘in a fraction of a second! but this still involves ‘reading “what we see" according to the manner in which objects and events are expressed by forms under varying historical conditions’. ‘Panofsky applied this approach of ‘reading what we see’ to built as well as to painted forms, He argued that designers of gothic cathedrals ‘began to conceive of the forms they shaped, not so much in terms of isolated solids as in terms of a comprehensive “picture space”’, just as contemporary Church Fathers were conceiving of their textual apologetics as tightly articu- lated summae wherein the whole structure of the argument could be read off from the table of its contents and textual subdivisions. Thus, Panofsky pointed out, the entire constructional order of ribs and vaults may be read Off from the cross-section of a single nave shaft. While acknowledging its status as building he found it fertile to regard gothic architecture as text, not just ‘a way of seeing - or rather designing’, but as a ‘mode of literary representation’, a treatise in stone, an architectural scholasticism.4 Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove Caen and Durham were to be read as cultural symbols of a whole age by being setin the full context of thei spatial and intellectual articulation. If the medieval “Age of Faith’ wove the meaning of its world out of images and signs it was not in this respect fundamentally different from any culture. Thus when Panofsky likened iconography to ethnography” he pointed to a broad truth forall cultural study, one stressed in modern anthropology. Clifford Geerta's conceptualisation of culture as a ‘text’ and his dual method of thick deseription’ (‘setting down the meaning particular social actions have for the actors whose actions they are’) and ‘diagnosis’ (stating as explicitly as we can manage, what the knowledge thus attained demonstrates about the society in which it is found and about social life 4s such’) have much in common with Panofsky’s notions of iconography and iconotogy. It was perhaps inevitable that Geertz was eventually to "uphold iconographic art history (in the writings of Michael Baxandall) 2s ‘model for ethnography. Since the 1970s ethnography, often of an expli- citly Geertzian kind, has greatly influenced social history. In his essay ‘A bourgeois puts his world in order: the city as a text’, Geertz’s colleague, Robert Darton, analyses the representations of Montpellier in an account ofthe city written in 1768 by an anonymous but solidly middle-class citizen’. ‘The first half of the account translated into writing the idiom of the urban procession. Such a procession ‘expressed the corporate order of urban Society ... it was a statement unfurled in the streets through which the city represented itself to itself - and sometimes to God, for it also took place when Montpellier was threatened by drought or famine’. By 1768, however, ‘the language of processions was archaic. It could not convey the shifting alignments within the social order that resulted from the econo mic expansion of the mid-century years." In the second part of his account the author “began to grope for an adequate terminology ... the city no longer appeared as a parade of digntés. It became a three-tiered structure of “estates” (états).” And finally, and culturally more congenial for the futhor, the city became ‘the scene ofa style of living’ made up of musica, masonic and educational institutions. By his ‘thick’ description of this ‘account, through a dialogue of ‘tex’ and ‘context’, Darnton captures the shifting iconography of a modernising urban landscape.” ‘The iconography of landscape A scholar of Renaissance art, Panofsky never addressed the European tradition of self-consciously landscape art and painting that became firmly established in the seventeenth century. The first great art critic and historian, to devote his attention primarily to that tradition was the Victorian, John Ruskin. Over the past decade there has been a marked revival of interest in Ruskin’s writings not only because they place landscape so squarely Introduction: iconography and landscape $ at the centre of social, politcal and environmental morality, but because his way of seeing and coneeptuaising has certain similarities to sensibilities today. Indeed, Peter Fuller has proclaimed Ruskin as ‘the true prophet of the “post-modern” and “post-industrial” era. Inthe most recent major biography of John Ruskin, John Dixon Hunt has pointed out how his great eclectic collections or ‘cabinets’ of materials mineral, floral and artifactual specimens, so typical of the Victorian intellectual sensibility ~ faithfully mirror Ruskin's mind in which ‘everything was more or less reflected in everything else’. We are reminded of Fredric Jameson's characterisation of late twentieth-century post-modern art as ‘no longer unified or organic, but now [a] virtual grab-bag or lumber room of disjointed sub-systems and random raw materials and impulses of ll kinds In landscape Ruskin sought a stable ground in which a consistent order of divine design could be recognised in underlying form. Landscape he treated as a text, taking his method from biblical exegesis, seeking the reassurance of order in the face of the apparent chaos of industrialising Britain. Thus the central purpose of his frst great text, Modern painters (1843), was to locate lands- cape in a broader context than the study of form and the history of style ‘The ‘higher landscape’ depended upon a humble submission of men to the great laws of nature, a close observation of the natural world and the application of the greatest skill and imagination in its representation. In the hands of a master like Turner, landscape became in Ruskin’s eyes a suitable subject for examining the deepest moral and artistic truths, rather as history painting had been viewed within the academic tradition, Tn some respects Ruskin’s was a conservative attempt to wrest order from that quintessentially modern anarchic interplay of images and felings, which his own prose so often betrays, and which every sensitive Victorian faced as the onrush of modernisation and the feith-shatering impact of Darwin made ‘all that is sold melt into air’ But while Ruskin proclaimed himself like his father, a Tory ‘of the old schoo, he also, and without apparent contradiction, styled himself a communis, ‘reddest also of the red’. He was indeed one of the fiercest critics of the demoralisation and alienation of industrialism. In The stones of Venice (1851-3) he claimed to find in late medieval Venice a perfect society, one that followed the hierarchical order of nature. A voluntary submission to the laws which run through all creation had produced a community where a wise and just patriiate governed a state in which other orders of men and women found the spiritual freedom to express their truest being, a state therefore which became a collective work of art and the beauty of whose architecture and landscape still express the disciplined human liberation which comes only through faith.® Perhaps itis not surprising that it should be at the very juncture of the medieval world with its vision of nature as an illumi- nated text replete with the signatures of divinity, glossed at the margins6 Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove by the insights of faith, and the Renaissance world of deeply engraved symbolism that Ruskin's vision should find its most comfortable resting point. Perhaps, too, itis appropriate that Ruskin should be rediscovered in today’s world, so saturated in reproduced images that nature itself threatens to become what it was for the Middle Ages: an encyclo- peed, illuminated book ovelaid with ormamentation and marginal glosses, every Spject converted into an image with is proper abel or signature... The quintessen- Gal modern experience ofthis new “book of nature’ isthe stroll through the seenie Monders of a national park with a plastic earphone that responds to electronic triggers embedded at strategic locations along the path.™* ‘Ruskin’s modern appeal lies as much inthis radical representation of nature as a complex interplay of images as in his appeal to a ‘green’ ideology Ofsocial harmony with a nature whose laws are incommensurable, irreduc- ible to the analytic rules of positivist science and the profit-seeking logic of technology. “The landscape tradition in painting which Ruskin did so much to promote ‘and which peaked in England during his lifetime has been the subject of an increasing corpus of iconographical study that reaches beyond the discip- linary boundaries of art history. In his pioneering Landscape into art (1949), Kenneth Clark, himself a great admirer of Ruskin, attempted to place different styles of Western landscape painting — emblematic, empiricist, ‘naturalistic, fantastic-in their philosophical and, occasionally, theit socio- logical contexts. Seventeenth-century Dutch art, ‘the landscape of fact, ‘was, with its emphasis on ‘recognisable experiences’, Clark asserted, ‘a bourgeois form of art’ for it represented the experiential world of the rising middle-class merchant patrons of Amsterdam and Haarlem.** Taking his title, Ways of seeing, from one of Panofsky’s key phrases, but drawing too upon the marxist aesthetics of Walter Benjamin, John Berger took jssue with Clark's interpretative emphasis on the philosophical 2s opposed to the social and economic in works of art and also in the idea that the history of high art was an expression of a unitary history of ‘civilisation’. ‘Clark had described Gainsborough's Mrand Mrs Andrews asan ‘enchanting work’, a ‘naturalistic’ landscape painting expressing the artist's ‘Rous- Seauism’; “They ate not a couple in nature as Rousseau imagined nature’, countered Berger, ‘they are landowners and their proprictory attitude to- ‘wards what surrounds them is visible in their stance and their expressions the pleasure of secing themselves depicted as landowners ... was cahanced by the ability of oil paint to render their and in all its substantia- ity,” A way of seeing the world which ‘was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange, found its visual expression in the oil painting: ... not so much a framed window onto the world as a safe let into the wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited’ * Introduction: iconography and landscape 7 Berger thus reformulated Panofsky’s layers of meaning in terms of a marnist stratigraphy of economic base and cultural superstructure, the ideo- logy of representation in English eighteenth-century landscape art serving to naturalise, and hence to mystify, basic property relations. ‘Around the same time as Berger, Raymond Williams conducted a similar polemical critique of landscape in English literature and by implication in polite English culture as a whole: ‘a working country is hardly ever @ landscape. The very idea of landscape implies Separation and observation. Iti possible and useful to trace the internal histories of landscape painting, and landscape writing, landscape gardening and landscape lrchitecture, but in any final analysis we must relate these histories tothe common history of a land ands society. Berger and Williams inaugurated and often directly influenced a series of studies in many disciplines on the social implications of landscape imagery. Not all of them have been so confident as Berger and Wiliams in opposing ‘real’ history of ‘land’ toan ideological’ history of landscape’, ror have they all been willing to reduce landscape aesthetics entirely to ideology 2° But all have been intent to decipher the social power of land- scape imagery, to identify, in the title of James Turner's study of seven- teenth-century prospect poetry, the ‘polities of landscape’. Turner shows that many topographical and prospect poems went beyond the single van- tage point of a spectator, perhaps by deploying conventions of mapping of inventory to ‘work up an idea of human geography, a view of country life and regional character’? While landscape for these poets connoted fan attractive, elevated, comprehensive, disengaged and orderly view of the world ~ and hence a reliably objective one ~ 50 it was also distrusted (Gometimes by the same poets) as a pernicious delusion, a dazzling trick designed to distort the world and its workings “This sense of the duplicity of landscape imagery is charactristically ‘post- modern’, and it is no accident that Turner's study took shape under the influence of a critic best known for his decoding of modern advertising as well as painting and literature, Roland Barthes.” Commenting on such criticism W. J.T. Mitchell tates that language and images have become enigmss, problems tobe explained, prison houses swhich lock understanding avay from the world, Te commonplace of modern st- Ges of images, in fact, is that they must be understood as a kind of language; {nstend of providing a transparent window onthe world, images ae now regarded ts the sort of sin that presents a deceptive appearance of naturalness and transpar- nce concealing an opaque, distorting, arbitrary mechanism of representation, a proces of ideological mstifcation.* ‘The post-modem apprehension of the world emphasises the inherent instability of meaning, our ability to invert signs and symbols, to recycle8 Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove them in a different context and thus transform their reference. Earlier land less commercial cultures may sustain more stable symbolic codes Dut every culture weaves its world out of image and symbol. For this reason the iconographic method remains central to cultural enquiry. But the liber- ation of meaning in modern society, the freedom of intertextuality which Ruskin's writings implicitly acknowledge, emphasises surface rather than depth. The conservative picture of a ‘deep’ England with its stable layers of historical accretion, s0 profoundly threatened by modernisation, that \W. G, Hoskins framed from his window in North Oxfordshire inthe closing pages of The making of the English landscape,» and the more radical and ‘emotic, but no less composed, England sketched by Raymond Williams ooking out from the window in Cambridgeshire where he wrote The country ‘and the city™ represent alternative attempts t0 achieve that stability of ‘meaning in landscape which Ruskin sought and which has become a charac teristic and honourable response to the perceived chaos of the modern world. At the same time we recognise these Englands for what they are: images, further glosses upon an already deeply layered text. These images ‘might also be seen as additional reflections to a more dazzling and more ‘superficial pattern, From such a post-modern perspective landscape seems Tess like a palimpsest whose ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ meanings can somehow be recovered with the correct techniques, theories or ideologies, than a flickering text displayed on the word-processor screen whose meaning can be created, extended, altered, elaborated and finally obliterated by the ‘merest touch of a button.* NOTES 1D. E. Cosgrove, Social formation and symbolic landscape (London, 1984), pp. 13-38. 2. DW. Meinig, ‘Reading the landscape: an appreciation of W. G. Hoskins and. B. Jackson’, in D. W. Mein (ed.), The interpretation of ordinary lands- capes (Oxford, 1979), pp. 195-244; Pierce F. Lewis, “Axioms for reading the fandseape'in ibid. pp. 11-32; JamesS. Duncan, ‘Individual action and political power: a sructuration perspective’, in R. J. Johnston, The future of geography (London, 1985), pp. 174-89. 3. Similar common ground between those from different disciplines interested in landscape was soughtin the symposium organised by the Landscape Research Groupin Exeter, 1983, whose proceedings are publishedin Landscape Research 9,398), 4 W.J.T. Mitchell, eonology: image, text, ideology (Chicago, 1986), p. 2 5. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in iconology: humanistic themes in the art ofthe Renais- sance (Oxford, 1959), p. 14; Teonography and iconology: an introduction to a 2 B 6 1s 16 "7 18 9 » a Introduction: iconography and landscape 9 the study of Renaissance ar’, in Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the visual arts (Harmondsworth, 1970), pp. 51-81, quotations on pp. 57-8. Panofsky’s stratigraphic metaphor for iconology forced him to suggest that the meaning of a work of art was somehow secreted below its surface configu- ration. For a criticism of this approach see Svetlana Alpes, The art of describ- lng: Dutch artin the seventeenth century (Chicago, 1983), fp. xxiii. Panofsky, ‘Teonography and iconology’, pp. 55,64, 6. ‘Studies in iconology,p. 6 fn. 1; “Teonography and iconology’,p. 56. Ernst Cassrer, Language and myth (New York, 1946), p. 8; originally published as Sprache und Mythos, No. 6 in Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, quoted ia Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr, The Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective (New York, 1975), p. 156. We owe the recognition of the importance of Cassirer to Panofsky to pp. 153-65 of Edgerton’s book. Erwin Panofsky, ‘Die Perspektive als “symbolische Form", Vonage der Bib- liothek Warburg: 1924-5 (Leipzig, 1927), pp. 258-331. Panofsky, ‘leonography and iconology’, pp. 59-61 Erwin Panofsky, Gothie architecture and scholasticism (New York, 1957), pp. 17,58. anofsky,‘Iconography and iconology’, pp. 51-2. Clifford Geertz, "Thick description: toward an interpretative theory of culture” in The interpretation of cultures: selected essays (New York, 1973), pp. 3-30, quotations on p. 27. (Clifford Geertz, ‘Art asa cultural system’, in Local knowledge: further essays in interpretative anthropology (New York, 1983), pp. 94-120, esp. 102-9. Robert Damton, “A bourgeois puts his world in order: the city as a text, in The great cat massacre and other episodes in French cultural history (Londo, 1984), pp. 107-43, quotations on pp. 120,128,140 Forsimilar analyses of the ritual meaning of urban landscapes see Edwin Muir, Civic ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981); and David Cannadine, “The context, performance and meaning of ritual: the British monarchy and the “invention of tradition”, c. 1820-1977", in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The invention of tradisin (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 101-64, Peter Fuller, John Ruskin: a radical conservative’, in Peter Fuller, Images (of God: the consolation of los illusions (London, 1985}, pp. 277-83, quotation ‘on p28. John Diton Hunt, The wider sea a life of John Ruskin (London, 1982). The (quotation is from Kenneth Clark, Ruskin today (Harmondsworth, 1967), . Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, of the cultural logic of late capitalism’, [New Left Review, 146 (1984), pp. 3-92, DE, Cosgrove, John Ruskin and the geographical imagination’, Geographical Review @ (1979), pp. 43-62. ‘This is the title of Marshall Berman's essay on modernism: All shar ix solid ‘melts into air (London, 1981). The quotation is originally from Karl Marx discussing ‘the bourgeois epoch’ in The communist manifesto.‘Stephen Daniels and Denis Cosgrove penis Cnrove, The myth andthe tones of Voie: the historical era cen a eee ourale Hera Gapaphy 898) pe. 15-8 Sr ae Bis note the nguoge of mages, Crit! Inu, (60,9. 38. 02 hols, eolgal pposc the main reson for Rus ules aE pe Mato at Images of God pp. 7-2 ree dandape ino a (Harmondsworth 1950, . 8 Berger, aye cf seg (London, 97) Toi p06 Pld is, The country and te cy (London, 1973) 9-120. Rayan Barel, The ds of tonscape andi see of place ee ent h tthe poy of ohn Clare (Candie, 1972), a4 Feet ele Berger arecataion (London, 1980). Fer ee of andcpe rl seey and son Engl our 1301660 (Oxtore ). top 2 Imi 2. 6 ohn Berger and Rayiond Willams have ao adresed i ae ee Wa ofscng, pp. a8-49,an8 Wiliams Advertang ae en Problans i maori andere (Lando, 1580), pe 05 Riehl, cooly. p2. a ee ac and practical enon (Chica, 17) Mae making of he Engi ndseape armondswor, 190), pe 8 Wa Te county and the cy. 3 Mea ee Hernan fr ht commets on ear das of is a 1 The geography of Mother Nature PETER FULLER Recently, [told a fellow art critic that a group of geographers had expressed fn interest in some of the ideas which I had been putting forward: I could see from his expression that he was perplexed. I might just as well have told him that a gaggle of arms dealers, or pet food manufacturers, had responded to my aesthetic ideas. He could clearly discern no connection between the study and pursuit of art and those disciplines which are con- cerned with our knowledge of the natural world. do not think that my colleague was in any way exceptional; ‘perplexity’ is symptomatic of that chaos and confusion which prevails within today's art world. No one is certain any more about where aesthetic values come from; and itis the exception, rather than the rule, to think that they bear any relationship to our responses to nature. ‘Things were not always so: the early aesthetic philosophers ~ Alexander Baumgarten, Immanuel Kant, and Edmund Burke among them ~ recog- nised that the aesthetic response was evinced by natural forms and pheno- ‘mena as much as by the objects created by artists. Similarly, there was ‘a time when no one would have thought it odd for an artist to take a professional interest in, say, anatomy, zoology, botany, or meteorology. Indeed, it was generally assumed that such disciplines were keys to the successful creation of aesthetic effects in the visual arts. But that phenome~ ron which art historians refer to as ‘Modernism’ drove a wedge between the pursuit of art and the study of nature ~ a wedge which sadly seems to have remained firmly in place in the era of ‘Post Modernism’ which, ‘we are told, we have recently entered. "The modernist flight from the world of nature took a variety of forms. ‘Some looked to the paradigms of mechanical, as opposed to natural, pro- duction. Others urged a form of ‘art for art's sake’ which insisted there ‘was no correspondence between the ‘Significant Forms’ (of art) which give rise to aesthetic experience and natural forms, After the second world ‘war, this severance became chronic. Studies related to the natural sciences a BR