Looking at the Landscape: Class Formation and the Visual

Abstract

Abstract What has the art historian to say to the anthropologist about landscape and the ways in which it is perceived? At first glance, quite a lot. Landscape has been classically constituted by the discipline of art history as one of the major genres through which the ‘modern’ (that is, Renaissance and post-Renaissance) Western tradition of art can be traced: from the early glimmerings of an emergent ‘realism’ in the panoramic vistas of a Van Eyck or a Leonardo to the classic, ordered compositions of Poussin and Claude, so often imitated by eighteenthcentury landscape gardeners; from the fresh perceptions of Constable’s sketches to the even more authentic perceptual ‘truths’ of the Impressionists. In charting this route, art history has crystallized a specific vocabulary for dealing with the bundle of issues—the representation of place or environment, the organization and categorization of space—condensed in the term ‘landscape’.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.