Andrew's Wiki
Iconography Landscape

Daniel Cosgrove intro

• Representations of landscape in paintings, poems, etc are not illustrations, but instead “constituent images of its meanings” (1)
  • “And of course, every study of a landscape further transforms its meaning, depositing another layer”
• Human geography: “tendency to reify landscape as an object of empiricist investigation” (1)
• Iconography: “the theoretical and historical study of symbolic imagery” (1)
• Quotes Peter Fuller’s opinion about Ruskin being the prophet of the post-modern era (5)
• Daniel Cosgrove himself: “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” (5)
  • In Modern Painters (1843), “higher landscape,” in which man “submitted” to “the great laws of nature”
    • For example, Turner shows “deepest moral and artistic truths” (5)
  • Yet his own readings are “anarchic”
    • Betrays his politics: both said he was a communist and a Tory
  • “one of the fiercest critics of the demoralisation and alieantion of industrialism” cf Stones of Venice (1851-3), where Venice is the model for a hierarchical society
  • Ruskin: submission to order gives you a “spiritual freedom to express their truest being” (5) so human liberation comes through faith always
  • Ruskin: nature v modernity: “nature whose laws are incommensurable, irreducible to the analytic rules of positivist science and the profit-seeking logic of technology” (6)
• Landscape tradition of painting: peaked along with Ruskin
• John Berger, Ways of Seeing
  • Uses Benjamin’s Marxist aesthetics
  • Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews read as expression of a position within an order of property ownership
  • Property and exchange affect your ways of seeing
• Raymond Williams, The Country and the City
  • Qtd on 7 “a working country is hardly a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation.”
• Berger and Williams have made scholars of landscape more attentive to ideology, the politics of landscape

Random

• Ruskin quote, quite famous: “THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE” (13)
• Steel printing plate, invented 1840
  • By 1890, 126 printsellers in London