Description
Book SynopsisThe time of the landscape is not the time when people started describing gardens, mountains and lakes in poems or representing them in works of art: it is the time when the landscape imposed itself as a specific object of thought. It is the time when both the harmony of arranged gardens and the disharmony of wild nature led to a revolution in the criteria of the beautiful and in the meaning of the word “art.” It coincided with the birth of aesthetics, understood as a regime for shaping how art is seen and thought, and also with the French Revolution, understood as a revolution in the very idea of what binds together a human community. The time of the landscape is the time when the conjunction of these two upheavals brought into focus, however hazily, a common horizon: that of a revolution that no longer concerns only the laws of the state or the norms of art, but the very forms of sensible experience.
This brilliant and wide-ranging book will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy, literature, the visual arts, and the humanities generally, and to anyone interested in critical theory and philosophy.
Trade Review“This short, polemical intervention in the history of landscape aesthetics is sure to energize a fresh debate about the relations of painting, architecture, and visual experience in the nineteenth century.”
W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago
“A decisive treatment of the perception and management of nature, The Time of the Landscape contends that the design and management of gardens in the post-revolutionary regime signal a sea-change in the ways we perceive, experience, and shape the world around us.”
Tom Conley, Harvard University
Table of ContentsAbbreviations of frequently cited works
List of Illustrations
Foreword
I. A Newcomer to the Fine Arts
II. Scenes of Nature
III. The Landscape as Painting
IV. Beyond the Visible
V. Politics of the Landscape
Epilogue
Notes
