Landscape - a face of the world

Francesco Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux has been evoked by many and many times, to the point of being considered the event that symbolically marks the "discovery" of landscape by Europeans. Even if we peel back the layers of interpretation superimposed over it, Petrarch's account is tantamount to confessing a ^profane conversion1.

Hence the disturbance with which the circumstances in which the moment of the turning of his gaze, trained to contemplate the absoluteness of an unseen Creator, towards the created and very visible universe are transcribed. The poet - a Franciscan monk -, shaken by the intensity of the aesthetic experience of natural beauty, has the feeling of having fallen into sin. But he was merely responding to a paradigm shift in the European worldview, a shift that was to accompany the cultural revolution of the Renaissance and the European modernity it ushered in.

If the 'Renaissance understanding of the past'² would make the modern historical perspective possible, the Renaissance double understanding of the world - landscape as an aesthetic object and nature as a ^scientific object3 - would from then on determine the European attitude towards the man-made universe. We are confining ourselves here to the landscape half of the modern European attitude to the world, which is why we shall be particularly interested in the way in which the aesthetically filtered view of nature is manifested today, in the way we plan our inhabited territory. It is a backward glance: because we humans give meaning to the world in which we live, we are the only inhabiting species; that is why we look at nature in a somewhat 'outsider's view': although we are part of it, we only frequent it through the artificial environment we have built for ourselves.

The first landscape sequence is landscape painting. Having first become a genre in its own right in north-western ^Europe4, the pictorial or graphic representation of the view itself (not as the backdrop to a religious scene, a genre, or a portrait) has been a formidable success since the 15th century. Although the precise circumstances and timing of the emergence of landscape painting are not entirely clear from art ^history5, the massive presence of pictorial transpositions of views (always marked by the presence of humans) in European art from the Renaissance onwards is an indisputable fact.

Read the full text in Arhitectura 5/2013

1 The excursion took place on April 26, 1335, cf. Francesco Petrarca, 'L'ascension du mont Ventoux', in Joachim Ritter, Paysage, Les Éditions de l'Imprimeur, Paris, 1997. See also Kázmér Kovács, Peisaj cu grădină și casa, Simetria, București, 2011, pp. 62-63.

2 Cf. Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past, Saint Martin's Press, New York, 1969.

3 Joachim Ritter, op. cit., pp. 69 ff.

4 The present discussion is restricted to the European cultural space. Although in China (about a millennium before Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux) all the dimensions of a landscape culture were established (cf. Augustin Berque, Les raisons du paysage, Hazan, Paris, 1995), it was only in Western Europe that the post-industrial trends that were to be initiated by the change of vision represented by the landscape garden were to appear (cf. Kázmér Kovács, op. cit., especially chapter 12, p. 176 ff.).