Eckbo , 7. When dividing up landscape Eckbo identifies repeated daily, weekly, regular and special occasional routes as crucial modeling forces for how and when the environment is perceived; these are acted upon by paths of least resistance which themselves are in flux as technology and wealth shift. Through the derived patterns, understanding of the environment as landscape—and thus transitory—becomes possible. What transpires is an approach that characterizes landscape in ways that would become significant for a series of theoretical approaches, the so-called critical turns, wherein dynamism is key to unlocking increasingly complexly textured perspectives.
This has encompassed urban movement, of course, but also movement through the natural environment. The work of four scholars in particular has been instrumental in creating this paradigm shift within classical studies: Bloomer and Charles W. Moore, writing in collaboration with Robert J. Objects and their environments become subject to unique and dynamic processes of systematization or perhaps narrativization dependent on individual perceptive experiences and patterns of association.
The processes of detection that underpin this sensory model depend for their meaning on a consensus regarding the available repertoire of movement enabled or triggered by particular spaces and experienced as a product of human anatomical form. In classical antiquity, a discourse of center and periphery underpinned political space and societal self-fashioning. The incorporation of groups as communities and city-states required the tethering of individuals to particular and specified locales within which relativity, and thus proximity and boundaries, became crucial identifiers.
For the Greek world these were Delphi and the Omphalos aka Umbilicus , legendary center point and marker of relational divergence from Greek semiotics; at Rome, these were the features in the Forum known as the Golden Milestone erected by Augustus in 20 BCE and the Umbilicus which may have eventually incorporated the Golden Milestone:. The confluence of internal and external landmarks in this passage emphasizes how porous was the psychic demarcation between modes of spatial perception and experience. He also identified the city as the new normative topography.
This finding has its roots in the transition experienced by cultures of late capitalism, within which the commodification of consumption and the marginalization of the means and landscapes of production were becoming lived experience for majority populations in postwar economies. Technocracy, and the diminution of the need for mass labor in small-scale traditional agriculture, were both an aspiration and a dilemma, but whether or not technocracy was a positive factor for individual experience, it inevitably created a momentum that shifted populations from rural to urban lifestyles.
This has significant implications for the patterns of interpretation available to individuals and groups responding to the natural environment within more or less recent historical contexts. One shift occurs when experiential repertoires of how to read a landscape begin to operate by way of textual rather than directly obtained knowledge, and finding the most appropriate script with which to fill in the blanks when confronted by a scene situates the subjective response within a mediated process.
It also encourages individual recalibrations of space as a dynamic product of shifting visual, personal, and political perspectives. We can see aspects of this modality already transforming Greco-Roman understanding and textualization of the environment and its scenography, and this comes into focus in particular when agricultural landscapes are in the frame. The protagonist of Works and Days , subtly differently, challenges audiences to understand their individual autonomy against an agriscape that stages political systematization as an essential function of human environmental exploitation.
Even as urban centers began to take center stage, and in their novelty often became the described focus of, or relative to, contextual scenography for literary manifestation, nonetheless the countryside remained the central fact of life Osborne , Casey , responding to Philip J. Hence it can be something quite informal—indeed, anything that indicates a sense of direction and gives a basis for orientation.
Construed in this way, mapping is place-finding , a term that is in the same league as place-taking and place-making. Pragmatically and conceptually, what characterizes any successful farmer is a mastery of boundaries and thus an appreciation of what constitutes transgression and acceptable risk.
Turning back to ancient Greece, something like three centuries after Hesiod, Aristotle Pol. In reality, reading the literary texts conjures up a conversation linking among many others Hesiod to Xenophon Oeconomicus ; fourth century BCE , Cato De agri cultura , second century BCE , Cicero by way of his interest in Cato and, e. Literature of agriculture depends, implicitly or explicitly, on a sufficiently leisured and educated society of consumers hungry for a stake in the means of production but culturally and economically distanced from the day-to-day grind of plowing, shearing, fertilizing, feeding, harvesting, and slaughtering.
Narratology and Interpretation : The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature
Recent studies of agri-lit e. Kronenberg, Nelsestuen, Sciarrino have showcased the satirical and political weightiness of farming; the rural aesthetics of farmed landscapes see, e. Drawing these ideas together, we have a model that situates the cultivated farmscape as the boundary soil, territory, labor between the semiotics of untamed wilderness and the acculturated structures of urban morphology. In the Roman world a traditional citadel model, complete with acropolis, came to be accompanied by the expectation of political terraforming of the hinterland centuriation ; as part of the spatial grammar of colonization, its close, ongoing topographic association with the city made philosophically unnecessary any refraction of city-space by way of an agricultural filter.
This is evident in Theocritus Idylls 3, whose paraclausithyron asks the audience to imagine an urban irruption into a natural landscape not yet economized. Refining the focus to the farmscape, compare the versions of agribusiness produced in Theocritus Idylls 5, and more generally in Cato De agri cultura. Sympathetic qualities are ascribed to particular kinds of rustic environment and crops, and there is a figurative quality lurking within even the more apparently straightforward diktats.
The landscape for planting starts with a rich crassus , flourishing laetus , and open expanse of ground described as fieldland, suitable for grain; temporal modulation means that not all such soils produce somatically equivalent terrains. Fog, for instance, where environmentally pervasive, turns resource-hungry agriscapes of waving grain into patchworks of mixed-use terrain, visually and practically very different.
Grain, by contrast, promotes a sense of surplus both within the land and as an experience for the landowner , of coherence, and thrives where clarity is present. Moreover, grain encourages an identification of value and identity between the pater familias and his praedium Agr. Praedium in this sense is a function of boundaried territorialism within which the points of contact are also symbiotic, enabling comparative self-fashioning e.
The land should nevertheless be defined with a sense of autonomy and integrity: Clear sight produces the best result in both instances, one might suppose. Despite the obvious relevance of Oxford Latin Dictionary sense 2, praedium sense 1 is also flickeringly in play: The personified farm is a bellwether for the monetization of the rustic landscape and in itself guarantees that the citizen landowner is in a position to evade the ethical disasters that attend on money making Agr. For the text of Hesiod, this is in part implicit; even if the poem had its genesis in a culture comfortable with oral composition and performance, consensus enabled the eventual acceptance of one canonical text.
Superficially at least, a combination of territorial expansion, increasing density of encounters with new nations and peoples, and the scope for systematization of knowledge in new ways that these not only enabled but necessitated politically as well as economically , led to the kind of holistic encyclopedism that endowed geographical expertise, in the widest sense, with hitherto unexpected cultural capital.
The immersive frescoes that decorated uiridiaria e. These sites are easily intelligible as loci drawing on the distinction between loci and imagines that underlies the art of memory: Not all landscape frescoes are so evocative of synchronic abundance or mythological set piece or so ostentatiously representational. Eleanor Winsor Leach , 75—78 introduces the systematic quality delivered by the convergence of loci and imagines in ancient rhetoric succinctly, but also draws out the question of authenticity significant for this discussion , especially as it relates to the role of the viewer in filling in the gaps.
Townhouses and villas from this era often exuberantly manifest the visual puzzle offered by the free-floating glimpses of country life and laborers that miniature decorative scenes offer. This more do-it-yourself genre of free-floating landscape vignette, wherein the viewer completes the meaning with fewer visual guidelines than are on display in reality-effect, representationally rich and immersive images, is my next focus. Studies of corridor F-G have emphasized the dialogic relationship between the mobile viewer and the cartoon-strip quality that this kind of frescoed glimpse offers.
Cubiculum B like cubiculum D is themed red, and its walls conjure up a painted pinacotheca in which disproportionately slender columns i. Taloni , suggests that when one looks in from the garden court end the images take on a generic quality that further hastens the eye toward the back wall of the room, although she also acknowledges the exuberant variety and stimulating color contrasts that the space conjures up when set against the other two comparable cubicula , D and E.
The additional reality-effect depth offered by the stucco format, and use of both higher and lower relief modeling, enhances their perspectives. Creamy-white stucco, set in motion by flickering shadows from artificial light or shifting patterns of daylight through the door from the garden court, might cause these ceiling panels to float free from their real structural context, giving the impression of an airy expanse whose dynamics and kaleidoscopic scheme invite the eyes and signal the gravity-defying existence of an exterior world unlike the grounded, enclosing quality of the richly colored walls.
The ceiling panels, of course, in drawing the gaze aloft are also parading their artifice: The intended height is difficult to judge. The tower has a rustic pitched roof, creating a kind of loggia: Below the sequence of openings, the cornice supports swags of garlands. Taloni , reads the structure as two story, with the thatched roof adding plein-air volume above one tall story, ventilated and to an extent at least illuminated by narrow, ceiling-level openings. The entrance is framed by an open enclosure, with two pierced walls each crowned by a covered urn, each with a handle, at the end farthest from the tower.
In front of the enclosure and facing the river stands a guardian figure of Priapus, near enough to scaled life size depending on how one reads the perspective.
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The combination of trees, terrain, and people is in tune with the nostalgic idyllic landscape of for instance Propertius 3. Farther into the scene, behind them, the entrance of a large circular tower invites the viewer in, but also engages with the river: There is, however, a slight resistance inherent in the scenography, or at least an invitation to linger at the central tower.
Projecting toward the viewer from the central circular tower is a vestibule, propylaea-style, with solid walls and roof. Extending still further into the foreground are two broad walls, waist height, against the left of which an elegant woman leans, one leg crossed in front of the other, supporting a meditative stance by resting her chin on her hand. This figure, overshadowed by a tall deciduous tree emerging from the rocky ground behind the circular structure, faces front, but with her gaze directed down and toward the sacrificial scene.
In her graceful, static pose, and the intrigue of her reserved gaze, she encourages the viewer to linger in contemplative mode. Should one imagine stepping past her, to enter the tower, its circular form involves a complexly mathematical experience. First, pass between the half walls, humanized by the leaning female body; next step into the full-height rectilinear vestibule, with blind walls on either side and a shallow, pitched roof; and the drum construction of the tower itself, once through the vestibule, then discourages forward momentum.
Here, five visible narrow ventilation openings punctuate the upper wall above a cornice, externally decorated as at the first tower by swag garlands. The entire structure is surmounted by a large covered urn atop a column with a plain capital. On the embankment abutting the river stand two herms, and stretching from the drum and covering part of the embankment and bridge is an awning. Here the iconography is as much that of the tower-tomb, familiar from the Hellenistic world and a popular, locally normalized model in Rome by the later first century BCE as much as it is an evocation of Egyptian form.
The garlands broadly evoke the repeating pattern of bucrania with sacrificial filets and festoons familiar from the nearby, albeit later, Ara Pacis enclosure, or, for instance, the Tomb of Caecilia Metella close to Rome on the Via Appia. Whether or not the scheme is intended to suggest ox heads, nonetheless the decorative form was one with particularly Augustan and possibly semiotically playful connotations, as set out by Richard Jackson King Should viewers read this tower as funerary?
On balance, its relationship to the sacrifice in progress, the matching scale for these two elements, and the mood conjured up by the slender woman beside the enclosure suggest the asnwer is yes; the pose of the woman also evokes Attic grave reliefs Wadsworth , In addition, the geo-cultural association among elite villas, landscape vignettes, and monumental family tombs as noted above locks this scene into the cultivated farmscapes and their overlap with pleasure gardens, as described by Varro and his friends.
The right third of the landscape is separated from the rest by the small river, but joined by the bridge, traversed by two figures in the background and two men on the right bank, in the foreground whose activities balance the smaller-scale women sacrificing center, foreground. The woman and child, frozen just over halfway across the footbridge moving left to right , are approaching a small tower comparable to that at the left of the scene where we started.
This structure has no rooftop loggia but does have a porch, open on both sides, shallow-gabled, extending from the short right-hand elevation comparable to the central tower, but without solid walls. This pair are most obviously read as fishermen: Logically, these are the closest foreground characters, with the small tower top right in the background and some distance away. If so, then viewers are already being nudged to storyboard the elements in spatio-temporal terms: How far is one from the other?
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How long will it take the woman and child to reach their destination? What effort does the rocky terrain add, and how much further does that background tower seem as a result? Does the bridge disrupt the possibility of leaving the frame by way of a route from fore- to background? Does the scale of the fishermen encourage the eye to start and finish there?
What difference does the curve of the vault make to the physical relationship between the viewer and the overall scenography and each individual element? The awning attached to the central tower, in combination with the ventilation windows in the various structures, imbues the scene with a sense of pleasant, airy shade, but also with a sense of movement: The artifice of this panel is multifarious, even as it homes in on minute details to generate a reality effect.
If viewed by way of Gestalt psychology as an example of grouping, further analysis of the organizational agenda see Goffman can be attempted. We can see how the similarity of themes vault and walls and the similarity of spatial markup pinacotheca are also reinforcing the dramatic points of contrast between walls and vault plane, color, density of framed images. Moreover, the pinacotheca scheme implies design and thereby nudges the viewer to generate some organizing principle other than the simple artistic representation of random objects, individuals, and scenes. What is especially interesting about the Gestalt approach is that it encourages viewers to consider their position not simply with respect to the unified experience of the cubiculum , but with attention shifting between the whole and parts.
In assuming a narrative unity, my description has both recognized and fixed a set of archetypal qualities that imply the possibility of understanding landscape as a totality composed of symbolic unity. The ceiling vault contributes to the pinacotheca theme evident in the room as a whole, with the complex of framed images of different sizes, with some stand-alone motifs, but regularly organized including an offertory group at a Priapus herm, other landscapes with a sacral-idyllic theme, and scenes relating to the worship of Dionysus.
In addition, the angle of gaze required would float the elevated landscape, privileging it well above the terrestrial plane; the lack of any evidence of pigment means it was always intended to have a visually recessive status, and the physical location on a vaulted ceiling adds dimensionality to the recessive element by way of the gentle curve. Whether envisioned in art or literature, landscape had a symbolic potential to produce a double vision or dual nature in which the materiality of natural elements thickets, springs, crags could take on an archetypal role and participate in a mythic reality.
This practice eventually resulted in trips in and out of Roman cities becoming excursions into topographies of memory. This was possible by the late republic because Roman tombs became cultivated landscape features which, even as atmospheric wallpaper, were reframing and mediating admonitory, mnemonic, and melancholy experience for passersby see Purcell ; cf.
In effect, is Greek theory always compromising Roman adventures in and taming of the wild? Or is it integral to their enjoyment? This is evidently the case as ancient city-states reached a position of surplus production. Town and country were already taking on oppositional nuances in elite Roman rhetoric of the mid-first century BCE, but this nostalgic, politically reactionary overlay, assuming a negative disconnection from working the land, was for the most part a veneer.
Song exchange in Roman pastoral / by Evangelos Karakasis. - Version details - Trove
Even in a city of around a million inhabitants, few Romans would be without meaningful connections to small or large landholdings within an extended family context. Even agricultural laborers, or slaves, whose control over their environment was especially circumscribed, would perforce consult with overseers, colleagues, peers, or their own internalized lore when laboring on the land. Successful and thus productive collaboration with nature generates narrative at every level. Moreover, the increasing construction of landscaped gardens accessible to the public within Rome offered a gateway to a wide social range eager to experience and perhaps internalize the landscapes of elite otium to which wealthy Romans aspired.
Hence the aesthetic perception of landscape, in antiquity, is rather more about identification of aspects relevant or beneficial to oneself within it, and its potential to offer a culturally meaningful space to operate within, than it is about isolating it as a text for aesthetic interest. For the Hellenophile sophisticate and the hard-bitten estate manager alike, a tree is never simply a tree. It is always good for something and means something within a preexisting cultural system. Nevertheless, Greco-Roman engagement with the environment recognized, and evaluated pragmatically recalling Scott , the close alignment between vision and other somatic interactions.
Social strata and status acknowledged the value of landscape and experienced its realities in different ways, to be sure, but always within a world where responses to precarity of resource and sustainability were significantly focused on individual ability to exercise authority over the natural environment. Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. The Poetics of Space.
Moore, and Robert J. Body, Memory, and Architecture. Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture. University of California Press. Bragantini, Irene, and Mariette de Vos, eds. Le Decorazione della Villa Romana della Farnesina. Material Aspects and Symbolic Values. British School at Athens Studies 4. The British School at Athens. Corsi, Cristina, and Caterina Pada Venditti.
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The Case-Study of Mariana. Time and Space in the Argonautica. Trends in Classics—Supplementary Volume 4. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Landscape before Linear Perspective. Di Mino, Maria Rita Sanzi, ed. Accessed February 6, Textes, Techniques et Pratiques. The Landscape We See. Die Darstellung der Landschaft in der Griechischen Dichtung. The Urban Image of Augustan Rome. The Anthropologist as Author.
On the Psychological Activities of Reading. Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis. University of Georgia Press. An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Literary and Artistic Patronage in Ancient Rome. University of Texas Press. A Companion to Roman Love Elegy. Gould, Peter, and Rodney White. Class Formation and the Visual. Zur Raumbeschreibung in den Kultur- und Medienwissenschaften.
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