Scenery and landscape are now nearly synonymous. The slight differences in meaning they retain reflect their dissimilar origin. Scenery has traditionally been associated with the world of illusion which is the theater- The expression “behind the scenes” reveals the unreality of scenes.
We are not bidden to look “behind the landscape,” although a landscaped garden can be as contrived as a stage scene, and as little enmeshed with the life of the owner as the stage paraphernalia with the life of the actor. The difference is that landscape, in its original sense, referred to the real World, not to the World of art and make-believe. In its native Dutch, “landschap” designated such commonplaces as “a collection of farms or fenced fields, sometimes a small domain or administrative unit.” Only when it was transplanted to England toward the end of the sixteenth cen-
tury did the word shed its earthbound roots and acquire the precious meaning of art. Landscape came to mean a prospect seen from a specific standpoint. Then it was the artistic representation of that prospect.
Landscape was also the background of an oficial portrait; the “scene” of a “pose.” As such it became fully integrated with the world of make-believe.
Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception (1974)
I now see that I have essentially sought to answer two clusters of questions raised in my mind by this passage. First: What is so special about the “commonplaces” designated by the word landschap? If these places were so common, why was landschap significant enough to be “transplanted in England ”? And why was landschap important enough to be used as the label for an entire artistic genre? Second: What was being transformed into make-believe, and what was being made believe, when the meaning of landscape changed from commonplace to scenic spaces? Why are we not “bidden to look ‘behind the landscape”’? What is it that is being covered up, or masked, by the landscape? And how and why was this illusory
make-believe world, created through the transformation of landscape as place into landscape as a prospect seen from a specific standpoint?
All together, these questions make up a detective story in which the (dead?) body is that of the body politic. Now is the time to gather in the drawing room and review the plot as well as the unusual suspects. After addressing the two sets of questions, I conclude by broaching the subtext of a larger metadiscourse concerning the relationships between place, space, body, and polity in the making of the political landscape.
Kenneth R. Olwig, Landscape Nature and the Body Politic (2002)
Land Collective, The CommonGround and Sky Farm (2014)
Header: Engraved title page for the Thomas Hobbes Leviathan (1651)
landscape theory 