Landscape Ideology

Landscape Ideology

Cosgrove’s chapter on English landscapes is a fine historical analysis of the complex inter-relationship between society, aesthetics, economics, and politics. He is also sensitive to the changes and revaluations that occur when ideas pass from one cultural context to another, in this case from Italy to England. One aspect of his analysis I found very interesting is the process by which a society hides a reality, whether social, economic, or cultural, with an artificially constructed image or conception of itself. With this conception, the ruling class attempts to deceive itself and the rest of society.

The reality for England in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, according to Cosgrove, is that it was becoming a mercantilist, capitalist state, rather than an absolute monarchy. This was due to the strength of its navy, the influence of Parliament, and the commercial occupations of many of the landowners. The effect of this on landscape design was that no imposing imperial palace was built to symbolize absolutist control over society. Instead, the landscaping symbol of England became the country house: “A well-managed country house and its lands form a self-sufficient world, a microcosm of the mercantilist state” (196).

Whereas in 16^th century Venice Palladio’s neoclassicism represented a desire to legitimate Venice’s imperialism, in England it evoked “the moral and political perfection” of republican Rome – which seems to indicate some anxiety about England's own emerging empire. In country houses the Palladian neoclassicism combined with Gothic touches to create a union of “Roman authority and Gothic liberty” (203). This liberty is only for the “lord,” the landowner who controls the layout, management, and production of the land. The controlling, neoclassical design applied to the landscape was disapproved of by the older aristocracy. They instead had an idea of a “natural” landscape -- not an overly modified one -- intended for use, in which the the lord cared for the peasant as for his children. Obviously, this paternalistic feudal fantasy of “merry England” never existed. The newer, commercial aristocracy was more concerned with maximizing the profits from their land. They imposed a formal neoclassical design on the land, which they could view as a painting from the commanding vantage-point of their house. The peasants’ dwellings were removed to clear the view, thus making invisible the major factor in the estate’s wealth. Nature was a garden that reflected “the stability and perfection of English civilization” (204). As England was moving to capitalist relations of production with cities as the centers of wealth and power, the image the ruling class used to represent the nation was the country house, whose aesthetically pleasing landscape design was considered “natural.”

Even in the cities, where the squalor of concentrated poor workers was impossible to ignore, there was an attempt to treat the city as the country. The design of London was structured by parks which held country houses. This amounts to a “denial of the role of the city as an increasingly autonomous center of capitalist accumulation, market control and ultimately production, organizing the life of the countryside” (217). Treating London as the country with landscaped parks and villas reveals an anxiety about the reality of England's capitalist development, and about the resulting discontented poor workers. Cogrove calls the imposition of landscape design, in the cases of England and Venice, a “landscape ideology” (222). In Venice this ideology involved “linear perspective, the logic of urban aesthetics, and urban visual control”; its aesthetics attempts to hide Venice's shift toward a “second feudalism”(221,222). In England “colore and aerial perspective, the logic of rural aesthetics and visual control over the countryside” obfuscate England's progression toward urban industrial capitalism (221). Thus aesthetics can serve state power not only by openly glorifying it but also by disguising its actual operations.