Geography of the Gaze: Urban and Rural Vision in Early Modern Europe - Softcover

Dubbini, Renzo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226167372 ISBN 13: 9780226167374

Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Geography of the Gaze offers a new history and theory of how the way we look at things influences what we see. Focusing on Western Europe from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, Renzo Dubbini shows how developments in science, art, mapping, and visual epistemology affected the ways natural and artificial landscapes were perceived and portrayed.

He begins with the idea of the "view," explaining its role in the invention of landscape painting and in the definition of landscape as a cultural space. Among other topics, Dubbini explores how the descriptive and pictorial techniques used in mariners' charts, view-oriented atlases, military cartography, and garden design were linked to the proliferation of highly realistic paintings of landscapes and city scenes; how the "picturesque" system for defining and composing landscapes affected not just art but also archaeology and engineering; and how the ever-changing modern cityscapes inspired new ways of seeing and representing the urban scene in Impressionist painting, photography, and stereoscopy. A marvelous history of viewing, Geography of the Gaze will interest everyone from scientists to artists.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Renzo Dubbini is a professor in the Istituto di Architettura at the University of Venice. He is the author of Architettura delle prigioni: I luoghi e il tempo della punizione (1700-1880).

Lydia G. Cochrane has translated many books, including most recently The Myth of Pope Joan by Alain Boureau.

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Geography of the Gaze offers a new history and theory of how the way we look at things influences what we see. Focusing on Western Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Renzo Dubbini shows how developments in science, art, mapping, and visual epistemology affected the ways natural and artificial landscapes were perceived and portrayed.

He begins with the idea of the "view," explaining its role in the invention of landscape painting and in the definition of landscape as a cultural space. Among other topics, Dubbini explores how the descriptive and pictorial techniques used in mariners' charts, view-oriented atlases, military cartography, and garden design were linked to the proliferation of highly realistic paintings of landscapes and city scenes; how the "picturesque" system for defining and composing landscapes affected not just art but also archaeology and engineering; and how the ever-changing modern cityscapes inspired new ways of seeing and representing the urban scene in Impressionist painting, photography, and stereoscopy. A marvelous history of viewing, Geography of the Gaze will interest everyone from scientists to artists.

Aus dem Klappentext

Geography of the Gaze offers a new history and theory of how the way we look at things influences what we see. Focusing on Western Europe from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Renzo Dubbini shows how developments in science, art, mapping, and visual epistemology affected the ways natural and artificial landscapes were perceived and portrayed.

He begins with the idea of the "view," explaining its role in the invention of landscape painting and in the definition of landscape as a cultural space. Among other topics, Dubbini explores how the descriptive and pictorial techniques used in mariners' charts, view-oriented atlases, military cartography, and garden design were linked to the proliferation of highly realistic paintings of landscapes and city scenes; how the "picturesque" system for defining and composing landscapes affected not just art but also archaeology and engineering; and how the ever-changing modern cityscapes inspired new ways of seeing and representing the urban scene in Impressionist painting, photography, and stereoscopy. A marvelous history of viewing, Geography of the Gaze will interest everyone from scientists to artists.

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Geography of the Gaze: Urban and Rural Vision in Early Modern Europe

By Renzo Dubbini

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2002 Renzo Dubbini
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226167372
CHAPTER ONE - The World Described

1. Recognizability

If landscape is a result of human labor, the image that effectively captures its characteristics and identifies its essential lines is a document that reveals a given societys aspirations and its ability to transform the environment. As George Duby puts it, The topography that the geographer has before his eyes and attempts to understand depends of course on elements as material as geological formations, but it also depends, much more than one would think, on mental representations, value systems, and an ideology. Moreover, it represents the translation, the inscription on the terrain, of the whole of a culture. This means that all topographical projections, which are based on a dual operation of deciphering and presenting signs, are likely to be motivated by economic concerns, military strategies, or movements for reform. Above all, they reflect a vision of the world; they are attempts to analyze the structure of the historical space of existence and represent its true aspects.

In seventeenth-century Dutch culture the scientific view was one particular aspect of geographical representation; it aimed at orienting observers and training them to view images in specific ways. From Pieter Saenredam to Claes Jansz Visscher and Hendrick Goltzius, artists and topographers sought to use detailed, truthful descriptions to register the transformations that were taking place in the environment. Their aim was to set before humankind the reality of the world it had constructed. model for the entire Western world) was the famous atlas Civitates Orbis Terrarum (15711617), an extraordinary labor of documentation that dispatched collaborators to all the cities of Europe to draw their physical characteristics in exact but somewhat theatrical views. This famous collection offered a public eager for knowledge but perhaps unable to undertake long and costly voyages an opportunity to admire, at home, a succession of elegant images of the most noteworthy achievements of urban civilization. Works of this sort were intended not only as documents; they also aimed at seducing the reader by a structure that was to some extent narrative. The seventeenth-century topographer in fact did his best to crowd the flat surface of the representation with the largest possible amount of information about the visible world. He was perfectly aware that landscape could be understood only through the use of the laws of vision. This was what led Dutch painters and topographers to an interest in optical devices, microscopes, and, in particular, telescopes. Samuel van Hoogstraten spoke of geographical or topographical representation as a particular form of writing, a system of signs constituted as a mechanism for acquiring knowledge on the basis of conventions that were primarily optical in nature.

Svetlana Alpers has demonstrated, perhaps definitively, the enormous influence that an investigation of optics had on Dutch art of the seventeenth century. Scientific description became a fundamental axiom in both cartography and landscape painting, to the point of producing surprising technical overlaps between the two genres. In both views and local maps, woods, hedges, and even individual trees came to be shown with just as much painstaking realism as bell towers, windmills, bridges, and canals, because such landmarks served as indispensable directional signals to both travelers and the inhabitants of the region. Together they formed a system of coordinates set down for practical reasons in which both natural features and man-made objects could be clearly distinguished. What mattered was an accurate account, a readable view of the territory into which one might want to penetrate.

Representations of port cities viewed from the sea belong to the same sort of topography. They take care to delineate lighthouses, arsenals, and break-watersconstructions that needed to be immediately recognizable because they served navigators as points of reference or signals of dangers to avoid.

Recognizability came to be an important concern for English marine cartographers of the mid-seventeenth century. Joseph Moxons Book of Sea Plats (1657), an outstanding collection of sea charts, provided inspiration for The English Pilot (167172) by the hydrographer John Seller. In his next two works, Atlas Maritimus (1675) and A Book of Sea Stories and Prospects (1680), Seller sought to accompany his work with more incisive images by collaborating with a highly talented artist, Wenceslaus Hollar. Hollar, who had already demonstrated his own qualities as a hydrographer in a colored map of the Thames (1662) that included views of London, Greenwich, Woolwich, Erith, and Gravesend, went on to do a series of plans and views of the islands and cities of Sicily in which he showed to what extent better-quality images helped to communicate information and make topography more intelligible. During the same years Colonel George Legge published The Present State of Guernsey with a Short Accompt of Jersey (1680), a work that contained watercolor-enhanced plans and views by Thomas Phillips, an engineer and artillery expert. In his drawings (for the most part views of cities and fortifications viewed from ground level) Phillipss style to some extent reflects Hollars, once more showing a profitable exchange between the figurative culture of artists and the culture of technically trained topographers.

As the marine view became more accurate, need for it increased. Recognizability demanded an exact (in many cases, three-dimensional) description of the landscape. Admiralty circles in England accepted the notion that drawings aided the identification of places better than any written description could, and they assigned a high priority to training specialized draftsmen. Thanks to the energetic efforts of Samuel Pepys, secretary of the Royal Navy, and Christopher Wren, courses in drawing were instituted at the Royal Mathematical School at Christs Hospital, where students were taught navigation, given a general introduction to cartography, and trained to draw views of ports and cities with details that showed every object of navigational or strategic importance. Such courses were taught by prestigious figures, men with a solid background in science and mathematics, but also a firm command of representational techniques. In the eighteenth century, Alexander Cozens, an artist of great talent, was among their number, and he strove to give his students a sufficiently sure grasp of graphic technique to be able to note the salient traits of a landscape quickly and accurately. Cozens specialized in the marine view, and his students produced a large number of drawings of coastlines and islands. During a trip to Italy in 1746 Cozens made views of the port of Naples and a series of drawings of the fortifications and the port at La Spezia. During the same trip he met Claude-Joseph Vernet, a leading French landscape artist who had created a dramatic series of French ports, commissioned by the king. It is hardly surprising that an artist who taught courses in drawing coastlines in pencil and ink should subsequently work out a basic theory of landscape perception that stressed making forms recognizable by identifying their essential characteristics and interpreting them directly.

2. The Dutch Scene

Although it found expression in...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226167372
• ISBN 13: 9780226167374
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar