Dr. Kim H. Veltman
VII Architecture and Environment
1. Introduction
2.
Italy
3.
Netherlands
4.
France
5.
England
6.
Conclusions
We have already emphasized that perspective was much more than a pictorial revolution, that it involved other media such as wood, bronze and marble; that it went hand in hand with the development of new man-made spatial environments, i.e. the representation of spatial doors; was part of a larger phenomenon, which included their architectural construction and sculptural reconstruction (pl. 4.1-2). If the development of such spatial structures created a context for the discovery of linear perspective, perspective in turn transformed the nature of these structures. At the outset this was mainly by way of playful equivocations between real and imaginary space as in the case of Bramante's choir in Santa Maria presso San Satiro (pl. 5.4), or Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which might be seen as experiments in visual metaphor--see below 2.4.
As the sixteenth century progressed, what had begun in some respects as a competition of perspectival painting versus architecture and sculpture, evolved into a new alliance between the three media, which were coordinated in playing with existing spaces and the creation of new ones. In the previous chapter, we showed how this helped to explain developments in the interiors of mannerist and baroque buildings. It soon spread to exteriors. Beginning in Italy, buildings were rearranged to control the observer's viewpoint, in order to make things appear nearer or further. Perspective was used to link interior spaces of villas and the exterior spaces of gardens. However, the hilly landscapes, in which the villas were usually constructed, imposed their own limitations on creating regular geometrical grids, which could function perspectivally. In the North of Italy, and in the Netherlands, where the flatness of the land imposed no such limitations, the idea of a geometrical perspectival pattern was explored seriously. By the 1560's, Vredeman de Vries had begun publishing books devoted specifically to perspectival fountains and gardens.
There was great interest in these problems in France as a shown by Androuet Du Cerceau's (1576) publications on the great chateaux of France, which included views of gardens revealing many parallels with Netherlandish models and yet, with a difference. Whereas the Netherlandish examples invariably spread over an area of 100 or 200 feet, the French examples were many times larger. In 1587, when Du Perac came to France, he brought with him many Italian trends. These combined with existing methods to produce experiments on an ever greater scale: from the Tuilieries, to Vaux le Vicomte, and culminating in Versailles, which became the model for European cultural politics for over a century.
Meanwhile, in England, there emerged a very different pattern, which rejected the geometrical regularity of the Netherlandish and French models, but nonetheless emphasized new aspects of perspective. Here, theories about the aesthetics of Chinese landscape inspired fashions, which soon spread to the continent. The nineteenth century saw new applications of perspective in terms of town planning which continue to the present. Since then, illusionistic views, which were applied to interiors in the sixteenth, have become increasingly popular on the exteriors of buildings, creating new ambiguities between exterior and interior, in an environment where perspective plays ever more subtle roles. Each of these topics will be considered briefly in turn.
An awareness that images could be transformed, and/or controlled depending on a viewpont, had come through the optical tradition, and particularly through the use of camera obscuras (see above pp. ). The study of perspective brought with it new attention to problems of controlled viewpoints. Brunelleschi's first perspectival demonstration required a camera obscura like aperture. Alberti is also reported to have made a perspectival box which required a fixed viewpoint. The idea lingered.1 Marolois (1614) and Dubreuil (1642-1649) described their construction and at least six perspectival boxes from the seventeenth century remain in museums.2 Fixed viewoints were also important for anamorphic effects. Leonardo (1513-1514) considered the possibility thereof and decided against it.3 But seventeenth century thinkers took up the idea and Nicéron, for instance, played with the problem, in his anamorphic wall of Saint Francis de Paul, in San Trinità in Monte,4 while another Jesuit, Father Pozzo, specifically marked a spot on the floor, from which his fresco on the ceiling of Il Gesù was intended to be seen.5 Controlled viewpoints were also of interest in the theatre (see below pp. ).
Yet it was in the realm of architecture that this idea of controlled viewpoints gained a wider and more dramatic significance. Michelangelo, for instance, used the principle in designing the Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline Hill (Rome, 1538-1564, pl. 88.2), constructing the two, side palaces diverging outwards with respect to the Senator's palace to give the impression that this is closer than it is, as one first approaches it coming up the stairs,-- which incidentally employ the same device --, from the Piazza d'Ara Celi, and conversely that the stairs appear further away than they are, when one looks from the Senator's palace back towards the city.6 The architect, Vignola, responsible for the book on perspective edited by Danti (1583), used this principle of controlled viewpoints even more dramatically at Caprarola, to give the impression that the fortress shaped palace was closer and more domineering than it actually was (pl. 98.1). Below the main house at Caprarola, he experimented with the spatial effects of a long alleyway integrating architectural and natural features. He pursued these experiments at the Villa Lante in Bagnaia, the Villa Giustiniani in Bassano, the Villa at Bomarzo and the Farnese Gardens in Rome.7
Others explored a combination of these effects, i.e., making the long alleyways converge in order to play with normal effects of perspective. Shepherd and Jellicoe have, for instance, analyzed three classic cases beginning with the Villa Dona dalle Rose at Valzanzibio where:
the effect of distance is obtained by a gradual closing in of the elements, variety of the subtle breaks in the hedges and their freedom as they merge into the countryside, unity by the ribbon of grass, and a climax in the gigantic stairway of the fir avenue climbing the hill beyond.... At Collodi, the stunning widening of the cascade towards the top gives the effect of added distance above, and from below exaggerates the steepness and violence by bringing the top very much nearer. At the Villa Aldobrandini (pl. 88.3-4), at Frascati, both the lines and the levels of the cascade converge to a point in the topmost loggia. Here sits my lord, enjoying the apparent spectacle of the water tumbling dizzily in one vertical plane between the columns. Other views of the same cascade have very little drama.
The Aldobrandini garden is of particular interest because it links a controlled viewpoint inside a building with a complex view outside which functions, ultimately as an extension of the architecture.
Such deliberate manipulation of perspective to create spatial effects was subsequently exploited in baroque architecture. For instance, in Rome, the rows of columns which join the oval arcades with St. Peter's diverge in the direction of the Church, such that the great cathedral appears closer than it is as one approaches. Conversely, as one leaves, the distance of the square is exaggerated. As if to play with these effects, Bernini reversed them in his famous staircase, the Scala Regia. Here the columns converge in order to increase apparent distance as one climbs the stairs, and telescope distance as one leaves.9 As Sinisgalli has shown, Borromini's experiments in the Palazzo Spada (pl. 5.5) stood in a long tradition.10
Indeed, by way of context, it is important to recall that no less than four different traditions lay behind the approaches of the Renaissance. The most immediate of these was the mediaeval enclosed garden (hortus conclusus), which relied on certain geometrical regularities for symbolic and religious ends.11 A second tradition, also cosmological, was linked with ideal cities, such as Plato's Atlantis, or idealized landscapes, such as Dante's vision of Inferno (c. 1314), or Francesco Colonna's description of Cythera in the Hypnerotomachia Pamphili (1499). A third, involved the Roman tradition of gardening which had involved complex extensions of domestic space, with fountains, regular alleys of colonnades and works of art. Renaissance thinkers were inspired by this tradition. Androuet Du Cerceau, for instance, published reconstructions of the gardens of Antoninus (pl. 92.1), Ovid and others as examples of perspective in his books of Roman monuments. The resemblance between the secret garden of Pope Paul III,12 constructed behind the Vatican (1534), and such reconstructions, can hardly have been a coincidence.
A fourth tradition involved theatre. Already in the fifteenth century, there were important connections between Brunelleschi's perspectival interests in representation and his spatial reconstructions for sacred plays.13 In the sixteenth century, these connections evolved greatly with Buontalenti's activities at the amphitheatre that joined with the Pitti palace in one direction, and the Boboli gardens in another. His perspectival scenery linked the space of the palace and countryside, and in the amphitheatre, literally played on distinctions between interior and exterior, thus extending artifice and play directly into nature.14 Nor was this limited to the stage. For the same Buontalenti worked with Bernardino Poccetti on the ceiling of the large grotto at the Boboli (1583-1588), which was simultaneously a construction integrating architectural and sculptural elements, and a representation involving perspectival frescoes, all in the context of a natural grotto, with hydraulic automats as an added feature.15 Buontalenti was also the teacher of Salomon de Caus, who spread to France and England the idea of grottoes, which were so shaped by artifice that they invited one to reflect on the meaning of natural (pl. 99.1). The same De Caus wrote both on perspective (1611) and on hydraulic devices16 of the kind which helped to inspire Descartes' mechanistic model of reality (see above p. ).
Buontalenti's play between interior and exterior space may call to mind earlier discussions concerning the window principle (see above p. ), and the function of perspective in linking narrative and physical space (see above p. ). Yet there are important differences. There it was a question of linking a fictive and a real space. Here a real interior space is being linked with a real exterior space. Mantegna had moved in this direction with his painted perspectival aperture or oculus in the Camera degli Sposi in Mantua (pl. 70.2), which linked a real interior with potentially real clouds outside. Leonardo pursued, it when he used perspective in the Sala della Asse (Milan, Castello Sforzesco, c. 1497) to simulate an open canopy of interlacing branches and knots, through which one can see the sky beyond--a theme upon which Vignola played in the portico of the grand court in the Villa of Pope Julius III in Rome.17 Peruzzi took up the problem more directly in his Hall of Perspectives in the Villa Farnesina in Rome (c. 1516) which linked the interior space with a view of the city outside. Veronese took it further in the Villa Maser, where his perspectival frescoes linked the interior space with vistas down pathways which simulated actual views out of other windows elsewhere in the building.
These examples bring to light an essential difference betweeen ancient spatial effects and those of perspective. At Pompeii, Herculaneum, the Villa at Oplontis and elsewhere the ancients invariably produced spatial effects by a closure of space. By contrast, as artists explored the implications of perspective they increasingly created spatial effects which opened space beyond a given interior into exterior landscapes. This was matching in a new sense, and a next logical step was to use painted perspectives as substitutes from real landscapes in gardens which, as we shall see, is precisely what happened in France. Before considering these developments, however, it will be useful, by way of context, to mention the Netherlands, which took up another strand of the Italian tradition, that France subsequently developed further.
The secret garden of Paul III (1534) behind the Vatican had been constructed as an independent space, enclosed by walls with galleries crossing at right angles dividing the gardens into quarters. In the next generation, the nearby gardens of Julius III (1550) were again constructed in independent spaces,18 while the gardens of the Villa d'Este (1550) were carefully planned as a series of neatly defined adjacent spaces. This principle of gardens, clearly framed by a gallery or a wall, appears to have held a particular fascination for Vredemen de Vries, who produced what was probably the first collection of perspectival views of gardens (1583 etc., pl. 92.2-3). For our purposes, it is fascinating to note how, as an architect, Jan Vredeman de Vries, treated gardens as if they were simply extensions of his buildings, such that his main task became one of imposing regular geometrical patterns on the greenery. Indeed, he went so far as to adapt the principle of the five architectural orders (doric, ionic, corinthian, tuscan and composite), as a means of distinguishing gardens of lesser and greater complexity (e.g., pl. 92.3). The most developed of these, could show a group of four or five adjacent gardens, but even so the scale of the entire space remained limited to a maximum of a few hundred feet. His son, Paul, maintained this framework. He linked the five orders to the five senses, and again showed differing gardens in the background. The distance to the gate at the end of the garden might be a hundred feet further. There might even be a hint of space beyond, yet this was so hazily treated as if to show it was out of bounds. The focus of Vredeman senior and junior, as well as his student Hondius, was on a small enclosed perspectival space, which functioned, curiously, as if it were a secular version of the mediaeval walled garden (hortus conclusus).
Elsewhere in the North a more ample concept of natural space was emerging. As early as 1511-1513, Wolf Huber, had, for instance, sketched a view of Urfahr near Linz, on which he superimposed perspectival lines (pl. 91.2). He also made a preparatory sketch showing Christ on the Mount of Olives (1526, pl. 91.1), in which perspectival lines were again imposed on a landscape stretching into the distance.19 In the text attributed to Rodler (1531) there were also illustrations to show how the principle of a perspectival window could be applied to landscapes. Yet it was particularly in France where the larger horizons of perspective were first thoroughly explored.
The reasons were partly political. At a time when the Netherlands were still stifled by Spanish control, and Germany remained a series of isolated states, France was already a country where enormous power was centralized in the hands of a few influential families. Even a cursory glance at the gardens in Androuet Du Cerceau's collection of great French houses (1576) reveals a new sense of scale. The palace at Gaillon, for instance, has connected with it, a walled garden with a geometrical layout reminiscent of individual gardens at the Vatican, or those of Vredemen de Vries. But beyond this is a so-called park, which consists of a regularly spaced orchard, plus at least a dozen geometrically organized rectangular gardens. Italian gardens such as the Boboli may in fact have been larger, but being spread out over several hills, they did not produce the same cumulative effect. Spread out on flat land, the park at Gaillon, might still nominally be contained within low walls, but even so they conveyed a sense of stretching much further. The sense of space ending after a few hundred feet as in Vredeman de Vries does not apply here.
The same book also contains a ground plan to the chateau at Charleval, which offers a preview of the new aesthetic that is evolving. The chateau is on a quadratic island, bounded by a moat rather than a wall, i.e., interrupting physical contacts without interfering with visual links between interior and exterior. Directly behind it, and connected to it by means of a small bridge, is a second island containing a garden comprising twelve square, ten rectangular, two angular and one oval compartments. From the chateau, across the bridge, there is a view which goes straight down the path, across the moat and into the open. How such a view could be extended, not just another few hundred feet, but to the limits of the horizon became a major concern a seventeenth century France.20 As the idea evolved, it became clear that much more was involved then producing a straight road that continues to the limits of vision. More and more elements needed to be controlled in order to create the desired effect. It was not just a case of aligning a few bushes and trees to create alleyways. The irregularities of nature had to be systematized. This process may have been stimulated by the sojourns in France of both Leonardo and Serlio. The works of Androuet Du Cerceau attest that the process was well under way by the 1570's. The arrival from Italy of Du Pérac (1587) and De Caus (c. 1600) must have brought new incentives. By 1600 Olivier de Serres was convinced that the gardens of France were the finest anywhere. As examples he cited Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the Tuileries, Monceaux and Blois adding:
It cannot be without a sense of wonder that one beholds plants speaking in the form of letters, mottoes, numbers, coats of arms, clocks, gestures of men and animals, dispositions of buildings, ships, merchant vessels and other things imitated in plants and bushes with marvelous industry and patience.21
The Jesuits published the shape of things to come. For example, Dubreuil (1642-1649), demonstrated how trees were effectively reducible to rows of geometrical lines (pl. 90.1-2) and how bushes could be fashioned into rectangular bodies, bringing to gardens all the regularities of a geometrical ground plan (pl. 90.3-6). Vredeman de Vries had imposed architectural orders on the curious shapes in his gardens (pl. 92.3). Dubreuil went further. He explicitly compared the principle of the vanishing point in an architectural construction with that of a row of trees (pl. 91.3). His contemporary, Bosse (1648) took this regimentation of nature to a logical conclusion, transforming nature into avenues of regular or near regular green solids (pl. 91.4), reducing nature, in fact, to simple architectural forms. Morel in his Theory of Gardens (1776) described these tendencies, accusing the architect of confusing the principles of architecture and gardening:
and being too accustomed to regular forms,...he tried to link by mutual correspondence a building, which he made his principle object to a garden, which seemed to him only an accessory. He arranged a garden like a house; organized it into halls, rooms, corridors, made divisions with walls of hedges, pierced by doors, windows, arcades, and their piers were filled with all the ornaments destined for buildings.
As a result of this false analogy, architects gave these rooms, round, square and octagonal forms, like those in their buildings; they decorated them like an apartment, with vases, niches, openings in which they put statues as lodgers, insensible inhabitants, well suited to so dismal an abode. They furnished them like rooms with carpets of greenery, of trellis work, painted perspectives, beds and seats of earth covered by grass. They went as far as building theatre rooms, dormitories and ultimately even devised a miniature labyrinth.
Always architects when they should have been gardiners, they cut a tree like a stone, as a vault, a cube or a pyramid and reduced even water, if mobile, to their forms.22
Once reconstructed with such regularity, nature could be represented perspectivally and accordingly gardening treatises recorded the increasing significance of perspective. For example, Olivier de Serres, in his Theatre of agriculture (1600) observed:
It is worth noting that in looking at compartments from a distance, as far as the bedding of a garden is concerned, it is useful to make more distant rows further from one another, than the ones one sees from nearby. One will see them as being closer together the further away the eye is, for the good reason that the object diminishes in accordance with its distance as a result of perspective. For this same reason, the rows of compartments occlude one another, when one looks at them from the level of the garden itself, walking along the alleys, because, since the viewpoint from which one looks is low, the view is taken up by the first rows of plants which it encounters, which do not permit it to extend as far as the others. For this reason, it is desirable that gardens be viewed from on high, be it from neighbouring buildings, be it from terraces around the confines of the garden, as the King had had done by artifice at the Tuileries with his fine alley of mulberry bushes, and also at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where nature has contributed a great deal of her own through the altogether favourable lay of the land.23
Claude Mollet, in his Theatre of plants and gardens, (also written c. 1600 but not published until 1652), drew attention to another perspectival problem:
The largest alleys you will plant are the noblest ones. In any case, it is necessary to proportion them in keeping with the length that you are able to give them. Hence, those which will be one hundred and fifty fathoms long, must be made five fathoms wide, because perspective foreshortens them.24
His son, André Mollet, in his Pleasure garden (1651) returned summarily to the problem, which De Serres had considered:
First, it is to be noted, that the parterres which are more distant from the eye, need to be made larger than those which are nearby, in order to appear more pleasing to the eye and better proportioned.25
This amounted to looking at immense gardens as potential anamorphic games requiring subtle adjustments to create desired effects. At Chantilly, for instance, the ponds were constructed in oval shapes such that, when seen from the terrace, they appeared to be foreshortened circular basins.
In baroque interiors there was an increasing fascination with the ambiguities of perspectival space. Gardens now became the exterior equivalents of these concerns. Hence, it was no longer enough to reconstruct nature geometrically, so that it could function perspectivally. Playing with these effects became a new source of optical entertainment. For example, Michelangelo's technique of making buildings diverge in order that they look closer (pl. 88.2), was adapted by Le Nôtre to affect the layout of the entire property at Dampierre, with the added feature that the space at the end of the garden was made to converge in a V shape in order that it appear further.26 The french landscape gardener Dezallier d'Argenville used such a divergent space, specifically referring to it as an Italian esplanade.27 It was used again at Luneville and became a familiar feature in French gardens.
The reverse effect of converging space was equally popular. It was used to increase the apparent length of an avenue of grass beyond the main pond at Chantilly and developed at Rydorp (pl. 89.1) and Würzburg (pl. 89.2) to make gardens look much larger than they actually were. At Chenonceau (pl. 89.3), the principle was applied to increase grandeur by exaggerating apparent distance to the entrance of the chateau, an idea subsequently exploited on a grand scale at Versailles (pl. 89.4). At the Olympic Theatre in Vicenza, Scamozzi had used this principle for interior stage sets (pl. 78.3). At Versailles, it was adapted for the so-called water theatre in the garden (pl. 78.4). At the Hannoverian court of Herrenhausen, it was used to increase effects of distance on an open air stage.28
These playful uses of perspective went hand in hand with other developments involving painting, as it became clear that, if perspective could be extended to paintings of nature, such paintings could in turn be used to extend effects of nature. Once again the roots of this idea lay in Antiquity. Vitruvius reported how in their covered walks the Romans:
painted landscapes representing different sites; some showing ports, promontories, shores, rivers, fountains, streams; others temples, graves, flocks, shepherds. And in some places they painted large pictures representing the gods as they are described in fables.29
As in the case of Roman scene paintings (see above p. ), the emphasis was on imaginary situations, mythological scenes and different sites, rather than a commitment to extend the space of the surrounding countryside.
The idea of paintings in gardens was revived in the Renaissance. In the Hyperotomachia Pamphili (1490), for instance, Francesco Colonna spoke of painted scenes in the garden at Cythera.30 Erasmus, also broached the problem in his Colloquies, when the guest Timothy discovered that the marble column he saw was actually painted:
Timothy: An artistic deception indeed. I'd have sworn they were marble.
Eusebius: Let that be a warning to you not to believe or swear to anything rashly: appearances often deceive. We make up for lack of wealth by ingenuity.
[They turn now to the frescoes on the walls of the galleries]...
Eusebius: Our garden wasn't enough to hold all kinds of plants. Moreover, we are twice pleased when we see a painted flower competing with a real one. In one we admire the cleverness of nature, in the other the inventiveness of the painter; in each the goodness of God, who gives all things for our use and is equally wonderful and kind in everything....
This painted grove you observe, covering the entire wall, presents a varied spectacle. In the first place, you see as many varieties of trees as you do trees, each one represented with no little accuracy....31
Yet there were important differences between these paintings and, those of the Vitruvian tradition. These paintings were of real objects in nature, not imaginary ones. Moreover, part of the delight stemmed directly from comparing real flowers with painted ones, using painting as an extension of real particulars of nature surrounding one, rather than as evocations of imaginary universal scenes of nature outside of place and time. A little over a century later, the Italian author, Bisagno, in his Treatise on Painting (1642), included a special section on "what sort of paintings are to be painted in fountains, gardens, in rooms and other places of pleasure," where he explained that one could use:
various perspectives which have the effect of extending the gates and walls of the garden and besides, the columns in the intervals, landscapes which accompany them in such a way that they appear to follow those of nature, adding some stories which are appropriate to such places.32
Here a lingering Vitruvian tradition produced combinations of natural and mythological scenes. By contrast, in France, perspectival paintings became literal extensions of landscapes. For example, André Mollet, in his Pleasure Garden (1652) described the use of bushes and trees to create long alleyways at the end of which "one will place beautiful perspectives painted on canvas in order that one can remove them from the injuries of weather when one wishes."33 At Reuil, there was a grotto decorated with shells, stalactites and columns in a niche offering: "a perspective of which the sky is painted with colours so natural that one is assured that birds were deceived and thinking they were flying in the open air they killed themselves".34 Unlike the famous story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius, cited earlier (p. ), which involved isolated objects, this involved a whole context. At Rueil, there was also a "perspective" in the form of a trompe-l'oeil arch in the middle of a real park (pl. 99.1). Nor were such methods limited to France, as we learn from the following description of the "perspective" at Schwetzingen:
Ahead of us lies a dark pathway, and in the far distance a pleasing landscape appears, stretching out before our eyes, a landscape based on a drawing by the court painter Ferdinand Kobell and painted so deceptively on an oval-shaped wall by a common house painter in Mannheim by the name of Truckenmüller, that one truly believes, at first glance, that a broad natural landscape is unfolding before one. What gives rise to this beautiful effect is, in part the approach by means of a heavily shaded pathway three hundred and seventy feet long, in part the fact that the landscape is painted on an oval form [i.e. a concave surface] and just before coming to this, one finds oneself at a small grotto broken up by an artificial cliff, where the water that runs off the walls and the ceiling collects in the basin.35
That the view at Schwetzingen was called "The perspective", reflected more than local usage. The French term "perspective" had literally come to mean: "a painting which represents gardens or buildings at a distance and which one places at the end of a gallery or alleyway in a garden, in order to deceive the eye pleasantly."36 If artists had begun by matching paintings with nature, a complex process of matching nature to paintings was now emerging. Hence, De Serres (1600) recommended that a garden should resemble "a panel of an exquisite painting which has come from the hand of a good master"37 just before discussing perspective. Elsewhere, he suggested that gardiners should base their work on the drawings of painters.38 Nor were such remarks limited to France, Shenstone (1765), in England made related, albeit more critical, comments:
I have used the word landscape-gardeners; because, in pursuance of our present taste in gardening, every good painter of landscape appears to me the most proper designer. The misfortune of this is, that these painters are apt to regard the execution of their work, much more than the choice of subject.39
A generation later, Medikus (1783), in Germany, pursued the analogy in a more subtle vein :
Just as a landscape painter, by a juxtaposition or combination of individual natural beauties, has an unlimited material for the most beautiful paintings, which he uses and orders with an inventive spirit, so too must the gardiner first study these beauties of nature and make himself familiar with them, before he dares to set up such a nature painting in the garden that he has to construct, all the more so, in order that one will not tend to get rid of his efforts in the way that one removes the painting of a bad landscape artist from the walls of its owner.40
By the late nineteenth century, there analogies between painting and landscape had become sufficiently commonplace that artists could treat them satirically. When, for example, a lady mentioned that a landscape reminded her of his work, Whistler quipped: "Yes, Madam, nature is catching up."41
A closer reading of the above passages reminds us that etymologically "painted landscapes" existed before the concept of landscapes in the modern sense emerged. Perusal of the Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, confirms that the term landscape first appeared as "painted landskips" in Haydocke's translation of Lomazzo (1595) and soon led to Du Bartas (1605) reference to "the cunning painter limning a landscape" and Howell's (1642) report: " how some have used to get on the top of the highest steeple, where one may view all the country circumjacent and so take a landskip of it." Such turns of phrase offer insights into the complexities and paradoxes which the perspectival matching principle had set in motion. If painting copied nature, nature also copied painting. To represent nature perspectivally, required that it be reconstructed artificially, and the artifice of painted landscapes then made possible the discovery of natural landscapes.
At a practical level, all this led to experiments on an ever greater scale. The Tuileries led to Richelieu and Rosny, and pointed the way to Vaux le Vicomte and Versailles.42 To create the view at Vaux le Vicomte, two villages had to be removed. To create Versailles, a whole countryside had to be adjusted, which is one reason why the plan took nearly a century to complete (1664-1758). But then Versailles was much more than a house or a garden. It was a grand demonstration how geometry and perspective were matrices for the organization of nature. And, in a sense, it was an encyclopaedia of all the optical and perspectival experiments of the past two centuries. It contained views to the limits of the horizon, and others which were cut short to produce special effects, spaces which converged to exaggerate a sense of distance, others which diverged to telescope effects of distance; terraces and slopes which played on one's estimates of distance. Androuet Du Cerceau had once produced a book on all the famous houses of France. Pérelle (1722) could devote an entire book to the wonderful views of this one complex.
Versailles has often been called a symbol of absolute power. This is misleading. For at a certain level the assertion of power involved was absolutely literal. To approach the King's premises, required experiencing how every view reaching to the horizon had been transformed and was now in his control. Moreover, just as individual figures had shrunk to an insignificant size in the early perspectival paintings, visitors to Versailles experienced this in real life, when confronted by the grand scale of buildings and gardens. And these demonstrations of power already exercised, were the real power behind a so called absolute throne.
Versailles had many consequences. At Salzdahlum, the Duke of Lower Saxony, literally made a wooden replica.43 In Augsburg, Decker (1711), adopted its principles with teutonic thoroughness to show how they could be extended to every nook and cranny of the horizon (pl. 93.2). The Nymphenburg in Munich (1701) and Schönbrunn in Vienna (1759-1760), were important imitations. Sans Souci (1745) and Würzburg (1770) were interesting variants, yet they basically added little that was new.44 They confirmed that if one extended the principles of perspective to transform the whole environment, it came with the price of regularity, which could be surprisingly predictable, and sometimes even monotous.
One country developed conscious alternatives to this regimentation of nature. But this came slowly. For a long time, England remained much influenced by the continent. Witness the gardens at Wilton House (1630's), Longleat (1675, 1678), Petworth (1695), Blenheim (1704-1764) and Hampton Court Palace (1702-1710). For a time, the influence had been Netherlandish, as Dennis remarked:
While architectural vistos were imitated by planted avenues, the charge of inconsistency could not be advanced against disposition of a flower garden, into beds of unnatural figures, not infrequently assimilated with the unnatural shape of, what is termed, a Pope Joan table. Happily this Dutch style was for some years superseded.45
As late as the 1760's, there remained a fascination with formal effects of loss of distinctness perspective, and linear perspective, as witnessed, for instance by Shenstone's (1765) recommendations
A straight-lined avenue that is widened in front, and planted there with yew-trees, then firs, then with trees more and more fady, they end in the almond-willow, or silver osier; will produce a very remarkable deception of the former kind; which deception will be increased if the nearer dark trees are proportionable and truly larger than those at the end of the avenue that are more s[h]ady.46
But this was the generation of Stourhead (1740-1785), and the atmosphere was changing,47 as is also reflected in Chambers (1772) description of continental developments which was as damning as it was colourful:
The gardens of Italy, France, Germany, Spain, and of all the other countries where the ancient style still prevails, are in general mere cities of verdure; the walks are like streets conducted in strait lines, regularly diverging from different large open spaces, resembling public squares; and the hedges with which they are bordered, are raised, in imitation of walls, adorned with pilafters, niches, windows and doors, or cut into colonnades, arcades and porticos; all the detached trees are shaped into obelisks, pyramids and vases; and all the recesses in the thickets bear the names and forms of theatres, amphitheatres, temples, banqueting halls, ball rooms, cabinets and saloons. The streets and squares are well manned with statues of marble or lead, ranged in regular lines, like soldiers at a procession; which, to make them more natural, are sometimes painted in proper colours, and finely gilt. The lakes and rivers are confined by quais of hewn stone, and taught to flow in geometrick order; and the cascades glide from the heights by many a fuccession of marble steps: not a twig if suffered to grow as nature directs; nor is a form admitted but what is scientific, and determinable by the line or compass.48
To leave no doubt concerning his views Chambers added that this European style was "held in detestation." His respect for typical English gardens was not much higher, which brought him to the topic announced in the title of his work: A Dissertation on Oriental Gardening. Among the extraordinary features which he attributed to Chinese gardens, was a complex use of space involving multiple viewpoints of an object:
Where the ground is extensive, and many scenes can be introduced, they generally adapt each to one single point of view; but where it is confined, and affords no room for variety, they dispofe their objects so, that being viewed from different points, they produce different re-presentations; and often such as bear no refemblance to each other. They likewife endeavour to place the separate scenes of their compositions in such directions as to unite, and be seen all together, from one or more particular points of view, whence the eye may be delighted with an extensive, rich and variegated prospect. They take all possible advantage of exterior objects; hiding carefully the boundaries of their own grounds; and endeavouring to make an apparent union between them and the distant woods, fields and rivers: and where towns, castles, towers, or any other considerable objects are in sight, they artfully contrive to have them seen from as many points, and in as many directions as possible. The same they do with regard to navigable rivers, high roads, foot-paths, mills, and all other moving objects, which animate and add variety to the landscape.49
Chambers went on to relate this aesthetic of mutliple viewpoints to advanced uses of linear perspective, anamorphosis, and colour perspective among the Chinese:
All sorts of optical deceptions are also made use of; such as paintings on prepared surfaces, contrived to vary the representations as often as the spectator changes place: exhibiting, in one view, groupes of men; in another, combats of animals; in a third, rocks, cascades, trees and mountains; in a fourth, temples and colonades; and a variety of other pleasing subjects. They likewise contrive pavements and incrustations for the walls of their apartments, of Mosaic work, composed of many pieces of marble, seemingly thrown together without order or design; which, when seen from certain points of view, unite in forming lively and exact representations of men, animals, buildings and landscapes: and they frequently introduce pieces of architecture, and even whole prospects in perspective; which are formed by introducing temples, bridges, vessels, and other fixed objects, lessened as they are more diftant from the points of view, by giving greyish tints to the distant parts of the composition; and by planting there trees of a fainter colour, and smaller growth, than those that appear in the fore ground: thus rendering considerable in appearance, what in reality is trifling.50
Sir William Chambers was also involved with Kew gardens, which accounts for the pagoda and other oriental features which still remain there today. But his text is of interest to us for other reasons. Two years before this, Thomas Whately had published his own Observations on modern gardening (1770). Unhappy with the frontal methods of perspective dominant in Europe, Whately proposed alternatives which bore an uncanny resemblance to Chambers' so called oriental methods:
Buidlings, in general, do not appear so large, and are not so beautiful, when looked at in front, as when they are seen from an angular station, which commands two sides at once and throws them into perspective: but a winding lateral approach is free from these objections, it may besides be brought up to the house without disturbing any of the views from it; but an avenue cuts the scenery directly in two, and reduces all the prospect to a narrow vista. A mere line of perspective, be the extent what it may, will seldom compensate for the loss of that space which it divides and of the parts which it conceals.51
Whately illustrated his point with a long description of the approach to Caversham, the seat of Lord Cadogan, near Reading. The following year (1771) there appeared in French a work entitled The art of forming modern gardens, or the art of English gardens. Translated from the English to which the translator has added a preliminary discourse on the origin of the art. The preface began with what was rare praise for a Frenchman:
Without pretending that their gardens are exempt of faults, I believe that those who have seen them and who sense the extent to which noble simplicity is superior to all the symmetrical refinements of art, will prefer their gardens to ours.52
There followed the preliminary discourse, which was a translation of Chambers' Dissertation on Oriental gardening53 and served as an introduction to a translation of Whately's Observations on modern gardening. Obviously the translator had also been struck by the parallels between the two. In one of his notes the translator dealt with a perspectival problem omitted by Whately. We shall quote it for, if it may betray how little the translator actually understood the details of English aesthetics, it also reveals how far the consequences of perspective had gone:
Animated objects are a genre of beauty so interesting and so particular to English gardens that it would be desirable that the author would have dedicated a section to them. Thereby, it seems to me, he would have made his work more complete. Not every species of animal is appropriate for every perspective, and even through everyone knows that goats enliven a rocky scene and that sheep spread across the bottom of a valley, form a most pleasing pastoral picture, it is, nonetheless, in this branch of art, which involves the manner of distributing animals, that there exist fine nuances, known to the English, and which the author might perfectly well have explained to us in his manner had he so wished.54
The English response to this French enthusiasm concerning their methods was mixed. For example, the anonymous author of Planting and Ornamental gardening (1785), set out to prove that claims about English gardens being founded on those of the Chinese was "founded in Gallic envy rather than in truth."55 The same author launched a vigorous attack on the whole complex interplay between painting and landscape which perspective had stimulated:
In a picture bounded by its frame, a perfect landscape is looked for: it is of itself a whole, and the frame must be filled. But it is not so in ornamented Nature.... Suppose a room to be hung with one continued representation, - would pretty pictures be expected? would correct landscapes be looked for? Nature scarcely knows the thing mankind call a landscape.... Let the ingenious artist call from Nature her choicest beauties...but do not let us carry his production back again to Nature and contract her unbounded beauties within the limits of a picture-frame.56
In spite of such protests, the Anglo-Chinese style, exerted considerable influence, and the analogies between painting and nature continued. In Italy, Silva (1801), in his book On the art of English gardens (1801) repeated Chamber's theories concerning oriental gardening and also emphasized the importance of colour perspective in a manner reminiscent of Shenstone:
The expert gardiner will take care that the distribution of his greens obtains the effect of perspective of colours, called aerial perspective by painters.... If he has a small space, and wishes to have his wood, valley, or bush disappear rapidly from a given point of view, he should be encouraged to place up front, trees and bushes which have a deeper green, larger and more detailed leaves; trunks, with rougher and darker bark, putting at the limits of the horizon, the paler greens, the smoother trunks, the whiter leaves, which produce such a brilliant effect when dominated by the sun. Thus he will obtain the marvelous effect of enlarging the place by reducing colours with the same rules, that linear perspective has established for the landscape painter.57
In England, Humphrey Repton (1805), one of the greatest Engtlish authors on gardening reasserted links between painting, perspective and gardening:
The art of landscape gardening is in no instance more intimately connected with that of painting than in whatever relates to perspective, or the difference between the real and apparent magnitude of objects, arising from their relative situations, for without some attention to perspective, both the dimensions and the distances of objects will be both changed and confounded.58
Repton devoted an entire chapter on optics or vision59 and included an appendix with his theory of colours and shadows.60 His chief concern was how optical and perspectival principles of occlusion could be used in planning improvements to landscapes as seen from a specific viewpoint: how, for instance, a careful positioning of trees and shrubs could hide an industrial suburb of Bath from a nearby park, or how removal of certain trees could open up a beautiful vista of a lake. Repton provided beautiful flap up pictures showing before and after effects to illustrate his examples. Perspective, which had helped to create an awareness of context, was now being applied to isolated parts deemed to need adjustment in that context. In the English tradition, these adjustments became associated with deception. Perspective belonged to the category of special effects. Dennis (1835), mentioned an example:
At Corsham, in this vicinity, where the exclusive object is to produce pictoresque effect on view from the picture gallery, a grand river appears flowing through the park by a complete deceptio visus,the eye not perceiving sunk spaces intervening between successive sheets of water.61
Given these associations, perspective was no longer an essential instrument for organizing the environment. It became an emergency measure, a technique to be applied only in exceptional cases:
But when absolutely necessary to conceal an object, to break a line to foreshorten an ill-proportioned area, or sometimes to give perspective, a parterre should received irregular form and be composed of incurvated lines.62
And so perspective, which had moved to the foreground of all spatial orientation in France, moved into the background and seemed to lose its integrating significance in England. Or to put it differently: the English tradition focussed attention on the occlusion principle of perspective. As such, it could be used as a means, without necessarily being visible in the end result: e.g. perspective could be used in deciding how to occlude an ugly view with a clump of trees, without these trees needing in any way to be perspectivally arranged to create special effects of depth.63 As the nineteenth century progressed, this was perfected into a technique which allowed one to see what effect a new building or complex would have on a skyline or popular view.
Essentially, this is the same method which has since been mechanized in the methods of photo-montage which authors such as Jantzen (1983) have recently made popular (see above p. ). It applies perspectival principles of occlusion specifically to a building or complex of buildings and is usually not concerned with context as a whole. And in a curious way, this relates to another fashion of our times, which plays on the occlusion principle of perspective, to create spatial views on the exteriors of buildings, which frequently bear no connection with their context, and function rather as surprise snapshots or frames into other imaginary spaces.64 But whereas the nineteenth century used the occlusion principle literally to close views and spaces, the twentieth century method plays with the possibilities of physically closing and yet optically opening the same spaces by making careful use of perspective, using the frame principle in a new way.
In the previous chapter dealing with interiors, we showed that perspective affected both the contents and the forms of pictures. The first of these concerns led to emphasis on spatial context; the second led to emphasis on their frames, and ultimately to geometrical plays of form, at the expense of content. In this chapter, we have shown that perspective had equally profound consequences for exteriors, for spaces outside buildings, and have found that there were again two different strands of influence, with certain parallels to the different concerns affecting interior space. In terms of exteriors, one tradition explored the consequences of perspective for the contents of nature. This tradition began in Italy, received certain impulses in the Netherlands, and was taken to its logical consequences in France. It was concerned with, what might be termed the opening principle of perspective, i.e. the converse of the occlusion principle. Its effects were extraordinary. It approached nature as an extension, first of architecture, and ultimately of geometry, transforming and reducing its myriad irregularities to the predictable contours of regular and semi-regular solids. In the process, the content of nature was subordinated to context, and emerged as a pattern of geometrical matrices. And as in the painted ideal cities, the scale of the geometry was such, that it rendered the individual seemingly insignificant, making it attractive to absolutist monarchs such as Louis XIV, and various totalitarian minds since.
In interiors, the study of perspectival contents had led to contexts, but there being many of these within the frames, these contents had remained isolated spaces, and it was the study of frames that brought a more universal context. In exteriors the reverse happened. Here study of contents affected one universal context within which, by contrast, frames functioned as isolating features, snapshots which, even though they assumed a greater whole, nonetheless, focussed on parts, leading towards a fragmentation of space. The English aesthetic, which concentrated on the occlusion principle of perspective and its framing functions, led in this direction.
We have shown that perspective affected not only the representation of space in painting, but also the reconstruction of space in the environment, and that, from the outset, there were complex interactions between the two activities. In this chapter, we have deliberately cited some extreme examples to focus attention on unexpected applications of perspective. It must be emphasized, however, that perspective was much more than a Hobson's choice between these two extremes: one leading to the impersonal uniformity of geometrical matrices artificially imposed upon nature; the other, involving isolated applications out of context, and a fragmentation of space.
True, there was a choice between two elementary alternatives: an opening principle, which generated alleyways leading as far as the horizon, and an occlusion principle, which generated walls controlling the distance of the horizons. And it was possible to apply either principle absolutely, But this choice had nothing to do with the principles. The principles could be contained at will. Indeed, an unending combination of the principles was possible. For this reason, there was much more to Versailles than a single path to the horizon, and considerably more than walls to occlude views in great English gardens at Blenheim, Castle Howard, Stourhead and elsewhere. And thus gardiners, architects, artists and others very gradually realized that, while the laws of perspective were fixed, their applications were not. As they did so, they discovered that perspective was a new key to imagination and freedom, as will be seen in the final chapter.
Last Update: August 4, 1998