Nothing but images

Landscape and Identity: A Metaphorical History

Ours is the age of landscape.Today, landscape is debated, flaunted, observed, and protected. Today, landscape belongs to everyone—it’s an international phenomenon, an expression of a uniform and globalized world.

Could this cultural overexposure be a symptom of lack? Various scholars have addressed this issue, interpreting the phenomenon and uncovering a concerning reality.

But this article won’t dwell on that. My question is different:

How did we arrive at the age of the Omni-landscape?

The subject has been explored in a series of essays by landscape theorist Michael Jacobs, particularly in Il paesaggio, published by Il Mulino.

To understand how we arrived at an era dominated by the image, we need to establish at least a couple of foundations; the first: understanding what lies at the root of the concept of landscape—namely, the modern human's relationship with nature. If we wanted to reduce this concept to a mathematical formula, we could say that L = S + N.

S stands for Subject—the human being breaking with the past, the modern man. The modern man sees and experiences.

In the case of landscape, perception changes over the centuries, as we will see, thanks to inventions and technologies that interpose themselves in human life. To name two from the 14th and 15th centuries: the conquest of the elevated viewpoint, exemplified in Petrarch’s Letter of Mont Ventoux, and the invention of linear perspective, which marked a break from monocular vision.

For the modern human, therefore, the landscape is the meeting point between artifice and lived perception.

N stands for Nature. Nature hasn’t always held the same value for humans; in fact, the relationship is ever-shifting and follows the development of human thought. To better understand how and why the concept of nature changes, let’s take a broad look at history starting in the 5th century BCE, the height of the Hellenic period.

In the 5th century BCE, the human is at the center of the world, and landscape isn’t seen as an aesthetic form but rather has practical value. Even in the pre-Socratic philosophies that focus on natural elements—like those of Thales, Anaximenes, or Anaximander—we don’t find the distance necessary for a contemplative gaze upon nature.

In the 3rd century CE, in Alexandria, Egypt, the bucolic genre was born, and later we see mural paintings in Roman villas. It’s no coincidence that a poetic genre featuring simple shepherds in peaceful countryside settings originated in the most “technological” city of antiquity. This marks the first sign of distance from nature—necessary to create the genre.

We then arrive at the Middle Ages, a period in which nature is filtered through two lenses: the religious—viewing nature as lapsa, fallen, referring to humankind’s condition after the expulsion from Paradise—and another we might call anthropological or psychological, that of the locus terribilis, or threatening nature. For medieval man, nature primarily meant danger: leaving one's village meant risking one’s life.

Only at the end of the Middle Ages, thanks to deforestation, exploration, and the appearance of literature that begins to describe natural elements, does nature become a safe space. A key element in this shift is urban migration; by moving away from nature, humans entered the unknown—the city. From this, what we now call the “desire for nature” would arise.

Continuing our journey to the 16th century, nature now takes center stage in science and philosophy. This is a time of harmony and philosophical optimism, and it’s no coincidence that the landscape genre is born in this era.

Summarizing the milestones:Before 1500, humans lived within nature and had not yet experienced the nostalgia that would allow them to desire it. Only by moving away from it could humans become aware of that desire and, through their gaze, construct a vision: nature becomes image. Image becomes landscape.

Until the 17th century, landscape in art history is seen through a subject. The figure is part of the narrative context, and entering the landscape means doing so through the story and point of view of that subject. Experience, then, is filtered through a temporal element.

It was the painter Claude Lorrain who changed the role of figures in the landscape genre, turning them from protagonists into elements that dissolve into the scenery.

In this way, the viewer projects themselves into the landscape without the mediation of figures, and experiences time through space, as the Chinese-American geographer Yi-Fu Tuan defined the phenomenon.

The 18th century, by contrast, is the era of the sublime: nature must astonish, and the task of human beings is to tame it. The greatest exponent of this genre is Caspar David Friedrich.

However, the sublime is destined to have a short life: once nature is captured and thus subdued, it no longer surprises. And in order to relive that experience, man must move—and keep moving—until the entire world is known and nothing remains to inspire wonder.

Thus, in the 19th century, the picturesque is born. The picturesque transcends the two classical forms of nature aesthetics: the beautiful and the sublime. In a time of aesthetic disintegration, the beautiful becomes boring and the sublime exhausting; the picturesque emerges as a meeting point between the two.

Contemplating nature becomes a way to affirm the self through the immediate effect that a natural scene produces on the viewer. It is nature’s victory over humanity: in picturesque images, we find traces of human ingenuity—but they appear abandoned and overcome by the overwhelming power of nature.

We reach the 20th century: postmodernity marks the end of history as a succession of meaningful novelties and ushers in an aesthetic of blending and assemblage.

Moreover, the innovations of this century create new perspectives, inevitably generating new images. Consider, for example, the railway system at the end of the 19th century, with its skewed, almost cinematic view, or the automobile, which brings back frontal vision.

By the end of the 20th century, we witness a crisis in urban planning. In the early postwar period, the phenomenon of sprawl emerges—that is, the rapid and chaotic expansion of cities, leading to the disappearance of "non-places." Non-places are parts of the land still untouched, the pleasant spots, the picturesque sites; this lack gives rise to a desire for protection, and thus, in 1945, UNESCO is born along with its inventory.

These images, born of nostalgia, are what allow us to discover and remember a specific place. Think of Alpine landscapes, panoramic views, tourism posters, or that whole series of images that point to a theme we ourselves associate with a specific visual representation.

Today, new media and constant demand are continuously generating new images.We live through images; we even use them to communicate—just think of the emoticons and stickers that flood our conversations.

Everything we experience is transformed into an image, and through it, we define ourselves.Our identity has been tied to images since the moment we are born: photo albums, social media, avatars...We are our images, and our lives are contained in the images that exist of us.What is not worthy of becoming an image is not real; it is obsolete, something that does not belong to us.

The reflection now shifts to the authenticity of the images we produce.