Nature pictorialized

the long version

For centuries landscape designers have been influenced - often unknowingly - by the conventions of painting and poetry. In Nature Pictorialized, Gina Crandell offers an introduction to the basic concepts of art and literary history as they relate to the discipline of landscape architecture. Beginning with the earliest known encounters between artist and landscape, Crandell traces the process of pictorializing nature through the art of ancient Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. She devotes special attention to seventeenth-century European landscape painting, which provides the model for the eighteenth-century landscape garden. She shows how the "naturalistic" images of these art forms surpassed the mere imitation of the seen world, transforming it instead into a pastoral ideal in which nature is green, attractive, and yielding. By the late nineteenth century, painters had largely abandoned naturalistic portrayal. But the pictorial conception of nature persists to the present day, Crandell contends, in part because the landscape itself has become the repository of pictorial conventions, and landscape architecture the perpetuator of the painter's vision. Nature Pictorialized is the first book to stress the importance of art and literature as forces that have helped shape landscape architecture.