Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory (review)

Professor Fitter addresses the question of why the art of landscape painting, arising in the fifth century BCE, was abandoned with the collapse of Rome and revived again in the High Middle Ages. Did the Greeks, or the ancient Christians, perceive the natural world differently from the way we do now? In Poetry, Space, Landscape Fitter traces the history of sensibility to landscape from the ancient world to the English Renaissance, situating poems and paintings in the widely differing cultural contexts that gave rise to them. After reviewing attempts to account for “landscape-consciousness” from Ruskin to Jay Appleton’s essentialist “habitat theory” and Mircea Eliade’s luminous but stubbornly unhistorical reflections on the human response to nature, he suggests a new social and historical theory of the conceptualization of natural space, describing the fortunes of the idea of “landscape.” He argues the dialectical case that enduring basic categories of perception yield different readings of natural reality as they are shaped by our social and material relations with nature. Before addressing in detail the historical issues, he identifies four perennial “matrices of perception”: the ecological, the cosmographic, the analogical, and the technoptic (the identification in visual experience of “those codes of experience . . . learned in art”). Fitter makes the useful distinction between “landscape” and the seventeenth-century term “landskip,” “signifying the concern in painting or poetry specifically for the technique of pictorial naturalism,” with its careful commitment to the empiric authenticities of “perspectival recession, chiaroscuro, and localizing detail” (25).

The exceptional range of this book encompasses chapters on Biblical landscape, the theory and practice of landscape in late Antiquity and the Church fathers, and the transition from medieval to Renaissance aesthetics. A rich chapter on seventeenth-century English poetry concludes with fresh and substantial re-readings of Milton, Marvell, and many of their contemporaries in the light of this long tradition of landscape art.