The Dark Side of Landscape: Ideology and Power in the Christian Myth of the Desert

In a fascinating study of English rustic landscape painting of the enclosure period (18th-19th centuries), art historian John Barrell uncovers what he identifies as "the dark side of landscape." ¹ By this he means the hidden ideological agenda that informs the portrayal of the landscape, which in turn promotes the ideology. The paintings of the period fashioned an ideal image of rural life, suggesting a "stable, unified, almost egalitarian society." ² When one examines the English society of the day, however, a disjuncture between the paintings and reality becomes immediately apparent. The enclosure period marked the stage in English society when new laws and practices led to the use of fences to divide and close off the common land. In the process, the traditional rights of the common people to the use of the land were extinguished. Barrell's interest lies in the disquieting fact that as English society was becoming more stratified and subdivided, English landscape painting was fashioning a version of rural life that concealed the harshness of the new social order. The paintings of the period offered a rural scene more acceptable in the drawing rooms of polite society, where they served the elite by lending ideological support to the new division of the land. ³

Barrell writes in a tradition that views landscape painting as an ideological tool that promotes a particular view of reality among those who "see" it. In a reversal of creative power, the landscape, shaped by human ingenuity, in turn shapes the social and cultural world of its creators. It becomes not only "an object to be seen or a text to be read, but . . . a process by which social and subjective identities are formed." ⁴ English landscape painting of the enclosure period effectively promoted within the society "a set of socially and, finally, economically determined values to which the painted image gave cultural expression." ⁵ The artificial landscape impressed its vision of the world on those who viewed it. It filtered into and altered the cultural environment through a subtle process that conformed the cultural vision of the world to that of the painting. Its power as a cultural medium lay finally in its ability to "naturalize a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable." ⁶ "The painting," Barrell writes,

offers us a mythical unity and—in its increasing concern to present an apparently more and more actualized image of rural life—attempts to pass itself off as an image of the actual unity of an English countryside innocent of division. But by examining the process by which the illusion is achieved—by studying the imagery of the paintings, the constraints upon it, and upon its organization in the picture-space—we may come to see that the unity is artifice, as something made out of the actuality of division. ⁷

The art historian's understanding of the painting lies not only in the description of its content, but also in the unraveling of its artifice so as to understand not only the ideology that lies behind it, but also "the process by which the illusion is achieved." "It is possible," Barrell contends, "to look beneath the surface of the painting and discover there evidence of the very conflict it seems to deny." ⁸

These insights into the ideological function and power of landscape painting offer valuable tools for understanding the nature and enduring impact of the myth of the desert in late antiquity. Grounded in the ecological reality of the Egyptian desert and the experiences of actual individuals, the myth of the desert emerged in the writings of the Christian authors who told the stories of the desert saints. They fashioned, whether consciously or unconsciously, a spiritual landscape that transcended the...