Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The systematic origins of Renaissance art and of the Copernican astronomy can be
found in a movement of thought which may be properly called a 'Ptolemaic renais-
sance'. . . . When scientifi c 'pictures' of the world came to be constructed according to
these same principles, modern astronomy and geography began their rise. (Gadol,
1969, p. 157)
The re-discovery of the cartographic techniques of Ptolemy (1991), an ancient Greek
astronomer and geographer (or 'cosmographer,' as he was then known), facilitated
the creation of the modern map, in which locations are plotted upon the grid of an
absolute space. What was less well known, until the topic began to be explored by
scholars with an understanding of art history, including the geographer Denis Cos-
grove (1984; 1988; 1993), was that the rise of modern surveying, cartography and
geography, also made possible the development of the techniques of central point
perspective which were used to create landscape pictures that were expressive of
what became the modern world picture. These pictures represented the world in
terms of an extent of space, with the various objects in it. What we then see is that,
at the same time surveying and cartography were being developed by the 'modern'
geographers of the Renaissance for the practical purpose of both understanding and
transforming the material world, these same techniques were also being used (often
by the same individuals) to create an equally modern world picture by which to
comprehend and form that world. It was in the Renaissance and Enlightenment that
modern space was discovered and deifi ed as the 'sensorium' of God, as Isaac
Newton put it (Newton, 1717, p. 380), meaning the seat of the mind of God. What
made this space modern was that Nature was seen to operate according to eternal
laws instituted by God . In this way natural science, with its knowledge of Nature's
laws, was able to lay claim to powers once reserved for religion.
'Sensorium',' at Newton's time, meant 'the brain or a part of the brain regarded
as the seat of the mind,' but in literal terms it refers specifi cally to 'the parts of the
brain that are concerned with the reception and interpretation of sensory stimuli'
(Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2000). Perspective functioned as a kind of spatial
sensorium through which a particular central and focused world picture could be
formed. This spatial framing of phenomena facilitates their treatment in terms of
measurable spatial relationships governed by natural laws, such as those of physics.
This framing, furthermore, facilitates a shift in meaning of 'land' in landscape from
a cultural phenomenon, a land in the sense of country or pays , to a natural object,
land understood as a physical phenomenon like soil. It thus makes landscape an
object of scientifi c interest, as in landscape ecology. This approach also implies that
human cultural phenomena can be treated in the same way, thus reducing cultural
phenomena to a subset of the natural.
To understand the way the conceptualisation of landscape as pictorial, scenic
space helped create a larger world picture one must take a closer look at the way
these pictures functioned during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Pictorial
landscape images played an important role in the Renaissance development of the
modern theater with its perspective scenery, framed on a stage. 'Theater' thereby
came to provide a metaphor by which everything from war ('theater of war'), medi-
cine ('operating theater') and even the globe (atlases were called theaters and the-
aters could be called 'The Globe', which was the name of Shakespeare's London
playhouse). The stage, with its landscape scenery, created a stratifi ed space with
nature as its foundation. Its structure consisted of superimposed layers of earth, fl ora
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