by Nigel Spivey
Diversities of religious belief modulated the messages of particular scenes: we know, for example, that Wang Wei was a Buddhist at a time when one strand of Buddhist doctrine extended the quality of enlightenment to non-sentient objects: trees, plants, grasses and rocks. But it is broadly true that painting and poetry during and after the T’ang period shared similar visual cues. Plum blossom, for example, could cause delight by its outburst in hard winter months, or regret by its flimsy transience. And the inscriptions attached to many Chinese landscape scrolls confirm what we might have deduced from the occasions and allegories of Wang Wei’s poems: that these images are not merely what they seem. Produced for certain rites of passage – birthdays, farewells, retirement parties – they carry a freight of hopes, thanks and congratulations.
A landscape with pine trees was suitable to honour longevity because pine trees symbolized resistance to the passing years. A landscape with cranes might wish good luck because cranes were auspicious birds.A landscape with faraway peaks would be appropriate for bidding farewell, since the composition itself implied distance and separation. A landscape steeped in mist and clouds, perhaps with calligraphic references to ‘sweet rain’, or a ‘timely downpour’ might have been painted in homage to a local administrator, whose beneficent order ensured that crops were always watered; or in itself, the painting may have served as some kind of charm against drought.
These are messages understood from scripts that belong to the pictures.Thanks to the triple alliance of poetry, painting and calligraphy – which during the Sung dynasty (960–1279) was recognized as a formal aspiration, the ‘Three Perfections’ of artistic endeavour – we also appreciate that many of these landscape paintings feature the painter’s own ambience.Wang Meng’s Dwelling in the Ching Pien Mountains, for example, gives us a view of his family estate near Wuhsien, to the west of Shanghai. But matching a picture with a given prospect was not a priority for these artists and their patrons. It was a Confucian principle that ‘the virtuous find pleasure in mountains’. As mountains were hard work to climb, so their negotiation in art and verse required agility of intellect, moral stamina and the sustained application of effort. Plain viewing was for lesser souls.
A PLACE OF LEISURE – OR TOIL?
THE ROMAN EMPEROR Nero earned notoriety from many excesses of autocratic behaviour during his rule (AD 54–68); for some contemporaries, it was his private residence in Rome, the Domus Aurea (Golden House), that caused most offence. Nero commandeered a prime urban area for the project, and spared no expense upon its structure and decoration. And this is how the grounds were laid out:
‘An enormous pool, more like a sea than a pool, was surrounded by buildings made to resemble cities, and by a landscape garden consisting of ploughed fields, vineyards, pastures and woodlands – where every kind of domestic and wild animal roamed about … When the palace had been decorated throughout in such lavish style, Nero dedicated it, condescending to remark: “Good, now at last I can begin to live like a human being!”’ Suetonius, Life of Nero, 31
Knowing what we do of Roman landscape painting, and the cleverness of Roman muralists in creating the effect of rapidly receding depth (trompe l'oeil), we can understand what underlay the affront at Nero’s scheme. Other inhabitants of Rome contented themselves with painted evocations of extensive countryside surrounds. Nero, by contrast, flagrantly swept aside illusion. For his Golden House, the truth was installed, whatever the cost. It was an index of his absolute power; it marked him apart – to own a piece of land that for everyone else was the stuff of dreams.
This is lordly vanity by no means unique to Nero. Centuries later, Mughal rulers in Afghanistan might look with satisfaction at a portrayal of their own paradise gardens that showed in the foreground the strain and labour entailed in its creation: the digging, the hoeing, the planting (Fig. 59). Likewise, we presume that the early fifteenth-century French patron of a series of vignettes known as ‘The Splendid Hours of the Duke of Berry’ was pleased to see a record of unremitting toil on his estate, charted month by month. It is almost as if the tenant farmers have been put under surveillance. In October, for example, we see one figure on horseback, raking the soil to a tilth, and another wearily casting seed from his apron; neither they nor the armed scarecrow nearby seem very concerned by the eager magpies and crows pecking about (Fig. 60). The moated castle beyond is where the gentry abide, and whence they will emerge – in April to go courting, and in May to go hunting, and so on.
59 (above) Babur supervising work in the ‘Garden of Fidelity’, from the Baburnama manuscript, c.1590.
60 (opposite) Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry – the month of October, c.1416.
NATURE AS DIVINE REVELATION
To his followers in medieval Italy, the monastic revivalist St Francis of Assisi preached the kinship between mankind and all of God’s creation. Legendarily, he exemplified it by his own rapport with nature – feeding the birds, befriending a wolf.
Still in Italy, some two centuries later, the soothing potential of painted landscapes was acknowledged by the architect and all-rounder Leon Battista Alberti (c. 1404–72). ‘Our minds are cheered beyond measure by the sight of paintings depicting the delightful countryside … the games of shepherds – flowers and verdure … ’ More specifically, Alberti saw direct psychosomatic applications for this sort of art. ‘Those who suffer from fever,’ he wrote, ‘are offered much relief by the sight of painted fountains, rivers and running brooks.’
In medieval Europe, following an older Arabic tradition, painting had been put to another medical purpose, namely, making meticulously illustrated almanacs of pharmacological plants and herbs. It may have been with this tradition partly in mind that the German artist Albrecht Dürer produced his arresting close-up of Das grosse Rasenstück, (The Great Turf), or section of meadowland (Fig. 61). It gives a cricket’s-eye view of grasses, dandelion, plaintain, yarrow and more; indirectly it conjures up a piquant image of the artist himself laid flat on his belly amid the damp sedge for the sake of this microscopic masterpiece.
‘Art lies in Nature,’ Dürer ordained, ‘so whoever can extract it, possesses it.’This wisdom came from his own faith in a divine creator whose handiwork could not be bettered by any artist.The artist’s vocation was to study, and never swerve from studying, the world that God bestowed.
The logic of Dürer's credence is severe, taking us far beyond herbalist manuals.The conclusion is that all landscape – from dandelions to glaciers – is a show of divine revelation.
THE SANCTION OF THE PICTURESQUE
Still-life painters stopped the clock of nature; the painters of Arcadia let it run to eternity.
It was not signalled as such, but by the eighteenth century, Arcadia was effectively established within the educational curriculum of young European aristocrats. Having been schooled in Greek and Latin literature, they put the final polish on their upbringing by taking a journey down to the lands of Virgil,Theocritus and the rest. Greece, then under the Islamic rule of Ottoman Turks, was perhaps too much of an adventure, though both Greece and Turkey held rich pickings for those who wished to appropriate large-scale souvenirs of Classical sculpture and architecture. Italy was easier. ‘Do you know the land where lemon trees bloom?’ crooned the German writer Johann Goethe, around 1783.The eighteenth-century Grand Tour was a secular pilgrimage that usually culminated in Rome, whose hinterland (the campagna) travellers discovered to be rolling, verdant and gratifyingly staffed by shepherds, who wore hide jerkins and took shelter in straw-roofed huts.
61 A painstaking close-up view of meadow grasses – The Great Turf by Albrecht Dürer, 1503.
62 (top) Goethe in the Campagna, by J.H.W. Tischbein, 1787.
63 (above) A Pastoral Landscape by Claude Lorraine, 1677.
Goethe commissioned a portrait of himself in the midst of that scenery (Fig. 62); already it was being treated by painters as a place where Classical myths or historical events might have taken place. So as safe, pleas
ant or even familiar as the landscape seemed, it was also the setting for extraordinary happenings – where, for example, the blinded giant hunter Orion once trod, seeking to reclaim his sight by the sun’s rays. And as everyone schooled in Virgil knew, it was along the River Tiber that the boats came carrying Aeneas, founder-father of the Roman race: the hero was greeted by the same lounging locals as were still to be seen with their flocks. Since any sketchbook view of the campagna was likely to include a tumble of ruins, the evocation of ancient epic was not hard to achieve.This was a countryside that Italians would call suggestivo – full of murmurs from the past.
Claude Lorraine (1600–82) was one of the painters who made capital of this suggestive quality in his work (Fig. 63). His pictures became much sought after by the Grand Tourists who, returning to their gloomier homelands, hankered for the countryside where lemon trees grew. Such was the appetite for this scenery in eighteenth-century Britain that a gadget was produced, ‘the Claude-glass’. It comprised a slightly convex and tinted lens through which the viewer of any country prospect gained the characteristic mellow hues and lustre of a Claude Lorraine painting – nature softened and subdued. And if this device were not sufficient, then wealthier individuals summoned professional translators of Claude into three dimensions: such ingenious figures as Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown, so called because of his eye for the capabilities of turning a British country estate into a Claude-style scene of picturesque charm.
‘The picturesque’, a term found in French, Italian and other European languages, means ‘like a picture’, or ‘something seen as a painter would see it’.While this definition is accurate enough, it does not quite cover the force of the notion as it emerged in the eighteenth century. People could pose to be picturesque, and so could their gardens. But the picturesque was something else. It was a slice of the Earth’s crust that had to be seen to be believed; it was a tranche of scenery that provoked not only intense satisfaction, but perhaps also incredulity - to the point of exhilaration, or fear, or both at once. It was a place that begged to be hymned, sketched, moulded or somehow recorded for art. If someone had done so before, no matter. Pictures were necessarily what the picturesque brought forth.
The ex-European settlers in America certainly felt that way.There was a romantic logic to their choice of sites to serve as the first ‘national parks’: each one (Grand Canyon, Rainier, Zion,Yellowstone and Yosemite) is marked by outcrops, chasms and cascades; no swamps or plains encroach. If indigenous peoples occupied these prime sites, they were swiftly dislodged. For romanticism was here reinforced by a powerful doctrine of divine permanence or revelation in the land; an affirming of some sacral rapport between these colonists and their adopted home. (That the Indians before them had also steeped their environment with divine spirits was perhaps further reason to assert the Christian claim.) In New England, Ralph Emerson and his junior disciple Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) were the most articulate of these visionaries. In his 1836 essay Nature, Emerson wrote of the self-effacement gained by surrender to the pulsing forces of stream and sap (‘all mean egotism vanishes … the currents of Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God,’ he enthused).Thoreau, meanwhile, cultivated the ‘society of Nature’ from a house he built for himself by the edge of Walden Pond, a contemplative space within walking distance of his home in Concord, Massachusetts.
Lines of longitude and latitude were projected on to America by the country’s third president,Thomas Jefferson.This was done chiefly to facilitate the definition of administrative districts, but in Jefferson's compilation of data about his home constituency – Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) – we see a founding father laying down the ideal of righteous possession. Of a naturally formed bridge in Virginia, Jefferson concluded that it was ‘impossible for the emotions arising from the sublime, to be felt beyond what they are here: so beautiful an arch, so elevated, so light, and springing as it were up to heaven … ’; it must be the handiwork of ‘the Almighty’. Landscape painters were duly lured to the spot, notably Frederic Edwin Church (Fig. 64), whose own locality (overlooking the Hudson River in upstate New York) was also officially perceived as picturesque.
64 The Natural Bridge, Virginia by F.E. Church, 1852.
65 T.H. O'Sullivan’s atmospheric photograph, taken in 1871, of Black Canyon on the Colorado River, Arizona.
Church did also seek beyond the United States for his views, painting in the Arctic and in the tropics. For most Americans, however, the wonders of their own land were sufficiently venerable, and to be witnessed with proper trepidation even if captured on camera.When Congress dispatched a geological survey to the Great Basin areas of Nevada, Arizona, Utah and New Mexico in 1867–74, the expedition was accompanied by the photographer Timothy O’Sullivan, who took care to convey the fearsome aspect of the scenery he recorded. Few of his compositions lack a human figure as some minuscule indicator of scale; so even when conditions were evidently sunny and placid, the sense of an immanent Almighty is installed with due apprehension (Fig. 65).
ART ON LAND
The very first use of a photographic device, in 1826, seems to have been for a shot of scenery, producing what we might want to call a landscape. Again, we are reminded of art’s tenuous rapport with the environment – attempting to capture a view that is destined to change. But what if artists acknowledged the rhythms of formation, erosion, submergence and decay, and worked with them?
‘Land Art’ is a phenomenon that emerged in the late 1960s. It may be documented photographically – for the record – but otherwise defies norms of permanence, transport and replication.This is art whose materials are not only often organic – pebbles, ferns, deer droppings, bark – but sometimes also naturally pre-shaped (icicles, sand-drifts) or else naturally liable to metamorphosis (a cluster of buds that will break into flower).
This art is complacent with decay.The sites of such ecological cooperation are not necessarily remote, though its practitioners tend to capitalize on what is untouched about the world’s surface.The British artist Richard Long once simply created a circle in the Sahara desert by clearing shingle to expose sand – enough to say one human had passed that way and left a print.
Land Art may have no message for those who see it, save to make them ponder on the passing of time. It is overtly contemporary art, not made to last; yet, as Richard Long and others have made clear, the inspirational debt to prehistory is great. Perhaps no other mode of art has had such a keen sense of its own potential archaeology.
One herald of the genre was the American Robert Smithson, whose 1970 ‘earthwork’ entitled Spiral Jetty cannot presently be seen, except on celluloid (Fig. 66). Smithson talked of conducting through his work ‘a democratic dialectic between the sylvan and the industrial’; but we may now sense opposing forces differently. In order to extend his anti-clockwise coil into the waters of the Great Salt Lake, the artist took out a 20-year lease on the land. His bid to posterity went no further than that. Perhaps the shape suggested a collapsed tower, or a snail shell; perhaps it was left there like some giant question mark. In any case, it makes a point – by being submerged. Using dumper trucks, Smithson laid out what would seem like a monumental inscription upon the Earth’s crust, more solid, we should say, than any tenuous arrangement of particles in oil paints and canvas.Yet it did not resist a water-level rise.The Spiral Jetty was as nature is: grained into the energies of flux, growth, weathering and instability. It may yet reappear, one day – or centuries from now.
66 A 1970 photograph of Robert Smithson’s temporary Spiral Jetty.
6
ART AND POWER
IN THE ANCIENT WEST AFRICAN KINGDOM OF BENIN, the king ruled by divine right. He was known to his people as the ‘oba’; his realm was defined as that area in which the oba held the power of life or death over his subjects. His mother, the ‘iye oba’, was a figure of great supportive importance, maintaining her own palace and staff of retainers and dignitaries; and the oba could not
assume rule without permission from a council of king-maker chiefs. But once established, the oba laid personal claim to what his territory contained: the coral of its shoreline, for example, all belonged to him. Myths of the Edo, the people who were the oba’s tribal subjects, attributed the oba with control over animals: so crocodiles, for instance, were his ‘policemen of the water’. He was deemed to command natural elements, too: the resources of air and water depended on him.The oba was, in short, a personage to be signified apart. From the fourteenth century onwards, the favoured sculptural medium for this distinction was solid-cast bronze or brass.
Alloys of copper and tin or copper and zinc respectively, bronze and brass are non-rusting metals.This rust-free quality gives both materials the value of conveying the willed permanence of kingly power. Moulded into free-standing statues and busts, or more often plaques in high relief, the effigies of the oba can be arranged in a chronological sequence according to variations of headdress and other insignia. Typically, the oba will be shown almost walled behind a high choker of coral beads, with a net-like cap – also linked with coral beads – enclosing his brow (Fig. 67). On a plaque, which would be fixed to a pillar within the palace complex, he may be shown with raised sword, and decked with further items of office: necklace of leopard’s teeth, tasselled crown, bracelets and beaded sash.
