ABSTRACT
Chapter two departs from some iconic pastoral works – Vergil’s tremendously influential Eclogues and Nicolas Poussin’s painting Et in Arcadia ego – and demonstrates how they can serve as inspiration for a new approach to landscape analysis. Practised intentionally, pastoral episodes and motives serve as narrative tools, a terminology for analysing landscapes, with which to tie landscape analyses to the outer world. Three basic motives in the pastoral tradition have triggered humans’ reflection on their engagement with nature and provided ever new meaning and insight. Landscapes emerge into appearance as images of the liminality between opposite life forces and are symbolic of a potentially emancipatory reflective attitude.
