ABSTRACT
Landscape is everyone’s fundamental heritage. It is all embracing and unavoidable. It inspires and shapes much of what we learn and do. Landscape is where we all make our homes, do our work, live our lives, dream our dreams. The chapter discusses changing Western apprehension of landscape, in the first place as loci of settlement and occupation, subsequently as scenes of spectacle. The taming of nature, the experience of travel and the development of landscape painting habituated early-modern Europeans to look at the real world as a series of static, contrived views. That landscape attachments vary with locale and language is obvious; how and why they differ is more a matter of folk wisdom than of scholarly findings. That collective landscape attitudes remain little more than anecdotally known reflects the huge range of the subject and the paucity of generalists.
