ABSTRACT
In contemporary writing on the origins and meaning of landscape, it is often taken for granted that landscape is a visual and spatial idea, expressing a distance from place. One influential theorist takes “landscape to be a way of envisioning, contemplating, manipulating, and representing the natural world, always a construction and thus primarily ideational rather than inherent in nature". The Dutch landscape formation around 1600 brought out complex relationships between platial and spatial ideals of political representation. Around 1600, landscape was thus employed as a source of platial feelings of belonging and community, continuity with the past, and political boundaries against the spatial expansionism and absolutism of the Spanish empire. The Dutch countryside was frequently represented as a thriving garden shared by a characteristically diligent population and contemplated by urban visitors. In official Dutch land-use policy, landscape attains various guises on different scales.
