ABSTRACT
The traditional art-historical paradigm states that with rare exceptions, classical and medieval landscape representations were 'landscapes of symbols', rather than 'landscapes of fact' capable of conveying impressions of sensation. While geometry and mathematics are the scientific roots of the 'perspectival gaze in which the observer is always outside and above the action', the observer actually occupies an aestheticized pictorial point of view. The perspectival gaze served mercantile capitalism's ordering and codifying drive in various ways. One is the wide range of subject matter encompassed within the metaphor which, apart from land-related topics, ran the gamut from theaters of lace patterns to theaters of mechanical engineering. A second is the practical application of this new landscape perspective to the technical practices of cartography and land surveying that became invested with artistic concerns of light as well as linear and aerial perspective. Medieval and early Renaissance landscape depictions are most often presented as colorful panoramas revealing or supporting a divine order.
