ABSTRACT
To perceive and to act in the weather-world is to align one’s own conduct to the celestial movements of sun, moon and stars, to the rhythmic alternations of night and day and of the seasons, to rain and shine, sunlight and shade. For the weather engulfs the landscape just as the sight of things is engulfed by the experience of light, the hearing of things by the experience of sound, and the touch of things by the experience of feeling. The equation of the shape of the land with its look – of the scaped with the scopic – has become firmly lodged in the vocabulary of modernist art history. In a landscape painting, however, and by contrast to a map, a large part of the picture often consists of sky. Thus people and landscape – to recycle an overused anthropological formula – are ‘mutually constituted’.
