Cosgrove, D. (2004) “Landscape and Landschaft”, German Historical Institute Bulletin, No. 35 Fall, pp.

57-71

German word Landschaft  used as a descriptor for administrative regions (ex. Frisia (Northern Netherlands) and
Schleswig-Holstein (North Germany).

Physical environment  low-lying marshlands, heaths [charneca], and offshore islands known as impoverished
regions explored by monarchs and aristocrats (ownership and taxation).

 For being located in the borderlands, they received a greater local autonomy.

In this context, the definition of Landschaften denoted a notion of polity (an identifiable political entity—any group
of people who have a collective identity) and a customary law (in which tradition and customs determined the way
community lived and worked)  this defines the Landschaft

In English, the word is associated in a more relative and scenery aspect, being considered “a picture of natural inland
scenery” (associated with a 17th century type of painting).

Landschap originated in the Netherlands popular among landowners as a way to represent their estates.

 Aligned with estate survey, mapping, mathematics, measure, and perspective.

 Connected to Prospect Poetry (genre of poetry that describes, and often praises, a landscape or place).
o Privileges the sense of sight, and what started as a representation of space rapidly became a
designation of material spaces themselves.

In this context, the meaning of landscape stopped portraying the type of community and customary rights of a
region and became a proof of the capitalist property rights and to a change of the spatial control.

 This change can be connected with James I of England.

o The hardest challenge he had as King was uniting the “countries/lands” of England and Scotland
under his sovereignty and negotiating with the local attachments of landed nobility in England.
 Statutory law (written law passed by a body of legislature) from the court and parliament
was put into action across the whole national territory.
 Local customs and community living rules were expunged.
 Contested affair  led to an eventual collapse of Stuart absolutism, Civil War, and the
ascent of parliament and constitutional monarchy.
 Theatre and masque also contributed to this new concept of Landscape.
o Creation of imaginary spaces in closed playhouses decorated with stage
scenery designed to create the illusion of space.
 Politics  landscape are images to “naturalize” its legal and territorial claims.
 Masque  an illusion of a harmonious national space.
 Chorography (art of describing or mapping a region)  continued vitality of a more regional
political territoriality.

In conclusion, Landscape emerged from Landschaft with a totally transformed meaning, and the transformation was
at once social and spatial.

 Socially  landscape was divested of attachment to a local community and its customary law and handed to
the “distanciated gaze [olhar]” of a property owner whose rights over the land were established and
regulated by statute.
 Spatially  landscape was constructed as abounded and measured area, an absolute space, represented
through the scientific techniques of measured distance, geometrical survey, and linear perspective.

In this respect, landscape should be understood as a direct expression of modernization.