purified surfaces of Ansel Adams’ highly aesthetic
photographs of western wilderness (Schama,
1995) (Figure 12.3). Connections between image
and action and between the material and the
imaginative in landscape have evolved histori-
cally in close connection with changing tech-
nologies of seeing and representing space.TECHNOLOGIES OF VISION
AND LANDSCAPEModern ideas and experience of landscape have
evolved in close association not only with
changes in the ownership and use of land but
with technologies of seeing and representing
space. In the economically progressive, urban-
ized regions of late medieval Europe – northern
Italy, southern Germany, Flanders – the revival
of population, trade and urban culture after the
Black Death of 1350 saw the spread of new
forms of rural property and production. Increas-
ingly, urban capital and urban authority flowed
between urban centres into their hinterlands, ini-
tiating processes of social and economic change
that continue today. Urban investment progres-
sively turned agriculture from a localized,
largely self-sufficient and collective way of life
into an industry through which capital mobilizes
land and labour to yield profits. New modes ofexploiting nature and those who worked it
demanded new ways of knowing and represent-
ing the natural world, locally and eventually
across the globe. An example of this is the
demand for accurate measure and recording of
productive natural spaces for the purposes of
establishing ownership and control within a land
market. Thus we see the invention and use from
the fifteenth century of surveying techniques
including handbooks, instruments for measuring
distance, angles, heights and areas, and the appear-
ance of estate and cadastral maps (Figure 12.4).
All these were in common use across Europe
by the mid sixteenth century and would be
refined and deployed over succeeding centuries
to redraw the boundaries of enclosed estate
lands, to drain and improve whole regions such
as the Po Basin in Italy, the Netherlands,
the Vendée in France or the English Fenlands,
and to appropriate and colonize lands in overseas
regions newly discovered to Europeans
(Cosgrove, 1993: 123–35; Mariage, 1998).
From about 1500, in these regions’ urban
centres, for example in Nuremberg, Antwerp,
Venice and Florence, merchants, scholars and
craftsmen produced instruments, maps and
pictures to regulate and celebrate the wealth,
power and beauty of their native cities and regions.
Jacopo de Barbari’s bird’s-eye view of Venice
or Rosselli’s map of Florence in which the
artist includes himself seated on the hills at
Fiesole (Figure 12.5), the coloured image ofLANDSCAPE AND THE EUROPEAN SENSE OF SIGHT 255Figure 12.3 Ansel Adams, ‘View of Yosemite’(Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust)3029-ch12.qxd 03-10-02 5:49 PM Page 255