Nuremberg’s towers and spires proudly set in open
fields and royal forest, all date from this time (Nuti,
1999; Schulz, 1978; Söderström, 2000). They ini-
tiated a long tradition of celebratory urban land-
scape views and maps. The same merchants
and patricians who thus celebrated their cities
also commissioned ‘chorographies’ or detailed
descriptions of their local regions, drawn and
painted to offer an immediate visual impression
of the lands in which their capital was invested.
And they purchased ‘cosmographies’ to decorate
their walls: small, jewel-like paintings, which
offered panoramic scenes over the vast horizons
beyond which their merchandise moved (Wood,
1993: 45–50). Painted images of city and country
themselves offered opportunities for investing
and displaying wealth and national pride: they
required costly materials and great skill on the
part of artists to produce (Alpers, 1984). The
popularity of these painted scenes of nature, landand urban space, given the new name of
‘landscapes’, spread rapidly in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, especially in Holland,
England and Lombardy, the European regions of
most rapid advance in capitalist forms of land
tenure. From 1600 the invention and rapid devel-
opment of lens technology in microscopes and
telescopes opened new spaces to human vision
and were enthusiastically embraced as aids to
painting and mapping of space (Kemp, 1990).
Technology served to enhance that identification
between empirical observation, mathematical rea-
soning and knowledge which we call the scien-
tific revolution. In the academic hierarchy of the
fine arts, landscape long remained culturally infe-
rior to oil paintings of sacred or historical events
and portraiture. The taste for landscape was pri-
marily bourgeois, and by the nineteenth century
its practice, especially in water-colour, had
become itself a mark of middle-class cultivation.
To make pictorial images of landscape
requires compositional and drafting skills,
including perspective, the ability to produce real-
istic appearances of three-dimensional space on a
two-dimensional surface. Effective perspective
learning demands a grasp of similar principals of
geometry to those required for transforming
physical nature: in architecture, water manage-
ment, land survey, mapping, exploration and
trade. To achieve realistic effects, artists have
consistently embraced mechanical means such as
the camera obscura, lenses and prisms, mirrors
and polished surfaces, photographic equipment
and plates, film and video. In landscape, the
skills and techniques of the surveyor, the map-
maker, the planner and the artist overlap and
have often been practised by the same individu-
als. This was especially true in the case of mili-
tary mapping and art. The European states
emerging from the processes of modernization
initiated in the cities were large-scale territorial
units whose survival and prosperity depended
upon effective defence and effective administra-
tion of the realm (Heffernan, 1998: 170). Armies
and navies undertook the first of these tasks,
requiring detailed knowledge of topography and
coastlines to perform their roles. Warfare has
always been a principal stimulus to technological
development, not only of the means of violence
but of surveillance, strategic planning and battle-
field operation. Military topographers – often
recognized artists – trained officers in the skills
of drawing, mapping and recognizing land-
scapes, while naval officers and ratings learned
to sketch coastlines by eye and from memory
(Martins, 1999).
The intimate connections between gathering
and classifying spatial information, its accurate256 LANDSCAPEFigure 12.4 Sixteenth-century engraving of ‘The
Surveyor’(from E.G.R.Taylor,Mathematical
Practitioners)3029-ch12.qxd 03-10-02 5:49 PM Page 256