Robert Baldwin, The Culture of Nature in Early Modern Europe

To be sure, much of this traditional scholarship was keenly aware of the intellectual qualities of Renaissance landscape art and the way Renaissance painters elaborated nature into a series of complex pastoral, georgic, garden and wilderness modes tied to the rich landscape literature of the Renaissance and of classical antiquity itself. These modes, in turn, were linked to the philosophical, moral, religious, and historical values of patrons and groups. ² Despite this admirable investigation of early landscape as a high intellectual culture tied to a lofty landscape literature, much traditional art history saw Renaissance landscape as a strangely timeless world. And for all its high imaginary qualities, it was still either implicitly or explicitly grounded in an empirical response to an existing nature.

Ironically, the intellectual analysis of Renaissance landscape did not undermine its "natural" qualities. In so far as the "nature" of Renaissance landscape art was informed by the Renaissance humanist values institutionalized in the Western "humanities," Renaissance landscape could appear both as a true, enduring "nature" first observed and recorded by sixteenth-century artists and as an enduring world of lofty, "true" values continuing into the present. By describing Renaissance landscape as something both empirical and intellectual, traditional (humanist) art history removed it from a more critical history and gave it a double timelessness.

For modern viewers of Renaissance landscape, the prospect of a stable, timeless "nature" confirmed by an unbroken artistic and literary tradition stretching back five centuries assuaged anxieties about a threatened or disappearing nature in the twentieth century. ³ If the social, political, and economic changes during the Industrial Revolution helped make Dutch burgher landscape of the seventeenth-century more, not less compelling after 1760, ⁴ the modern sense of alienation from "nature" makes most earlier landscape art all the more "true," especially the visionary yet descriptive, burgher landscapes of Bruegel. ⁵ No post-modern critique of Western myths of "nature" can touch this infrastructural change or the cultural nostalgia it produces, much less the circulation of such imagery in the mass media. If anything, the 1990s saw a resurgence of cultural primitivism, the lifeblood of traditional nature ideology since the Romantics. ⁶. Fueled by modern changes and fears, traditional ideas on nature will remain true on an emotional or spiritual level even if we doubt them intellectually. Both coexist happily in the same culture and even in the same psyche.

Ironically, the historical distance of Renaissance landscape works to confirm the larger, enduring truths of Renaissance culture and "nature" still so deeply embedded in modern consciousness. Seen as the highest truths of a dawning, early modern age, modern assumptions about "nature" speak more powerfully to us when projected into the paintings of Bellini, Botticelli, Giorgione, Titian, Altdorfer, Bruegel, Ruisdael, and Cuyp. ⁷ Relocated in such great works of art, our modern values acquire a heroic antiquity and transcendence. They allow us to see with much greater clarity the stability, timelessness, and depth of our own "true" humanity and the larger cosmos in which it was once so harmoniously embedded. To succumb to the persuasive rhetoric of this early modern landscape (1485-1700) and pay tribute to the nature it records is to rediscover our own, original place in the world. At the very least, we witness a lost metaphoric truth, a plausible Golden Age of our own past to which we are still profoundly connected. The felt loss of this embeddedness in a larger, natural world only makes it easier to experience the latter as a deeper, truer "nature" obscured by modern life yet living on, buried in our psychic past.

Just as seventeenth and eighteenth-century aristocrats could admire their own heroic past in the historicizing pastoral landscapes of Claude where shepherds, gods, conquering heroes, and architectural tributes to the Roman empire mingled in Golden Age vistas of cosmic harmony, so modern, middle class viewers can see their own original place in nature in the visionary, burgher landscapes of Pieter Bruegel and the later painters of the seventeenth-century century Dutch republic.

Nothing can be said for the scholarship on Renaissance landscape painting before 1980. The three social histories published before then had no discernible impact on the extensive art historical literature on Renaissance landscape until 1990. ⁸ Only in the last decade has the history of Renaissance art begun to look beyond the exalted realm of intellectual history, in large part inspired by the social history of eighteenth and nineteenth century landscape mentioned above, and a post-colonial history of Renaissance cartography and geography coming from geographers and literary historians. ⁹ Even today, no book or article explores the social meaning of sixteenth-century Dutch landscape art. As late as 1989, the most important new book on sixteenth-century Dutch landscape focused entirely on style development and humanist philosophy. ¹⁰And in 1991, one important Bruegel scholar claimed landscape was "a relatively neutral subject from an ideological viewpoint". ¹¹

In accord with revisionist literature, I assume that landscape is the most ideologically loaded of all artistic subjects in using "nature" to conceal its artifice, subjectivity, and social, political, and economic interests. Rather than a transparent window onto an observed nature or the expression of a disinterested or timeless set of values, Renaissance landscape art was a complex set of rhetorical fictions devised by the urban elites dominating the production of landscape culture including poetry, painting, prints, sculpture, villa architecture, and gardens. More importantly, Renaissance landscape art emerged from a much larger universe of technological, economic, social, and political change and a new world of humanist discourses on nature encompassing and redefining every human activity, institution, and thought. ¹²

As a set of fictions about nature, Renaissance landscape worked on many levels simultaneously, confirming all agendas, verifying all falsehoods, resolving or mystifying all contradictions, concealing all unpleasant realities and violence, and silencing all dissent. First and foremost, nature in Renaissance culture endowed contested practices and values with the highest political, religious, moral, and philosophical truth, doubly removing them from critical scrutiny. Even when one powerful group – nobles, burghers, or clerics – used landscape to criticize the culture of a rival group as “unnatural”, it did so by securely embedding its own, contested values in a universal nature. While the proliferation of competing natures and interpretations proved unsettling to a few observers like Montaigne, the Renaissance did not face a crisis in the belief in nature, despite what scholars have claimed. For all the changes in thinking about the natural world between 1300-1700, the new discourses on nature allowed elite groups to renegotiate on an ongoing basis a relatively stable, universal system transcending group differences.

Representations of nature also universalized the time-bound values, agendas, and hierarchies of groups and institutions. It inscribed disturbing novelties into invented "traditional" settings, unbroken temporal continuities, political genealogies ¹³and geographical histories. In its historical dimension, “nature” continually modernized the past, inscribing it with new values, purposes, and problems to heal ruptures with the present. Conversely, it created nostalgic, equally imaginary images of the past to critique a wide spectrum of “modern” conditions such as large cities, impersonal economies, autonomous women, social ambition, ungodliness (Catholic or Protestant), and political tyranny. Usually it did both simultaneously, at once naturalizing a problematic modernity and invoking earlier Golden Ages of natural virtue to contest modern practice. It also reduced anxieties about modern practices by imagining compromises with traditional values. Or it co-opted traditional values as pious warnings about modern "excesses" within an otherwise legitimized or assumed modernity.

For example, the juxtaposition of a virtuous, stay-at-home plowman in Bruegel's Fall of Icarus with a foolish high-climber and a modern, mercantile ship worked, like those in earlier geographical discussions since antiquity, to critique a modern mercantile travel turned reckless, immoderate, and greedy, a world of "new men" pursuing private ambitions at the expense of the common good still upheld in the countryside. At the same time, the diligent plowman allowed Bruegel’s humanistically educated, art collecting elites to rise above the quotidian labor of a rustic boor, conscious only of the furrows at his feet, and contemplate the new global world of international commerce, exploration, and geography. The plowman remains in his material substratum while the viewer soars aloft into a higher, intellectual universe of geographical, philosophical and moral self-knowledge not unlike that suggested by the Dutch humanist, Lipsius, in a 1578 letter recommending travel to a young English nobleman.

Central to Renaissance nature's rich system of contradictions was a series of oppositions between city and country largely inherited from classical antiquity but invested with new meanings and purposes and encompassing all spheres of human existence, activity, and consciousness, all locations and classes, all history, politics, religion, economics, morality, sexual issues, and other concerns. Most of these contrasts elevated nature while disparaging an "unnatural" life in city and court. An incomplete list follows.

SUPERIOR NATURE VS. CITY OR COURT
Nature / Art

Order, harmony / Chaos

Hierarchy (order) / Vertical confusion, presumption

Harmony, unity / Discord, fragmentation

Simple / Complex, excessive

Community, cooperation / Self(ish), predatory, divided

Nurturing, caring, familial / Indifferent, impersonal

Natural, organic , human / Unnatural, technology, artifice

Unbought, home-grown / Commercial, commoditized

True, authentic / False

Reality, fundamentals, depth / Image, superficial

Past, tradition, roots / Modern, uprooted

Golden Age, original perfection / Decline

Pure, innocent, original, perfect, virtuous / Corrupt, immoral

Timeless, static, stable / Ephemeral, unstable continuity

Shelter, home, belonging / Homeless, wandering, alienation

Young, reborn / Old, decaying

Spiritual, mythic, mysterious / Material, ungodly, mundane

"Universal" or "true" piety / "Unnatural" or fractured piety

Beauty / Ugliness

Fecund / Sterile

Freedom, autonomy, self-government / Confinement, slavery

Nudity, sexual delight / Clothing, cosmetics, conventions

Vital body, refreshing food / Stifling mind, slothful delicacies

Healthy / Unhealthy, declining

Work / Leisure (sordid, wasteful, luxurious)
Necessities, (food, clothes, architecture) / Luxuries (art)

Utility, productivity / Uselessness, waste, decline

Virtuous wife, mother, compliant or chaste nymph / Prostitute, debauched noblewoman, transgressive woman, she-monster

While many qualities on either side of the city-country divide could be readily overlapped to build more complex discussions, contrary qualities were also combined quietly. The ability of nature to tolerate contradiction was greatly enhanced by the simultaneous existence within Renaissance and earlier landscape culture of a contrary set of oppositions which devalued the natural in comparison to a higher civilization located in city or court. This second set of polarities operated simultaneously in all landscape texts and images and included the following.

INFERIOR NATURE VS. CITY OR COURT
Animal / Human

Lowly body (brute appetites, passions) / High mind, reason

Chaos, wild, savage, primitive / Order, civilization, progress

Ignorance / Education, culture, art, language, music

Base / Noble

Coarse / Refined

Sloth, complacency / Heroic achievements

Harsh work and grinding poverty / Leisure

Empty, dull, routine, monotonous / Full, exciting, novel

Provincial / Cosmopolitan, well traveled
Though all of these oppositions were never present in a single image or text, they provided the fertile cultural vocabulary used to write early modern landscape culture and to define larger orders. It was humanist nature's openness to contradiction and its ability to reconcile or elide antithetical impulses which made nature such an appealing, flexible, fruitful, and prominent subject within Renaissance culture. Capitalizing on its ambiguities, Renaissance landscape concealed and managed the conflicting obligations, desires, experiences, and values of urban elites. With an all-encompassing wealth of contradictions, humanist nature allowed urban groups to forge convincing, true, universal cultures within distinct group mentalities and to fashion stable identities in a more complex and unstable world. In this sense, Renaissance landscape was driven less by empirical responses to visible settings than a new totality of unsettling experiences, most of which were far from the countryside.

In general, nature's representational contradictions operated quietly, at times, subconsciously, in sixteenth-century landscape texts and images. By excluding or downplaying contradictory features, artists and writers preserved nature's essential unity, consistency, and truth. The ability to manage such contradictions artistically allowed wealthy patrons to find solace from urban trials and tribulations without giving up their distinctive urban culture, values, and leisure practices. Nature was both a retreat from the city and a rustic version of urban life in one form or another, whether princely, courtly, burgher, or ecclesiastical.

Here is one area where the social history of landscape is so revealing. For it allows modern viewers to see how Renaissance landscape never left city or court despite endless claims to the contrary. Even as retreat, Renaissance landscape represented utopian versions of city, court, or church. Just as early modern court society produced a new pastoral culture not to escape the court but to redefine aristocratic values, sensibilities, and practices, so Dutch burgher culture produced a distinctly burgher landscape mode extolling the republican, Stoic, civic humanist values of Dutch citizens. We can learn a lot more about Bruegel's landscapes, for example if we see them not as descriptive records of the Dutch countryside but as ideal images of the new Dutch city and as discussions of burgher problems. So too, the enormous popularity of Claude’s pastoral landscape among European princes, church officials, and high nobles makes sense only when we see the complex absolutist values - historical, political, social, religious, geographical, and aesthetic – which structured his seemingly timeless arcadias.

In a larger sense, the extension of a Renaissance landscape culture into all areas of human existence and consciousness allowed nature to reconcile and interweave all elite desires, values, actions, forms of existence, social identities, and historical epochs. Renaissance nature enabled nobles and burghers not just to inhabit city and country simultaneously, but every other imaginable world, every existence, every historical moment, and every social level, regardless of how mutually exclusive they were.

Renaissance landscape also worked as "culture" in the more dynamic sense defined recently by "cultural studies". Here culture refers to an unbounded sense of identity and social interaction. Rather than a stable system of shared beliefs uniting individuals in a common order within a bounded region, culture emerges as a dynamic arena of contest, a medium of discussion, exchange, and identity formation across groups and borders. Seen in cultural studies terms, landscape is less as a set of objects or an aesthetic category than an interpretive process interweaving nature into contemporary values and naturalizing problematic issues of morality, politics, social order, gender, and identity.

In so far as “nature” operated as an authoritative yet flexible and ambiguous category throughout early modern European culture, it allowed a wide variety of topics, spheres, and discussions to be linked in ways which were culturally, politically, and economically productive for elite groups. As an arena of discussion, nature was both a cultural and material location, a set of places which allowed new interactions, exchanges, activities, and identities. These places included physical locations like farms, villas, and gardens and cultural places like texts and images, themselves full of geographical images.

“Nature” was also a series of conceptual locations tied to certain religious, moral, social, and political values. For example, it was a place of "true" piety as God's Creation in both anti-clerical and church culture. It was an inner space of Stoic philosophical serenity and freedom far from the "shipwreck" of mercantile or political ambitions. It was the image of perfect urban community figured in harmonious villages. It helped carve out larger political identity by offering up a new Dutch ethnicity proudly grounded in Netherlandish geographies. Conversely, it gave princely, burgher, and clerical elites new images of global community, harmony, unity, and order tied variously to the international, humanist values of absolutist, mercantile, Catholic and Protestant elites.

Conceptualized in this way, Renaissance landscape nature became a culturally fertile zone where material locations flowed in and out of symbolic locations and where the real countryside was physically reshaped by changing social, economic, and cultural conventions. In the sixteenth century, this process of reinterpretation encompassed the "hard reality" of land as new economic, political, and social conditions produced new land tenure and land use and new ties between rural economies and an expanding market economy tied to large cities, credit finance, and long-distance trade. Needless to say, all geographical changes and shifts in the rural economy fueled the cultural investment in representations of "traditional" nature as a timeless, objective world beyond human intervention. At the same time, all such traditional images were inscribed with a wealth of early modern urban practices, values, and ideals, allowing Renaissance elites to have their cake and eat it too.

By investigating early Renaissance landscape as a series of productive discussions between nobles, burghers, clerics, and peasants, one can avoid the limitations of more traditional approaches such as style history and iconography (theme). Once we redefine art as an arena for the discussion, exchange, and definition of group values, it is much easier to see iconography and aesthetics as inseparable elements of coherent visions embedded in group mentalities. ¹⁷ In the projection of group values into material culture, style is another kind of iconography just as iconographic choices are another form of style, another way of imposing meaningful patterns on reality.

In a larger sense, "cultural studies" allows the art historian to move across all artificial boundaries and interweave a wide variety of texts, social practices, rituals, geographic locations, buildings, and aesthetic objects. All have significant iconographies, aesthetics, techniques, media, size, location, audiences, and social functions. By relocating art within a totality of material culture, consciousness, and activity, one can develop a richer and more nuanced historical reading of Renaissance landscape art in and against sixteenth-century history.

"Cultural studies" also escapes the overly static, reductive, and determinist social history of culture found in the 1980s. By restoring individual agency, ¹⁸ cultural studies restores the importance of the creative artist, the individual patron, and the qualities of art objects as uniquely visual, material agencies where ruling values are publicly displayed and defined. While the work of art remains shaped and constrained by social, economic, and political structures, material circumstances, and prevailing ideologies, it is never fully determined by them. On the contrary, the art object becomes a creative force in all ongoing discussions and in the reshaping of identity, material reality, and ideology. While no single work of art ever changed the world, the totality of artistic production served as a powerful outlet for the formulation, circulation, and legitimization of new ideas, practices, and socio-political structures. From this perspective, the rise of landscape as a major category of Western art in the sixteenth century had important implications and consequences far beyond the world of luxury objects inscribed with nature.

One challenge for the historian is to preserve the creative interaction between landscape as matter and as metaphor, as a hard, external reality reshaped physically by human technology and socio-political changes and as a representational arena continually redefined by human agencies. Though “nature” necessarily remains a slippery, elusive, flexible, protean, and contradictory sphere, I see nothing gained by embracing an extreme, post-modern view collapsing all distinctions between "reality" and representation, nature and culture, empirical world and human subjectivity. By reducing the natural world to a rhetorical zone collapsing on its own limitations and ambiguities, one denies the existence of any world which can be known empirically or historically.

A more historically productive view sees nature and representation as unbounded, intersecting, yet distinct zones which continually interact in mutually transforming ways. The inclusion of mind and self in discussions of nature serves not to deny the "reality" of nature or the possibility of knowing something about it. Rather, it allows us to move to a more complex reality which recognizes and discusses the participation of human mind in all accounts, representations, and histories. As recent social geographers have noted, "By acknowledging that our story is related to and constitutive of our social experience, by admitting that our story is part of moral and political discourse, we become more fully rational". ¹⁹