Landscape has been a key theme in world archaeology and trans-cultural art history over the last half century, particularly in the study of painting in art history and in all questions of human intervention and the placement of monuments in the natural world within archaeology. However, the
representation of landscape has been rather less addressed in the scholarship of the archaeologically-accessed visual cultures of the ancient world. The kinds of reliefs, objects, and paintings discussed here have a significant purchase on matters concerned with landscape and space in the visual
sphere, but were discovered within archaeological contexts and by means of excavation. Through case studies focused on the invention of wilderness imagery in ancient China, the relation of monuments to landscape in ancient Greece, the place of landscape painting in Mesoamerican Maya art, and the
construction of sacred landscape across Eurasia between Stonehenge and the Silk Road via Pompeii, this book emphasises the importance of thinking about models of landscape in ancient art, as well as the value of comparative approaches in underlining core aspects of the topic. Notably, it explores
questions of space, both actual and conceptual, including how space is configured through form and representation.
Author(s): Jaś Elsner
Series: Visual Conversations in Art and Archaeology Series
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 208
City: Oxford
Cover
Landscape and Space: Comparative Perspectives from Chinese, Mesoamerican, Ancient Greek, and Roman Art
Copyright
PREFACE
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Introduction: Landscape and Space
ART HISTORY AND LANDSCAPE
SUBJECTIVITY
COMPARISON
REFERENCES
1: Inventing Wilderness: The Birth of Landscape Representation in China
INTRODUCTION
THE SCENE
THE OBJECTS
WILDERNESS VS CIVILIZATION
Pictures of Mountains and Seas
ENTERING THE WILDERNESS
REFERENCES
2: Statues, Stelai, and Turning Posts in Greece, c.565–c.465 bce: The Limits of Iconography
TRACKS AND TURNING POSTS
MORTUARY COLUMNS
GRAVE STELAI AS TERMATA
THE APOLLONIAN BOUNDARIES
THE “MOURNING ATHENA” (ACROPOLIS 695)
ABBREVIATIONS
REFERENCES
3: Locating Landscape in Maya Painting
SUPERNATURAL LANDSCAPES
TOWN, FIELD, AND FOREST
TOPONOMY AS LANDSCAPE REPRESENTATION
CODA: RADICAL RUPTURES AND NEW WAYS OF PICTURING LANDSCAPE AT CHICHEN ITZA
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
REFERENCES
4: Space–Object–Landscape: Sacred and “Sacro-idyllic” from Dunhuang via Stonehenge to Roman Wall-painting
PAINTING AS PICTURE POEM: THE DUNHUANG PAGODA
MONUMENT AND LANDSCAPE: FROM STONEHENGE TO BEWCASTLE
SACRO-IDYLLIC LANDSCAPE
CONCLUSIONS
REFERENCES
INDEX
