Full Description
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.
Contents
Ja's Elsner: Introduction: Landscape and Space
1: Wu Hung: Inventing Wilderness: The Birth of Landscape Representation in China
2: Richard Neer: Statues, Stelai, and Turning-Posts in Greece, ca. 565-ca. 465 BE: The Limits of Iconography
3: Claudia Brittenham: Locating Landscape in Maya Painting
4: Ja's Elsner: Space-Object-Landscape: Sacred and 'Sacro-Idyllic' from Dunhuang via Stonehenge to Roman Wall-Painting
