The four essays that make up this book take as their subject
gardens of the Middle Ages and Renaissance whose traces are still
visible, in varying degrees, at sites in Italy and France: Palermo
and Rome, the Vaucluse and Hesdin. Traces only, as these gardens
have long since been emptied of the life whose insistent motion
gave them shape and in the intervening years have been transformed
in such a way as to entangle and obscure significant moments of
their past. Yet these moments were also refracted in other media -
images and texts - that may be used to bring the past into focus
again in the landscape itself. The following book attempts
precisely this. Its modus operandi is an experiment, crossing the
constitutive acts of the discipline of archaeology - excavation and
reconstruction - with the protocols of the history of art, as it
will involve, in a continuous circuit, both the identification and
the interpretation of salient witnesses of the past. This
experiment may derive from archaeology and the history of art, but
its subject belongs to the field of landscape studies, which has
truly burgeoned in recent years under the auspices of a provisional
and yet ever-widening constituency of disciplines and initiatives,
including garden history, cultural geography and environmental
science, as well as anthropology and the histories of art and
architecture, literature, material culture and performance. As
landscape has become an increasingly independent field of inquiry,
however, it has tended to take on the character of an autonomous
form like that of the arts, whose methods of theory and criticism
have become ensconced in the academy. This book will take a
differnt path. The landscape it seeks to narrate, in four discrete
episodes, stands not alone, as an independent and integral
creation, but as an installation within a more enduring environment
in much the same way that temporary "ambient architecture" - the
architecture of the stage set, the showroom and the festival -
stands within the framework of building and city. - from the
Author's Prologue. 238 pages. Acknowledgments, prologue, notes,
bibliography and index. 78 color and black & white
illustrations. Art history, aesthetics, cultural studies, landscape
studies.
General
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