Landscape and Infrastructure

Reimagining the Pastoral Paradigm for the Twenty-First Century

Margaret Birney Vickery

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350071100
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Landscape and Infrastructure examines the relationships between landscape painting and landscape design from the seventeenth century to the present, and contemporary infrastructure projects around the globe. These seemingly disparate subjects are united by a shared concern for the pastoral middle ground; a traditionally productive landscape. By focusing an art-historical lens on pre-industrial productive systems and the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the pastoral landscape tradition, we can gain a better understanding of how to weave new approaches to productive infrastructure systems (such as power generation, water filtration and food production) into our contemporary landscapes. With rising demand for clean energy, clean water, and locally-grown food, this study offers a historical perspective on how such systems can be integrated into our suburban and urban areas. Vestigial elements of the pastoral tradition have long held aesthetic sway in our suburbs, cities and national parks, both in Britain and America. Now, as new energy and water related projects encroach on these spaces, remnants of the pastoral play a crucial role in convincing neighborhood residents, municipal leaders, and energy companies or water authorities of the benefits of a neighboring infrastructure. This book investigates the history of that tradition and highlights the advantages it brings as we re-imagine infrastructure in the twenty-first century.

1

Landscape Painting and the Productive Pastoral Tradition

For many of us today, the term “pastoral” evokes images of verdant fields and copses of trees with the odd shepherd or shepherdess and a small flock of sheep. Such scenes are understood as bucolic idylls and enjoyed for their beauty as a relaxing escape. Thus, the term “productive pastoral” can seem a contradiction. Productivity in the landscape often evokes images of grey industrial expanse, smokestacks belching black plumes or vast agricultural fields. Such images can have little in common with a Virgilian idyll of orchards and bees, shepherds and goats—what we often associate with the pastoral. Yet, as will become clear in the following pages, the pastoral landscape represented a middle ground between wild nature and civilization. This middle ground featured the productive systems that were celebrated by society; it was a liminal place wherein the conflicts between civilization and wild nature were resolved harmoniously. In the poet Virgil’s Eclogues, Tityrus and Meliboeus discuss the merits and benefits of the pastoral arcadia, one in which Tityrus basks amid his flocks, laboring yet taking time to rest in the shade and play on his pipes. In contrast, Meliboeus is exiled from his farm thereby facing the chaos of either the bustle of Rome or the dangers of wild nature which lie beyond the pastoral idyll. Thus, Virgil establishes in the first century bce the key trope in the pastoral tradition: a balanced middle ground tied both to nature and to civilization and a resolution of the two.

The pastoral tradition has had a long and fruitful history in art, literature, and landscape design. Scholars such as Gail Crandell discuss its seminal role in the development of landscape painting and architecture influencing the likes of Claude Lorrain and much later, Frederick Law Olmsted and his designs for Central Park¹ which we will examine in Chapter 5. Both the classicist Bettina Bergmann and the Americanist Leo Marx refer to David Halperin’s definition of the pastoral to help define the term in the context of their work. In his book Before Pastoral: Theocritus and the Ancient Tradition of Bucolic Poetry, Halperin defines the pastoral according to four criteria:

1. Pastoral is the name commonly given to literature about or pertaining to herdsmen and their activities in a country setting; these activities are conventionally assumed to be three in number: caring for the animals under their charge, singing or playing musical instruments, and making love.

2. Pastoral achieves significance by oppositions, by the set of contrasts, expressed or implied, which the values embodied in its world create with other ways of life. The most traditional contrast is between the little world of natural simplicity and the great world of civilization, power, statecraft, and ordered society—established codes of behavior, and artifice in general.

3. A different kind of contrast equally intimate to pastoral’s manner of representation is that between a confused or conflict-ridden reality and the artistic depiction of it as comprehensible, meaningful, or harmonious.

4. A work which satisfies the requirements of any two of the three preceding points has fulfilled the necessary and sufficient conditions of pastoral.²

The definition above is helpful in its expansiveness. At the time of writing his Eclogues or The Georgics, Virgil’s pastoral landscape included the shepherd and his flocks, pastures, orchards, vineyards, and beehives. While a place of refuge and peace, it was also a place of vital production, harvest and milking, slaughter, and honey. Such production fueled Roman society. While both poems may veil commentary about Roman politics, they celebrate the productive systems that power it. Thus, Virgil’s work most clearly adheres to Halperin’s first definition with the shepherds in the landscape. But equally, his writings meet the requirements of number two with the contrasts between the wilds of nature and the exhausting intricacies of Rome. Nature is tamed by human labor while the soul is restored by an escape into the rural pastoral, a peace not found in the urban streets. And finally, Virgil’s pen artistically resolves the two conflicting realities of city and nature into a bucolic ideal from which Meliboeus has been banished.

In her study of Roman wall paintings and the sacred groves they often included, Bergmann references the importance of this pastoral system. The agricultural scenes with their pasturage and fields were highly valued: “cultivation threatened the grove… . Accordingly, the paintings of quiet scenes with grazing sheep and cows omit any sign of danger from the plow; wool and meat accompany signs of piety, implying that peace with nature and the gods produces fertility and wealth.”³ And she cites the example of Varro’s writings on the ownership of private villas and the monetary and symbolic valued placed on the agricultural infrastructure they entailed. The Roman wall paintings, Bergmann argues, offered elevated perspectives across landscapes “in which the sight of family tombs and honored old trees were a reminder of the owner’s genetic ties, privately employed fishermen and shepherds of their self-sufficiency, and shrines and votives of the god’s protection of their proud possessions. Horace said that the happy man spent his days surveying his grazing herd and pruning his trees.”⁴ Roman pastoralism included many elements but key among them were the systems which brought wealth, civic pride, and recreation: the pastoral landscape of sheep and cows, fields and vineyards, and fishponds and aviaries.

Medieval Infrastructure

In her section on “Cloistering the Spectator: The Middle Ages,” Crandell argues that the medieval landscape was more a place of fear and hard labor than a pastoral idyll. While the pastoral with its harmonious balance of work and rest, nature and civilization, was not classically represented in medieval paintings and illustrated manuscripts, one need look no further than the celebrated Tres Riches Heures painted for the Duke of Berry in c. 1412 to see that agriculture and the landscape played very important roles in providing wealth, pride and even recreation in the fifteenth century. The “Labors of the Months” illustrate not only the duke’s numerous chateaux but also his valuable woods used for timber and heat, his fields for plowing and pastures for grazing, the thrill of the hunt for venison, and serfs for laboring in the farmlands. If we understand infrastructure to mean a series of systems that power society, then the “Labors of the Month” most clearly illustrate an agricultural infrastructure that was vital to a prosperous existence. While Crandell is right to argue that there was not a medieval focus on the landscape for its aesthetic properties or as a pastoral idyll, I would argue that artists such as the Limbourg brothers and others contributing to similar books of hours, were keenly aware of and celebrated the agricultural landscape—both as a symbol of their patrons’ wealth and prestige but also as a record of a landscape that sustained the community. Similarly, as we see in the months of April, May, and August, the landscape was a place of romantic love (in May), and of recreation in April and August. Leisure, wealth, pride, and sustenance are thus all associated with these agricultural infrastructural systems.

The medieval monastery was another site of productive synergies. Monasteries were often rural and self-sufficient and were planned to include orchards, fields, pastures, and vineyards. In some cases, complex infrastructural systems originating in the monastery yielded dramatic benefits for both the clergy and layman. Mickey Abel explores the waterworks and infrastructure of Maillezais Abbey in western France in her essay, “Water as the Philosophical and Organizational Basis for an ‘Urban’ community plan: The Case for Maillezais Abbey.” While her general thesis asserts that the complex infrastructure of water systems which re-claimed land from the sea and marshes and provided transportation of goods helped to create an urban center around the Abbey, her discussion of the sophisticated system of canals, levees, dams, and aqueducts posits that this “was the circulatory system that linked the interdependent components and supported the corporate body’s well-being.”⁵ Her research maps the rich and varied system of mills, rivers, canals, and levees that drained the land for agriculture while creating a transportation system. She concludes that “the monastic complex, working as a corporate enterprise with interests in agriculture, commerce, real estate, manufacturing, and construction, not to mention the service industries and transportation, all looked to the strong supporting infrastructure in order to prosper and grow stronger over the centuries.”⁶ In this case, the engineering success of fighting and organizing the sea and rivers made possible not only conurbations but also the agriculture and economic vitality that supported the community. Maillezais Abbey was widely recognized for its water-infrastructure and its enabling qualities. It can be argued that the monks of Maillezais, via their engineering might, created a pastoral middle ground as productive as Virgil described in The Georgics. While lacking classical allusions, the landscape surrounding the Abbey reflects the conflict between the monks who settled there and the watery power of the sea and rivers. By battling both, the monks created a productive middle ground—systems of water and land that brought prosperity to the area.

These early examples, from Ancient Rome and Medieval France serve to illustrate key elements of infrastructure and the landscape that we shall trace throughout this book. Beginning in the seventeenth century, artists began to look at specific landscapes for inspiration and landscape painting was born. Within these landscapes, the productive systems that powered society were included and celebrated. Claude Lorrain is touted as perhaps the greatest landscape painter in the Western tradition. He was a prolific painter who captured the romance and poetry of the Roman campagna with its ruins, lakes and rivers, and harbors and shepherds. Bathed in a soft golden light, these images did not depict specific sites but rather captured the essence of ancient Italy. His work was wildly popular, especially in Britain, and his influence on the design of landscapes there has been well documented. He included mythological and biblical characters set amid classical ruins or sparkling harbors. At times he painted simple pastoral landscapes with no specific literary narrative. The Claudian landscape was carefully arranged with trees framing a view into a distant landscape. Water, either the sea or river, snakes around a middle ground, leading the eye deep into the picture plane where mountains or rocky crags are suffused with a hazy light. Claude’s pictures were a pastoral refuge from culture, set within a tamed and peaceful middle ground. Nature was not angry or threatening but provided a peaceful respite from the cares of the day. While Claude Lorrain’s influence on the designed landscape stretches well into the twentieth century, his works and those of his followers are not featured here in the same detail as the Dutch landscape painters such as Jacob Ruisdael. This is because, while Claude has undoubtedly influenced the way we...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Infrastructure, Landscape, and the Pastoral Paradigm: A Tale of Two Projects
• 1 Landscape Painting and the Productive Pastoral Tradition
• 2 The Eighteenth-Century English Landscape: The Classic Pastoral and Its Productivity
• 3 The Industrial Revolution and Its Intrusion on the Landscape
• 4 A Growing Divide: Landscape and Infrastructure in Victorian Britain
• 5 Progress and Nature in the American Landscape
• 6 Infrastructure and Landscape in Early-Twentieth-Century England and America
• 7 Questioning the Infrastructure Paradigm in the Late Twentieth Century
• 8 Twenty-First-Century Power Generation: An Invitation to the Public
• 9 Clean Water and Recreation: New Approaches to Water Treatment Plants
• 10 Food, Community, and the Productive Landscape
• Conclusion: Reimagining the Pastoral Paradigm for the Twenty-First Century
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page