| "In
this book, which is great fun to read, Mark Roskill provides an up-to-date
revision of what was achieved a generation ago by Lord Kenneth Clark's Landscape Into Art, a systematic history of landscape painting.
Far-ranging in its theorizing, deploying marvelously inventive examples,
his visually sensitive book synthesizes the concerns of the new art
history, transfigured in challenging ways by a strong-minded senior
scholar."-David Carrier, Carnegie Mellon University
In The Languages of Landscape, Mark Roskill employs a new
approach to understanding Western landscape art, from antiquity
to the present, by linking the concerns of its creators to the ways
in which such art was viewed in successive periods or contexts.
Roskill uses new methodologies deriving from sociology, anthropology,
the study of rhetorical theory, and especially a version of visual
semiotics for this analysis.
The discussion covers artists not usually associated with landscape,
such as Goya and Géricault, as well as major figures such
as Bruegel and Dürer. Roskill ranges over topics of current
interest such as the gendering of art; art in the service of colonialism;
popularized uses of landscape; and the imagery of war-scarred countryside.
He addresses issues of intertextuality; audience awareness; response
to social and industrial developments; the tropologies of rhetoric
as they apply to visual imagery; and the problematic status of landscape
art in this century.
Thematically organized within a loosely chronological framework, The Languages of Landscape combines detailed analysis of
specific examples with supporting material, related texts of the
time, and a larger theoretical exposition. At the same time it serves
as a reference work on basic topics such as the rise of independent
landscape and the picturesque and the sublime. Eighty illustrations,
including twelve in color, accompany the text, and an appended glossary
of technical and linguistic terms is provided. |
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| Mark
Roskill is Professor of the History of Modern Art at the University
of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author of, most recently, Klee,
Kandinsky, and the Thought of Their Time: A Critical Perspective (Illinois, 1992), The Interpretation of Pictures (Massachusetts,
1989), and What Is Art History? (Harper & Row, 1976; rev.
ed. Massachusetts, 1989). |
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