Courts and societies across early modern Eurasia were fundamentally transformed by the physical, technological and conceptual developments of their era. Evolving forms of communication, greatly expanded mobility, the spread of scientific knowledge and the emergence of an increasingly integrated global economy all affected the means by which states articulated and projected visions of authority.Footnote1 Landscape both reflected and served as a vehicle for these transformations, as the relationship between space and its imagination, construction and consumption became a fruitful site for the negotiation of individual and corporate identities within and beyond the precincts of the court.
Through the juxtaposition of imperial landscapes across Eurasia between the early seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries, this issue offers a comparative perspective on landscape and the articulation of authority in the early modern world. Previous attempts at comparative histories of landscape have generally been predicated on the notion of incommensurability, such that different contexts are discussed in order to demonstrate the simultaneous equivalence and essential distinctiveness of one in the face of the other.Footnote2 While this approach has represented an important step in articulating a less Eurocentric history of landscape,Footnote3 it may lead us to miss meaningful parallels and connections within and across cultures, especially in the context of the rapidly globalizing early modern and modern worlds. This issue seeks to draw attention to such parallels by considering the increasingly sophisticated ways of thinking about place and representation that characterize landscape in this period: the development or adoption of scientific cartography; the use of novel understandings of pictoriality and pictorial media in the socialization or politicization of space; and the interplay across media and time through increasingly complex networks of visual, textual, mnemonic, and experiential references.Footnote4
These shifts in the conception of landscape and its communicative capacity incorporated not only contemporary inputs, but also what might be described as ‘late imperial’ formations: the established rhetoric of imperial ideology as it had evolved over centuries of iteration and reiteration. By bridging loosely, often problematically defined periods — not only the late imperial and the early modern, but also the early modern and the modern — this issue explores ways in which aspects of each overlap with the other, creating tensions of temporal ebb and flow.
Early modern rulers drew upon these tensions to define and extend the spaces of their gardens and territories. At Versailles and Compiègne, Louis XIV and Louis XV expanded established understandings of axial design by reiterating the centrality of the ruler’s body within pictorial landscapes. As Robert Wellington shows, Israël Silvestre employed the conceit of locating the Louis XIV at the focal point of his pictorial records of the king’s fêtes, in line with the vanishing point and its metaphoric connotations. In J. B. Oudry’s tapestries of the royal hunt, by contrast, Louis XV’s position at an axial node is evident not from the images themselves but, as Julie Anne Plax explains, through their reference to the physical landscape, to the history of its design, and to its articulation, highlighted in gold-colored paint, in a series of maps.
Such relationships between physical and pictorial iterations of the landscape, which drew upon the viewer-cum-visitor’s knowledge or imagination of the site and of pictorial conventions to fully realize the ruler’s vision, created composite landscapes that came fully into existence only in the triangulated space of site, image, and imagination. These composites emerged not only from horizontal networks of contemporaneous images and ideas, but from vertical links through history and memory, as well. At Compiègne, Louis XV drew upon the history of French royal occupation to create a form of ideological authority rooted in succession to the mantle of earlier eras. When read in concert with the contemporary notions of axiality seen in Oudry’s and Silvestre’s images, such historicized narratives suggest the positioning of the king at a different sort of focal point — the culmination of time.
Historical links, whether real or imagined, were not always evoked in service of a teleology, however. Early modern landscapes frequently drew upon literary pasts for narratives defining their design or interpretation. At Stourhead, the Romantic ideals of the place are traced by the garden’s paths, which have been said to follow the journey of the AeneidFootnote5; in the courts and ateliers of early modern India, depictions of Hindu gods, epic tales, and emperors were all often set in gardens, allowing landscapes to express overlapping aspects of deity, myth, and king. As Nicholas Fiévé demonstrates, for the imperial princes Hachijō no miya Toshihito and his son, Toshitada, the spatial and literary construction of Katsura recalled ancient mythologies and idealized histories. Through architectural and poetic reference, their suburban garden-palace represented not so much a drawing forward of the past into the present as an imaginative projection of the present into the past.
As at Compiègne, the axes along which early modern landscapes were defined and those through which their meaning emerged were often closely intertwined. Early modern technologies transcended their places of origin to be received and redefined in new cultural contexts; new forms of knowledge did not displace established ways of knowing, but rather were integrated with them.Footnote6 This was the case for the emergent sense of national territory in Korea that Nianshen Song describes. Part of a cultural and political context — the ‘sinosphere’ — in which both space and polity had long been defined through a state’s physical and tributary relationship with China, debates over territorial demarcation in late Chosŏn geography reveal the tensions that existed between established discourses of place and an increasingly precise capacity to cartographically locate topographical features in the early modern period.
Tensions such as these are one way of understanding the overlapping chronologies expressed by the notion of ‘late imperial landscapes in the early modern world’.Footnote7 Although habits of periodization imply fixed temporal boundaries, these borders are in reality porous, particularly when considered from social and cultural perspectives. Modes of being overlap, one receding as another arises: this is the crux, for Foucault, of Don Quixote’s world, in which earlier forms of knowledge persist in the emergent ‘Classical’ era.Footnote8 In the late Chosŏn court, the simultaneous engagement of geomancy, rhetorics of tributary relations, ‘evidentiary scholarship’, and increasingly accurate forms of surveying and cartography suggest a similar moment at a border in world historical time.
Marked by the continued presence of established formations mediated through new means and by way of new contexts, this overlapping of eras is equally present in the waning days of the great early modern empires. As Jennifer Keating shows, the Russian state’s efforts to ‘greenify’ its territories in Turkestan were not simply a matter of making an apparently barren landscape into a productive one; through images, memories, and above all, the associations of plants, the landscape was transformed into one that evoked a pastoral homeland for would-be settlers. This reiteration of home may constitute a final chapter in the late imperial formation of landscape, especially when viewed in comparison with other, slightly later imperial peripheries. For instance, after decades of importing plants from Europe, in the 1920s and 1930s, Australia began to incorporate native plants into familiar garden plans as a way of asserting a new, more independent national identity.Footnote9 Taken together, these two examples suggest a shift in orientation — expressed through foliage — from landscapes of an earlier era towards ones of the present and future.
Presented comparatively, the essays in this issue explore key themes and ideas that may be identified in many early modern imperial landscapes, including the intersections of novel and established notions of time, place, technology, and experience. As such, they suggest a ‘synchronization’ of forms and practices across early modern Eurasia that invites further inquiry.Footnote10 One important path for such research, which is at least implicit here, is that of transcultural interchange — a global, ‘connected’ history of early modern landscape.Footnote11 Ultimately, these two approaches — the temporal and the transcultural — may be seen as complementary, intersecting interpretive axes offering broader perspectives on the conception and articulation of spatial authority across the early modern world.
Acknowledgments
This project began as a panel, ‘Early modern imperial landscapes in comparative perspective’, held at the 2014 College Art Association Annual Meeting; I would like to express my appreciation to those participants whose papers first gave it life: Kelly D. Cook, Mohammad Gharipour, S. N. Johnson-Roehr, Julie Anne Plax and Anton Schweizer. Early work on this project was supported by the A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. For definitions of global early modern states, see, e.g., John F. Richards, ‘Early Modern India and World History’, Journal of World History VIII/2, 1997, pp. 197–209; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘Connected Histories: Notes Towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia’, Modern Asian Studies, XXXI/3, 1997, pp. 735–762; and Victor Lieberman, (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories: Re-imagining Eurasia to c. 1830 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
2. For instance, Michel Conan, ‘The New Horizons of Baroque Garden Cultures’, in Conan (ed.), Baroque Garden Cultures: Emulation, Sublimation, Subversion (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2005), p. 26; and Michel Conan and Chen Wangheng, ‘Introduction’, in Conan and Chen (eds.), Gardens, City Life, and Culture: A World Tour (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2008), p. 5.
3. Similarly, Mary Elizabeth Berry describes Victor Lieberman’s interests in Beyond Binary Histories as essentially ‘comparison for comparison’s sake’, which she nonetheless sees as ‘no mean thing’; Berry, ‘Was Early Modern Japan Culturally Integrated?’, in Lieberman (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories, p. 113.
4. For examples of arguments influential here, see, Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983); Mary Elizabeth Berry, Japan in Print: Information and Nation in the Early Modern Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation in Chinese Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
5. Cf. Malcom Kelsall, ‘The Iconography of Stourhead’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XLVI, 1983, pp. 133–143.
6. For examples in the early Qing court, see Catherine Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority during the Kangxi Reign (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Richard E. Strassberg and Stephen H. Whiteman, Thirty-Six Views: The Kangxi Emperor’s Mountain Estate in Poetry and Prints (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2016), pp. 73–119.
7. This construction is inspired particularly by a recent conference at Johns Hopkins University; see Tobie Meyer-Fong, ‘Conference Note: Early Modern China in the Late Imperial World,’ Late Imperial China, XXXVI/2, 2015, pp. 126–129.
8. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), esp. pp. 51–64.
9. Katie Holmes, ‘Growing Australian Landscapes: The Use and Meanings of Native Plants in Gardens in Twentieth-century Australia’, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, XXXI/2, 2011, pp. 121–130.
10. Victor Lieberman, ‘Introduction’, in Lieberman (ed.), Beyond Binary Histories, p. 7.
11. The subject of a second volume emerging from this project, Rhetorics of Landscape: Articulating Authority across the Early Modern World (forthcoming).