On the conceptual analysis of gardens

Abstract

Garden history, unlike the history of painting, sculpture, and architecture, has no conceptual foundations. It lacks the elements of scholarly and critical consensus: a conventional set of interpretive methods, agreed-upon leading terms, ‘ruling metaphors,’ and descriptive protocols. Painting, for example, has a recurring set of critical problems, including fictive space, the picture plane, the position and nature of the beholder, and notions of realism and representation. In art history, even the most abstract theoretical accounts of painting dwell on these same topics. The more specialized organs of art history, such as iconology, semiology, formal analysis, and psychoanalytic criticism, all return to these issues as if to a kind of home.