The Roman Idea of Landscape

Catalog description

Landscape was one of the most prominent themes in ancient Roman culture. The Roman visual and literary representations of natural scenery were adopted and expanded upon many Hellenistic themes. In the Roman period, however, for the first time in Western culture landscape was singled out as a theme in its own right; it was accurately described, its qualities were praised in the pastoral poetry of Virgil, and its idealized and symbolic representations permeated the public and private spheres: the garden paintings from the underground dining room of the Villa of the Livia at Prima Porta and the Odyssey Landscapes from the Esquiline are but two of many examples. This Roman sensitivity of landscape, attested in contemporary literary and visual sources, found an architectural expression in Roman luxury villas. In the realm of villa designs, gardens and landscapes could be represented in wall painting and realized in design at the same time. The villas provided literally a drawing board for Roman lovers of landscape. Late Republican and early Imperial poems, letters, and agricultural treatises read like exposés of architectural design exercises, vis-à-vis natural, cultivated and designed landscape, and how they delineated blueprints of villas – villa rustica, urbana, suburbana and the like. This course will examine literary and visual representations of natural scenery in the Greek and Roman cultures as well as Roman luxury villa architecture in order to address the ways in which Greek and Roman ideas and idealization of landscape contributed to the creation of a novel language of architecture and landscape architecture. Open to graduate and undergraduate students.