"Discovering in wide lantskip": "Paradise Lost" and the tradition of landscape description in the seventeenth century

• Autores: Douglas Chambers
• Localización: Studies in the history of gardens and designed landscape, ISSN 1460-1176, Vol. 5, Nº 1, 1985, págs. 15-31
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Near the beginning of Book V of Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve, waking together after their first night in Eden, go forth "from under shadie arborous roof" and see the sun "discovering in wide Lantskip all the East" (Il. 137, 142).The preservation of the spelling "lantskip" in some modern editions is not a gratuitous piece of antiquarianism but a reminder that, for Milton and his readers, landscape was primarily concerned with art. In the Oxford English Dictionary, the first meaning recorded for the word "landscape" is "a picture representing natural inland scenery asdistinguished from a seapicture, a portrait, etc." This is the meaning that prevailed in England for most of the seventeenth century and that Milton would have expected his readers to bring to the word. Its first use in what we now take to be its common meaning- "a view or prospect ofnatural inland scenery such as can be taken at a glance from one point of view" -is attributed to Pope in his 1725 translation of The Odyssey.