AAMW529 - Eco-Critical Approaches To Roman Ideas of Landscape

Topic varies from semester to semester. For the Fall 2021 semester, the topic will be: Eco-critical Approaches to Roman Ideas of Landscape. In the Roman period, landscape was singled out as a theme for the first time in Greco-Roman visual culture. Writers described it accurately in texts and treatises, its qualities were praised and sought out in everyday life, and images of the natural world permeated the public and private spheres. This attention to landscape found an architectural expression in Roman luxury villas. It is primarily in the luxurious country-house residences that ideas about landscape were fully explored and shaped. In designing for luxury, Romans engaged in a sophisticated interplay of architecture and landscape - an interplay that Renaissance architects discovered and reinvented, and which persists to this day. This course will analyze the architectural design and wall-painting decoration of Roman villas, the cultivated landscapes around them, and their literary representations in order to address the ways in which ideas about and the idealization of landscape contributed to the creation of a novel language of architecture and landscape architecture. And while Roman luxury villa architecture and decoration showcase sophisticated ideas about landscape, they silenced and beautified the dependence of their surrounding cultivated landscapes and agricultural estates on enslaved labor. Moving beyond post-Renaissance ideas of landscape and canonical considerations of Roman wall-painting, the course will adopt an eco-critical lens to shed light on the ideas and idealization of landscape that were shaped in this period. It will draw on a diverse body of evidence (archaeological, art historical, and literary) in order to prioritize perceptions of ecology, environment and human-nature relationships and uncover a broader relationship between architecture, landscape architecture and design.