Modern and Landscape: possible contacts

Abstract

Nature and Landscape hold different meanings throughout the ages. What was Nature for the period of Antiquity differs substantially from the Nature of Christians, the fruit of divine will, or from Nature which objectifies itself from Descartes, at the birth of the subject who thinks, therefore exists. This process, which marks the Philosophy called Modern, begins in the seventeenth century, reaching full development in the late nineteenth century, when nature, object of domination and exploitation, will be made resource; in technical-scientific scenario, it will have lost almost all their aura. The remaining gap resists in different ways, being events such as Romanticism, or part of the environmentalist movement, witnesses of this resistance. For participating in different fields of knowledge, Landscape is a polysemic definition term: literati, biologists, ecologists, geographers, architects and urbanists shall have different ways to crop and define Landscape. For the purposes intended here, we distinguish a strategic profile: that of being something that relates to the sum of the times that conforms places, which implies a historical-cultural construction, and a way to realize this relationship.