Abstract The is an organic and intricate field of intellectual knowledge immersed in continuous dynamics of mutations, progressively accruing interdisciplinary complexity, marked by fertile idiosyncrasies and subjectivities. Similar phenomena accompany the myriad of the garden’s formal manifestations spanning from functional modesty, artistic exuberance, and illusory fantasy. Since the establishment of the earliest forms of civilisation, the garden responds to the human urge to appropriate nature and the world he inhabits as well as translates the human’s conception of nature, of the world, and of himself. The garden’s idiosyncrasies and subjectivities arise from the ambiguous hybridisation of nature and culture. As a spatial discrete location, the garden is so assumed as a place of intentional discourse, which conjoins with the garden’s artistry to endorse the garden’s status as an aesthetic object. In such conditions, the garden consists of a semiotic system of representation conveying meaning concerning immateriality of the human condition and, furthermore, opening possibilities for alternative individual approaches endowing extended perspectives of such meaning’s interpretation.

Keywords: garden, nature, culture, representation, meaning.

O jardim é um campo de conhecimento intelectual orgânico e intrincado imerso em contínuas dinâmicas de mutações, progressivamente acumulando complexidade interdisciplinar, marcada férteis idiossincrasias e subjetividades. Fenómenos semelhantes acompanham a miríade de manifestações formais do jardim abrangendo desde modéstia funcional, exuberância artística e fantasia ilusória. Desde o estabelecimento das primeiras formas de civilização, o jardim responde ao impulso humano de apropriação da natureza e do mundo que habita tal como traduz a concepção humana da natureza, do mundo e do homem. As idiossincrasias e subjetividades do jardim surgem da ambígua hibridização da natureza e de cultura. Enquanto localização discreta espacial, o jardim é assumido assim como lugar de discurso intencional, que se conjuga com a condição artística do jardim para secundar o status do jardim enquanto objeto estético. Nessas condições, o jardim consiste num sistema semiótico de representação que transmite significado sobre a imaterialidade da Escarduça 2

condição humana e, ademais, abre possibilidades para abordagens individuais alternativas que proporcionam perspectivas alargadas de interpretação desse significado.

Palavras-chave: jardim, natureza, cultura, representação, significado.

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Acknowledgments

The accomplishment of the internship and this report would not be possible without the invaluable cooperation from Professor Peter Hanenberg, to whom the first and foremost acknowledgment is addressed for the acceptance to supervise the project, for the exemplary professionalism, wise guidance, and constructive criticism, for the infrangible promptitude and inspiring encouragement. This academic journey is decidedly marked by such privileges. A following sincere word is endorsed to Ms. Maria de Carvalho, Head Coordinator for Parques de Sintra Cultural Planning Office, for the energetic enthusiasm for the project, for the unquestionable acceptance of the main course of action, for the vigilant advises and remarks when necessary to conform with contextual circumstances, and for the memorable welcoming hospitality. To Mané, Lorena Travassos, António António Castanheira and the remaining artists which applied to the open-call, without whom the exhibition decidedly would have not succeeded, and for their dedication, enthusiasm and, more importantly, for the artistic standard with which their participation imbued the project. To the open-call’s jurors, Professor Isabel Capeloa Gil, Marc Lenot and Sérgio B. Gomes, first and foremost for the prestigious elevation with which have credited the project, and for their availability to accommodate the jury's activities within their professional quotidian. To Sintra City Hall, most prominently to Ms. Maria João Figueiredo, director of Museu Municipal de Sintra, for the validated insertion of the project in the Museum’s program, for the warmth hosting, and for the operational support during the period of the exhibition. To Professor Paulo Campos Pinto, for the careful efforts to implement the internship at Parques de Sintra and the thoughtful interest in accompanying its development. To Prof. Ana Abrantes, who temporally monitored the project’s evolution, for the relevant comments and assistance, and for the instilled stimulus. To Andreia Draque, Susana Quaresma and Ana Esteves, for their fundamental collaboration and assistance, and remaining Parques de Sintra members who, one way or another, collaborated with the project’s implementations.

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Table of Contents

Introduction______6 Part I – An Analysis of the Garden______9 Chapter 1 – Towards an Ontology of the Garden______9 Section 1.1 – The Garden’s Ontological Essence and Its Impossibility______9 Section 1.2 – A Framework for a Culture Analysis Direction______15 Section 1.3 – The Accent on the Garden as an Object of Representation______28 Chapter 2 – The Garden as the Representation of the Relationship with Nature_____32 Section 2.1 – The Human Action, First Nature and Second Nature______32 Section 2.2 – The Human Artistry and Third Nature______34 Section 2.3 – The Inexistence of First Nature and the Questioning of Nature______44 Chapter 3 – The Garden as the Representation of Nature______48 Section 3.1 – Universal Nature and the Philosopher’s Garden______48 Section 3.2 – Divine Nature and the Monastery Garden______50 Section 3.3 – The Nature of Human Reason and Renaissance’s Garden______54 Section 3.4 – Enlightened Nature and the Cartesian Garden______58 Section 3.5 – Unadorned Nature and Romantic Gardens______60 Chapter 4 – Additional Representations of Culture______69 Section 4.1 – Domestic and the Organisation of Social Classes______69 Section 4.2 – The Garden and the Organisation of Government Institutions______72 Section 4.3 – The Influence of Military Circumstances in the Garden______76 Section 4.4 – The Garden as a Representation of Utopia______78 Part II – The Exhibition’s Artistic Conception______84 Chapter 1 – The Culture Analysis Enabled by the Garden______84 Section 1.1 – The Meaning of The Garden______84 Section 1.2 – The Garden’s Utopic Idiosyncrasies ______86 Chapter 2 – A Brief Inquiry on Photography of the Garden as Art______89 Section 2.1 – The Hypothetic Problematics of Photography of the Garden as Art__89 Section 2.2 – From Imitation and Reproduction to Representation, From Representation to Signification______90 Chapter 3 – The Exhibition______95 Escarduça 5

Conclusion______97 Bibliography______99 Final Notes______106 Annex A______134 Annex B______147 Annex C______150 Annex D______174 Annex E______182 Annex F______191

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Introduction

Appearing in such opposite circumstances and contexts spanning from western contemporaneity local communities’ dynamics to a mere fenced area next to the entrance of a Neolithic cave in the Middle East and, emerging from the midst of the multifaceted phenomena enmeshed in such constantly altering dynamics, prominently substantiating a collection of emblematic forms, the garden is one of the most extraordinary and ancestral territorial manifestations of the human existence. The garden is simultaneously and mutually both the means by which the human copes with the urge to assign a human dimension to otherwise “unhuman” surroundings inasmuch as a reflection of the human’s self-conception. Decidedly, the garden comes into being in its various appearances in time and space by cause of human deliberate agency as compelled by the human mind, to the various services of the human mind, body, and spirit. Equivalently unsurpassable is the garden’s discursive condition, for the garden embodies a meaning uttered by an author who claims acknowledgment from an interlocutor. In other words, the history of the garden both writes and tells the history of human culture. The understanding of the factors animating such human agencies commands the delving in a complex web of mutually affecting relationships involving a multidisciplinary ampleness of knowledge areas, a non-reductionist and integrative web further complexified by the garden’s hybrid inherent character as a combination of artifice and nature. Thus, independently of the spatial discreteness of its formal appearances, the understanding of the garden mandatorily convokes the simultaneous understanding of the human culture organisation in which it is inserted and manifests, since the garden is the expression and performance of such culture, and further requires the understanding of the means by which both garden and context relate and affect, that which is attained by means of the analytical unwinding of such complex and multidisciplinary web of mutual relationships. The preceding observations resume the theoretical framework anchoring the internship at Parques de Sintra Cultural Planning Office completing the Culture Studies Master’s attendance. The internship consists of the conceptual contextualisation and production management of a photography exhibition which, in turn, is preceded by a correspondent open-call for artistic proposals’ submission. The pivotal initial guidance transmitted by Parques de Sintra, whose synthetic nature is merely apparent, unsurpassable Escarduça 7

marks the exhibition’s conceptual contextualisation: the photography exhibition is to specifically observe a contemporary perspective of Parques de Sintra’s historical parks, gardens, and groves. Yet, the exhibition’s concept is envisioned to venture beyond the artistic corollary of such theoretical investigation, particularly referenced to Parques de Sintra’s gardens, parks, and groves. Instead, the exhibition’s concept resorts to the richness and density of such an analysis of the garden traversing the history of human culture as the outset instrument for artistic production and mediation. Such analysis is to be displaced to contemporaneity by means of the artistic work, contributing with critical problematisations of such original analysis when referenced to contemporaneity, ambitioning the enlargement of its contemporaneity’s understanding, when dissociated from Parques de Sintra’s gardens and from the correspondent historical culture contexts from which they reach present days. Such goals are so established aiming for the exhibition’s compliance with the field of Culture Studies, according to which the exhibition’s relevance, posited as a constituent part contextualised within the body of the society being contested, depends, demands and is determined by a relational and integrated questioning and understanding of the complex and multidisciplinary entirety of the social formation in which the object is contextualised, so that it may expectedly intervene and contribute to such society’s cultural and intellectual progress (cf. Grossberg, 2010). Traversing the historiography of the garden’s most emblematic appearances, differently categorised according to style and type, this report’s Part I maps the culture analysis effected of their correspondent spatial and temporal context; an investigation evidently grounded on a theoretical facet by cause of the spatial and temporal dispersity of the garden appearances investigated, resorting to the fields of culture theory, semiotics, metaphysics, aesthetics, history, garden studies, in some occasions punctuated by literature. Part II addresses the evolutive process culminating in the formulation of the exhibition’s concept. Evidencing the garden’s predominant faculty for meaning representation, the antecedent investigation endows the qualitative interpretation of human cultures’ values and meanings animating the phenomenon of the garden and discoursed by the garden, which is considered the conceptual raw matter for the artistic production. Utopia Studies pinpoint a specific faculty of the garden, that related to the concept of heterotopia, whose inherent notion of displacement is then adapted to other aspects to converge in the artistic approach Escarduça 8

which is to conceptually orient the artists’ production while preserving their artistic individual authority and creativity. Considering that Parques de Sintra’s central directive determines photography as the artistic practice to be adopted, some considerations concerning the status of photography as art are advanced. Such research is manifestly limited, since a theoretical investigation approaching the theory of art and photography studies would be involved, unattainable within the ambit of this project. Nevertheless, albeit limited, such considerations reveal as of significant importance for the exhibition’s concept formulation, once more related to the notion of displacement to some extent. Concluding this introduction, it is to exalt that, considering the option for the Management of the Arts and Culture specialisation within the Master Program, the internship and its proceeding report presently submitted consist of the most privileged opportunity to conjoin the theoretical research in the general fields of Human Sciences and the Arts and a factual experience inserted in a professional atmosphere dedicated to the promotion of Culture and the Arts.

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Part I – An Analysis of the Garden

Chapter 1 – Towards an Ontology of the Garden

Section 1.1 – The Garden’s Ontological Essence and Its Impossibility This analysis of the garden commences by an assessment of its ontological essence, i.e. the attempt to isolate a cluster of definite and intelligible attributes capturing the garden as an invariant universal concept regardless of the spatio-temporal multiplicity of its physical appearances1. As a theoretical research study, the enumeration of such attributes consists of Annex A. Stressing that the enumerated garden’s essential attributes denote either a more inquisitive and philosophical dimension or a more pragmatic and objective character, the attempted attainment of the garden’s invariant and universal essence immediately self- exposes as inescapably infirm of two deficiencies, since a definition’s formulation itself implicates the election of a method whose intrinsic merits and faults influence the outcome. On one hand, the vast variety of the garden’s particular appearances, rendered both by the variety of styles and the multitude of types effected by the historiography of the garden traversing time and space, and the intrinsic vague and paradoxical character permeating not a negligible quota of the garden’s attributes, cumulatively attest the entirety of the enounced essential attributes not to be incrusted in each and all of the garden’s particular appearances, thus sentencing the invariance and universality of the attempted essentialist definition to inconsistency. Types of gardens prioritising utilitas to a preponderant objective, if not unique, elucidate such inconsistency. The historical metamorphosis of the small domestic vegetable and herb garden type’s formal appearances substantiates such assertion of inconsistency2, since it is questionable that such varied appearances are designed observing artistic and

1 Both the term and the concept of essence are hereby adopted with no disregard for their historical mutable development within philosophical systems, as signalled by Marcuse in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (cf. Marcuse, 1968). Yet, such critical and distinguishing scrutiny is considered to exceed this report’s ambit, as is also a more exhaustive formulation of the concept of essence than the one summarily suggested, which is considered to serve the purposes intended within this report’s ambit. 2 Regardless of the utilitarian service rendered either to the body, as a a space fostering either physical activity by means of the garden’s actual cultivation or the supplying of food or medicinal provisions, to the mind, by means of the experimental development of biological and botanical scientific knowledge, or to the spirit, as a place granting impressions of pleasure, peacefulness and time-stillness enablers of contemplation and reflection. Escarduça 10

aesthetic criteria granting the status of a work of art according to either embryonic or matured aesthetic theories, implicitly or explicitly represent their individual creator’s intention or their correspondent historic-cultural context or involve relevant historical references. Indeed, archaeology discloses eighth century BC West Asia small houses densely adjoined, implanted in relation to small internal yards supposedly containing and animals, and third millennia BC Ancient Egyptian small domestic gardens as outdoor enclosed rooms appropriate for domestic cooking, eating, animals’ keeping, craftsmen’s working, and also for leisure in the case of wealthy families, whose residencies comprise several courts and yards where pools and ponds serve for recreation, ’s irrigation, air cooling through evaporation or fish keeping (cf. Turner, 2005). Thus, while archaeology elucidates such garden appearances’ functionality, other attributes such as an intended design observing art and aesthetics are presumably absent. Additionally, Middle Ages’ poor tenants living in small villages outside castle walls or nearby monasteries observe only the usefulness criteria of vegetables and medicine plants in the cultivation of rectangular portions of assigned land slender enough to be arm-reached without being trampled and delimited by earth banks, , ditches or fences (cf. Turner, 2005). Moreover, Middle Ages’ medieval monasteries compounds include agricultural and herb private gardens performing not a ceremonial function, rather offering a contemplative spiritual space or assuming a body and mind functional character3, since conjointly, on one hand, monastic life regards manual labour, particularly , as devotional and preventive of the soul’s corruption which is effected by idleness, and on the other hand, monastic seclusion requires autonomy from the external worldi (cf. Turner, 2005). Contemporary times provide further examples of private vegetable and herb garden types grounding the assertion of the garden’s inconsistent essentialist definitionii. Additional garden types continue to illustrate such an assertion. The kindergarten, hereby briefly regarded as a space fostering physical activity and the cognitive development of social skills, is however much doubtful to be designed observing artistic and aesthetic criteria granting the status of a work of art, to be erratically incomplete and impermanent since its organic living elements are mostly or entirely scarce or absent, to

3 Referencing Sylvia Landsberg’s Types of Medieval Garden, Turner lists various types of garden occurring within Medieval monasteries’ walls, namely the cemetery , the infirmary garden, serving medicinal plants’ cultivation, the cellarer’s garden, observing the growing of vegetables, culinary herbs and other utilitarian plants, the herbalist, a small enclosed garden composed of a and herbaceous plants, the , the , destined to grow food and medicinal plants, and the obedientiary gardens, the monastery’s prior and office holders’ private gardens (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 11

encase its individual creator’s or its correspondent historic-cultural context’s implicit or explicit values and meanings, to comprehend cultural intentional discourse, or to involve relevant historical references. Further examples instancing for the inconsistency of the invariance and universality of the garden’s advanced essentialist definition are considered as unobservant of this report’s scope and aim, inasmuch as those formerly mentioned are regarded as illustrative of such inconsistency. On the other hand, noticing the garden’s historical competence to stand as the induction object instilling conceptual reflections and discussions addressing a manifold of topics which far transcend the garden’s specificities, the garden’s essence is to be credited with numerous additional attributes far supplanting those enumerated in Annex A, so demonstrating the presented record’s incompleteness4. To illustrate such varied topics, a summary of reflections and conceptions prompted by the garden is following addressed. The reenactment of the familiar and traditional myth of the Garden of Eden as a metaphoric abstract evocation of a technology dispossessed human existence in an isolated, protected and stable natural world in its purest form consists of the departing point for a cultural critical inquiry to the present human abandonment of nature’s purest form towards the densely textured contemporary enmeshment of technology in the human ecosystem – the technosystem5. Instilled by various prominent literary works of prose and poetry in which the garden figures as a scenario for characters and events to evolve which, in turn, are regarded and interpreted as revelatory emblems, Harrison renders a diversified body of reflections intimate to the timeless crux of the human condition. Firstly, the myth of the

4 A resembling notion of the garden’s faculty of representation may be suggested by Harrison’s words. Harrison stresses that son jardin à soi is formalized by the entirety of his reflections inspired and instilled by his thesis that “gardens are “figures” for many cultural activities that are not literally connected to gardening or garden making”, since gardens’ appearances, drawing attention to themselves, “present themselves as freely given, and as fully given, yet never exhausting their potential for self-manifestation in the punctual moment of presence”, are in turn affected by time’s diurnal or seasonal unfolding and themselves alter time’s rhythms and durations within a mutual and reciprocal relational dimension beyond gardens’ boundaries, “as if the aesthetically determined relations between things in the garden’s precinct had the effect of slowing time down and, in so doing, intensifying or throwing into relief the sheer gift of things to perception” (cf. Harrison, 2008: 51-54). 5 Don Ihde’s reference to the garden in Technology and the Lifeworld, From Garden to Earth is merely introductory and the departing point for a philosophical critique of a technologically saturated contemporary culture; such philosophical inquiry spans a vast range of topics, from the realm of human quotidian decisions, activities and relations to profound cultural, social, political, economic and scientific topics, and invokes several fields of science aiming for the perception and understanding processes of the phenomenon of human- technology relations; however much the garden expedience is merely introductory, Don Ihde’s perspective is nevertheless regarded as illustrative of the garden’s extensive potential versatility for representation, thus regarded as justification for the brief reference within this report’s segment stressing the stated garden attributes record’s incompleteness. Escarduça 12

Garden of Eden is confronted and correlated with a dehumanised existence, and cultivation’s literal sense’s immediacy is dislocated to the human’s spirit virtuous cultivation in a humanised multitude of facets transcending Eden’s context, in which the human spirit is a garden’s soil whose , the human, is vested with the human forces of cultivationiii (Harrison, 2008: 1-37). Secondly, the human spirit’s virtuous cultivation and its association with the garden adopts additional angles when referenced to two specific gardens different from Eden, that of Plato and that of Epicurusiv (Harrison, 2008: 59-82). Thirdly, Boccaccio’s fictional rendering of an Epicurean garden experience yields a twofold teleological and formal analogy between gardens and stories, as such not only echoing the incessant importance of stories in the fabric of human culture and interaction but, more importantly, enhancing the human urgency for temporary relief from reality granted by both stories and gardensv (Harrison, 2008: 83-96). Fourthly, inasmuch as the human spirit is a garden’s soil for the cultivation of virtues, it is also the grounds where opposite vices germinate and flourish and, similarly to virtues, vices’ appearance is represented in gardens such as Versailles or Vaux-le-Vicomte6, whose admirable stylised form nonetheless alleviates not such vices’ infamy (Harrison, 2008: 109-113). Fifthly, a garden may be regarded as a formal extension of a gardener’s past and present accumulated intrinsic state of soul and extrinsic context, since an intimate and reciprocal relation, far transcending mere representativity and ascending to a conciliatory harmonisation between past and present, between world beyond and world within, enmeshes the gardener and the gardenvi (Harrison, 2008: 125-134). Harrison further addresses a range of aspects concerning contemporary cultural phenomena. Opposing their design’s original objectives, the experimentation of gardens as contemporarily observed under specific circumstances inspires a critical reflection on a metamorphosis of the human mode of vision prompted by the contemporary cultural mode of being and the world’s visible plenitude and urgency, paradoxically inducing invisibility and a contemporary lost art of seeingvii (Harrison, 2008: 114-124). Furthermore, privileging motion and dynamism, the Western culture appears as a hostile and impatient earthly abode to the human cultivation of spiritual stasis granted by serenity, contentment and quietude, whether in ancient, medieval, modern or contemporary epochs, in turn, exposing an extended deficient cultivation of the earthly humanised and careful self when destructively assaulted by modern and contemporary human restlessnessviii (Harrison, 2008: 149-162). Such human

6 To which vices of envy, malice, pride and greed may be related (cf. Harrison, 2008). Escarduça 13

congenital dissatisfaction impulses a modern and contemporary re-Edenization of Earth, thus exposing an intrinsic conflicting paradox, since Eden is dread as a void concept of boredom inasmuch as it is yearned as a paradise where human desires are continuously and spontaneously, but fallaciously, gratified; a paradox which is disentangled only through the spiritual fulfilment of care rather than through the gratification of desireix (Harrison, 2008: 163-171). In turn, Gary Shapiro comments on the variety of metaphors included in several of Nietzsche’s writings which, grounded in the garden, translate reflections traversing the fields of religion, literature, and philosophy. Firstly, marriage is regarded as a garden for the cultivation of trees planted in the family garden’s “finest soil”, i.e. for the family’s generation of children, which, in turn, are “green” during their springing while under the family’s gardening shelter while simultaneously maturing over time, and are to be “transplanted” when “matured” in order to “stand-alone” subjected to the tests of life, until later in life becoming the gardener’s companion, hence relating the garden not only to sexual reproduction but also to some sense of the human cycle of life (Shapiro, 2013: 75). Secondly, much as the garden is permanently embedded in an erratic altering process7, the garden is regarded as a project and model for the continuous careful styling of one’s self-character throughout life, hence associating gardening to the growing of thought and the gardener’s mind not as the source of action but as the thought’s soil8, and analogies of taste are traced between garden styles and one’s own nature, either successful or failed (Shapiro, 2013: 78- 80). Thirdly, inasmuch as the garden is regarded as a protected refuge for the continuous careful styling of one’s self-character, thus attesting for Nietzsche’s admiration of Epicurus’ garden philosophy, its status as a work of art offers a promise of happiness, the “garden- happiness”, thus entailing Nietzsche’s discordance with the Kantian disinterested selfless posture implicated in the contemplation of art (Shapiro, 2013: 80). Lastly, the garden, or rather the multiplicity of gardens where their correspondent culture contexts manifest, is regarded as restorative medical geographies to which people refuge, considered an assortment of different spiritual remedies prescribed for the promotion of human happiness according to individuals’ or groups’ varying needs, hence transforming earth in a “great garden” whose resources are to be maximally cultivated and explored serving the flourishing

7 Recalling Annex A’s attribute of uncontrollability. 8 Correspondingly echoed by Harrison’s humanising fall from Eden when correlating the gardener’s care for his garden and the altruistic care entailing the worldly human planting, cultivation and protection of material beings and of human spirit, as mentioned in (iii). Escarduça 14

of the “great tree” of humanity9 (Shapiro, 2013: 81-83). Albeit not specifically alluding to gardens, Rilke’s Primal Sound begets a final comment concerning the garden’s unlimited fertility and versatility. Instigated by the memory of the marks furrowed on a rolling cylinder ridged surface by a phonograph’s needle registering and recording a receipting sound and the sound’s following reproduction, Rilke’s poetic imagination posits which sound would be reproduced by a needle travelling through a human skulls’ marks or, expanding the parallelism, whatever other naturally created surface (cf. Rilke, [1919]). Thus, if considering the garden a “natural” surface, the allure of the harmonious and melodic sound hypothetically corresponding to the texture of a garden’s surface may plausibly be imagined as representing meaning10. To such deficiencies of inconsistency and incompleteness attenuating the garden’s aspired essentialist conception an escape is offered by Wittgenstein’s family of resemblances (cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Ross, 1998). A family of resemblances, in this report’s case the garden’s family of resemblances, entails not invariance and universality of attributes amongst the spatio-temporal multiplicity of the garden’s appearances. Instead, as per Wittgenstein, the garden’s essence is admitted to correspond to the accumulation of all attributes manifesting in each of its particular appearances, regardless of an individual particular appearance ‘s retention or omission before an hitherto instituted globality of attributes, since a particular garden and similar gardens are indeed a garden, not entirely equivalent in the integrity of their essential attributes but preserving a relational specificity; furthermore, accumulation of

9 Such vision of the earth resources’ maximum exploration, admittedly risky as an experimental project destined to last centuries and involving widespread sacrifice aiming a distant general goal, interestingly contrasts the apparent critique of earth’s anthropocenic overpopulation and resources exhaustion; in turn, such critique is opposed both by faith in earth’s potential for self-renewal, however explicitly ungrounded by absent formulation, and by humanity’s refrainment from earth’s haphazard destruction, however unfoundedly trusted to unconfirmed yet necessary conscious and planned evolution implying the need for humanity’s transformation (cf. Shapiro, 2013). From such perspective, and considering the contemporary context, Nietzsche’s notion of a global earth-garden resembles an unattainable utopia. The historical relation between the garden and utopia is subsequently addressed, inasmuch as a critical perspective of contemporary matters inspired and induced by the garden indeed corresponds to this report’s Part II, i.e. to the conceptual frame contextualising Parques de Sintra’s exhibition. 10 Illustrating this query, three distinct garden styles are considered whose surfaces are markedly uneven: Serpentine style gardens and the smoothness and calmness of their undulated landform punctuated by groves of forest trees and organic lakes; style gardens and the rigidity and rationality of their geometrically planned horizontal areas of open , scrupulously shaped shrubs and large avenues; Picturesque style gardens and the rudeness and intricacy of their rocky abrupt hills and cliffs where raucous vegetation of wild shrubs and trees profuse. Annex B comprises air views’ photographic captures from different gardens emblematic of their historical culture correspondent context, so testifying for the surface texture’s differences and considered as somehow illustrative of the suggested parallelism between Rilke’s Primal Sound and the different sounds that could emanate from the garden’s different surface textures. Escarduça 15

attributes contributing to the garden’s essence is to be regarded not as a limited summation but as an unbounded and unconstrained accretion of the garden’s attributes gradually extending accordingly to the succession of particular appearances, insofar as such relational specificity is preservedx (cf. Wittgenstein, 1958). Hence, the garden’s family of resemblances resolves both the garden essence’s infirmities of inconsistency and incompleteness formerly referred. In fact, such faculties of inconsistency and incompleteness correspond to the garden’s ambiguity, subjectivity, intricacy, and idiosyncrasy.

Section 1.2 - A Framework for a Culture Analysis Direction However much this investigation of the garden has commenced by evolving towards an ontology of the garden according to a philosophically oriented inquiry as presented both more systematically in Annex A and more speculatively in the preceding paragraphs, such effort consists not of the garden’s analysis envisioned as the foundational requisite both for the conceptual contextualisation of Parques de Sintra’s exhibition and for this report’s ambit, since emphatically imperative to such requisite is not the inquisitive isolation of the entirety of the garden’s ontological essential attributes per se. Instead, this garden’s introductory investigation, in fact, pursues the foundational framework for a culture analysis direction, that regarded as Parques de Sintra exhibition’s and this project’s pivotal guidance within the frame of Culture Studies. Nevertheless, this preliminary stage retains its relevance, as it yields the eligibility of which of the garden’s essential attributes amongst Annex A’s enumeration – and their organic and reciprocal complex of multidisciplinary correspondences – qualify as pertinent and mandatory to such end. The framework for a culture analysis direction interests a manifold of culture analysis’ theoretical concepts, as follows. Predominantly, it is to stress that a garden, i.e. a deliberately designed territorial “inside” delimited by an enclosing barrier, fosters an outwards movement when stimulating the understanding of that which is external and, thus implicating an “outside”, is inherently referenced to its spatial and temporal culture context (cf. Hunt, 2000). The garden’s “here and now” significant reference to the “there and then” is commonly regarded as inaugurated Escarduça 16

by one of the most legendary and famous gardens: the Hanging Gardens of Babylon11 (cf. Hunt, 2000). In other words, an investigation of the garden observing a culture analysis requires the scrutiny of that which lies both within and beyond the garden’s physical frontier inasmuch as implicates the assessment of the existing relations between such an “inside” and “outside”. Such mutuality implicates an enhanced fundamental quality of one of Annex A’s attributes: the metaphorical porosity of a garden’s delimiting barrier12. The scrutiny and assessment of such relations are presumed to accredit the garden as an object instrumenting a theory of culture. An object13 is accredited as such an instrument when documenting, archiving and communicating the values and meanings embedded in the human activity specific to a referential culture’s epochal general formation accordingly to three defining categories: the social, the documentary and the ideal categoriesxi (cf. Williams, 1992 [1961]). If validated as an object instrumenting a theory of culture, a garden style’s specific appearance, i.e. a formalised inscription in the territory of its correspondent garden style, enables the analysis of the correspondent temporal and spatial cultural organisation within which it manifests, and which it represents, that envisioned as a pivotal requisite within the frame of Culture Studies when considering this report’s ambit as the conceptual contextualisation of Parques de Sintra’s exhibition14. As a demarcated physical territory affected by significant phenomena, a garden style’s specific appearance is posited as a geographical object; with regard to the garden as an object

11 The nomenclature derives from the gardens’ construction model corresponding to supporting masonry arched domes successively implanted along the inclined hills as “stepped terraces covered with greenery” (Hunt, 2000: 76; cf. Turner, 2005). Either in Babylon or in Nineveh, its exact location is a topic for discussion amongst scholars (cf. Turner, 2005). Nevertheless, early accounts are credited to defend that their were created to recall the distant mountains situated to the north of the plains where the ancient city was located, so nourishing recollecting memories of such particular geomorphological phenomenon, while simultaneously inciting curiosity and attention to their own status, construction and design (Hunt: 2000: 76). 12 Independently of its materiality, gradated from the manifested solidness of a compact brick-wall on one extreme to the delusive inexistency of the unnoticed ha-ha! fence on the opposite extreme, a garden’s delimiting barrier inherently encompasses such ideological porosity (cf. Hunt, 2000). 13 i.e. either an art, imaginative or intellectual work inasmuch as institutions, lives and forms of behaviour, either referent to antecedent cultural organisations or to present or former periods of a culture’s specific formation (cf. Williams, 1992 [1961]). 14 When scrutinised, valued and validated according to the documentary category – a culture’s category of major importance, as an object’s communicative power yields evidence of the particular traditions of the whole culture organisation in which it is expressed, including a comparative historical criticism to the body of artistic, intellectual and imaginative works in which it is contextualised –, an object enables an analysis of a particular culture consisting of the quest and discovery of the nature of the general organisation structuring the relationships bewteen correspondent ideal values and meanings as enfolded by the ideal category, the correspondent particular values and meanings as clarified by the social category and the objects and, or activities which record and communicate such organisation’s nature as embodied in the documentary category (cf. Williams, 1998 [1961]). Escarduça 17

of culture as per Williams, such phenomena are assumed as corresponding to such territory’s intentional inscription of cultural discourse15. Such assertion intends to echo Hunt’s recurrent reference to the garden as an activity of place-making16, i.e. a territory where wild nature is cultivated in the sense of its natural status’ alteration by means of the factual action – such as mentioned in Annex A – of a spatially and temporally contextualised society’s individual and collective institutions at the service of geographically organising such contextualised society’s economic, social, political, religious more imperative order17 (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 42-43; cf. Hunt, 2000). From such perspective, a garden style’s specific appearance is envisioned as an elementary form whose noticeable spatial particularity conveying cultural meaning combines with additional both discrete and connecting elementary forms, as such territorially inscribing a complex of culture references which, so apart from nature harmony’s immaculate ideal18, translate the idea held by such society’s individual and, or collective institutions of their relationships with the territory, those existing amongst them, and those occurring with others (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 45, 56-57). In other words, a garden style’s specific appearance is plausibly posited as a constituent parcel of the anthropological place’s conception, that which is asserted as the “concrete and symbolic construction of space, which could not of itself allow for the vicissitudes and contradictions of social life, but which serves as a reference for all those it assigns to a position”, notwithstanding that such Augé’s concept appertains to contemporaneity’s phenomena as opposed to the ensemble of historical garden style’s specific appearances this report alludes toxii (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 51). Augé conceives the anthropological place both culturally, as “a place of identity, of relations and of history”, and geometrically, mapped by the three geometric forms of “the line, intersection of lines, and the point of intersection”, as such constituting the elemental forms of an ampler and interdependently more complexified social spacexiii, that in which a garden style’s specific appearance is hereby presupposed to adhere to if observing the functions and uses (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 52, 56-57). From such

15 i.e. its presumed status as an object instrumenting a theory of culture. 16 That which Hunt compares to Augustin Berque’s concept of milieu when synthetically signalling Berque’s milieu not merely as a matter of environment or territory, rather the “mediation of environment” encompassing the inscription of an individual’s or a society’s cultural complexity in the making and experiencing of such location (Hunt, 2000: 8). 17 Thus prompting that which appears as a “second nature” (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 43). The notion of second nature as a constituent of a conceptual triad of natures is thoroughly adressed in the following chapter, and regarded as of paramount relevance within this report’s ambit and goals. 18 In turn, previously questioned or critically analysed, as per Robert P. Harrison’s observations concerning the myth of Eden. Escarduça 18

perspective, a garden style’s specific appearance, independently of its either most apical or trivial manifestation as per the various garden types and their associated functions and uses as mentioned in Annex A19, is plausibly considered to consist of a crossroad or a centre as referenced in (xiii), as such an elemental form of the anthropological place, i.e. as either of the both types of discrete locations of reunion and their monumental facet. Harrison further illustrates the garden as the location where the idea of shared identity and belongingness germinates and is reinforced, i.e. where it is cultivated, when examining the recent transformation occurred in entire neighbourhoods by the presence of new gardens created by such community’s members efforts, so effectively creating a community where it existed not beforexiv, which

many classics of world literature and philosophy affirm in more figurative terms: a genetic, almost organic connection between gardens and forms of conviviality. In these ancient, medieval, and modern texts, gardens frequently appear as sites of conversation, dialogue, friendship, storytelling—in short, communalization (Harrison, 2008: 45).

The investigation of culture thus encompasses a deciphering analysis of its spatial manifestation if it is to accept that a society’s culture expresses itself “in the most trivial of its usages, in any one of its institutions, and in the total personality of each of its members” (Augé, 1995: 44). When avowed as an object instrumenting a theory of culture and, cumulatively, a work of art as per Annex A, the garden’s status is assumed as an aesthetic object and its experience as pertaining to the aesthetics realm since it is embedded with intentionality20 (cf. Bundgaard, 2009). With regard to the garden’s avowal as an aesthetic object, more specifically stressing its embedded fundamental matter of intentionality, Carlson’s observations regarding the aesthetic appreciation of nature conveniently assist the argument: when initially outlining his defense of the aesthetic experience of nature, Carlson’s commences by accenting the customary habit of envisioning the work of art as that competent for an aesthetic experience since it is both created by the human and the human knows how to appreciate it, such as a painting or a piano concert, only to ground his

19 Specifically, social intercourse, artistic indulgence, intellectual gratification, personal well-being, economic and subsistence practical needs, spiritual contentment, authority’s or military ceremonials, public educational or political debate. 20 Besides aesthetics related aspects of beauty, emotion, taste, genius or originality, hereby not interested in this report section’s culture analysis oriented direction. Escarduça 19

investigation extending the aesthetic experience to nature, i.e. to natural objects, regarded not as artistic objects by reason of their absence of human intervention in their creation, of representational ties to the reality and of artistry; thus, assumedly implicit in Carlson’s words lies the capital matter of intentionality intimately incrusted in any aesthetic experience as claimed after Bundgaard’s words , independently of the aesthetic object’s status as natural or artistic, as Carlson illustrates when commenting that “This approach does not depend on an assimilation of natural objects to art objects or of landscapes to scenery, but rather on an application of the general structure of aesthetic appreciation of art to something which is not art” (Carlson, 1979: 274). However, noticing that Carlson devises natural objects as sites of wilderness, as such distinct from artistic objects grounded as antecedently referred, so apparently revoking this report’s credit of the garden as a work of art as per Hunt, Ross, Herrington and Crowe, a cautionary observation and fundamental contrasting perspective is compulsorily concatenated, in fact serving Carlson text’s accuracy and efficiency within the ambit of this investigation of the garden: oppositely to natural wilderness, however much comprising natural components, the garden is not a natural object as per Carlson, rather an artistic object affording an aesthetic experience, the artificial object representing the utmost opposition to natural wilderness as stressed by this report’s subsequent chapter 221, further encompassing numerous additional representational dimensions, as addressed in this report Part II’s remaining chapters. Thus, as an aesthetic object, the garden dislocates an entities’s perception not to the qualities of its constituents which limitedly specify such an object as a quotidian physical thing, rather differently to the intentional process of representation, in turn comprising the two-folded intentional representative object and the intentionally represented object22, i.e. when its composing elements and their correspondent qualities are cumulatively perceived as an intentional presentation observing a specifically encoded composition – a garden’s “inside” –, as such representative of an intentionally represented meaning – a garden’s “outside”23 (cf. Bundgaard, 2009). An equivalence to Bundgaard’s

21 Which focuses on the garden’s analysis as a work of art from a Culture Studies perspective rather than specifically investigating the garden’s artistry specific faculties, so attempting to demonstrate its artificiality. Antecipating chapter 2, its is to mention the garden as the utmost human artifical creation opposed to wilderness and, furthermore, it is to mention that natural wilderness as addressed by Carlson is, in fact, posited as factually inexistent other than as a mental, or virtual, conception. 22 The garden would be regarded as a quotidian object when perceived merely according to the sensorially recepetion of its composing elements simply specifying the garden as a physical thing, such as colour, shape, dimension, scent, sound, flavour, texture, materiality, or any other quality of its composing elements. 23 As Hunt similarly exalts when commenting that, while defining it, the garden’s boundaries “do not insulate it from the worlds in which and out of the materials of which it is constructed”, so involving “a whole cluster Escarduça 20

notions of representative object and represented object contained by an aesthetic object may be encountered in Hunt’s observations of Svetlana Aspers’s article addressing a self- reference facet of representations, which “makes visible, at one and the same time, references to itself, to the material of its creation, and to the idea or fiction”xv (Hunt, 2000:79). Accordingly, the representation process is of paramount importance for a culture analysis-oriented direction, intimately related to the garden’s metaphorical porosity of its enclosing barrier. With regard to the garden, it is to note that Annex A’s enumeration is not limited to attributes merely specifying the garden as a physical thing, specifically those relative to the garden’s natural and artificial composing elements. Instead, considering representation to comprise what is represented and how it is represented, the garden’s essential attribute of style, its archetypical design, and its specific appearances24 are convoked, since, following Annex A, style simultaneously refers to form and to meaning occurring in a period and a region of a contextualised cultural organisation. Correspondingly, the intentionally designed form of a garden style’s specific appearance is regarded as the representative object, and the values and meanings of such temporally and spatially contextualised cultural organisation adhering the garden to Williams’ social and ideal categories of culture are regarded as the intentionally represented object. Considering representation as a conjoined process of intentional expression and intentional formulation of meaning, signification is hereby regarded as a plausible equivalent term, thus stressing this report’s title. Additionally, Williams’ emphasis on the documentary category of culture, that via which an object of culture documents, archives and communicates, commands the ensuing more comprehensive considerations concerning representation, specifically the communication process combining a representative object and a represented object enabling signification, hereby envisioned as the discursive faculty of a garden style’s specific appearance as an aesthetic object, operated via the delimiting barrier’s metaphorical porosity.

of motifs and motives” and including references “to other places, events and themes (…) as resilient, central aspect of human culture”, when designating such extension as “re-presentation, the presentation over again of a whole range of other cultural and natural elements and occurrences”, and when stressing that “knowledge of both – the garden formulations and their “referents” – enhances the experience of both” (Hunt, 2000: 76). 24 To which corresponde the spatial arrangement of its natural and artifical elements according to a style’s codes, as such resulting in the garden’s form, investing a garden style’s specific appearance not only with the status of a work of art but also, and more importantly for a culture analysis oriented direction, with that of an aesthetic object. Escarduça 21

Albeit the discourse of a garden style’s specific appearance is transmitted neither orally nor in writing, to which words, syntactically and grammatically combined according to such garden style’s form to formulate sentences enclosing statements conveying an interpreted meaning, are absent, and consequently, to which linguistic rules are not directly applicable, a garden style’s specific appearance is yet alternatively regarded as a language and, as such, analysed according to an equivalent linguistics, when adopting a differing perspective of equivalence encompassing the acknowledgement that a message is communicated not only by words25 (cf. Jørgensen, 1998; cf. Ross, 1998). In this regard, it is to note the evidence that the form of a garden style’s specific appearance is predominantly apprehended by the visual sense, while simultaneously is complemented by the entirety of the sensory apparatus including the kinesthetic sensexvi(cf. Ross, 1998). As the spatial manifestation of a culture’s expression, the discursive faculty of a garden style’s specific appearance, i.e. its communication process combining a multisensorial experienced representative object and an interpreted represented object, indeed encompasses a text or a text analoguexvii . In other words, a garden style’s specific appearance is hereby regarded to encompass a descriptive or narratological facet, since “narrative as text operates as an instrument of mind” affording organisation to the experience and memory of human action, happenings, and affairs, “a form of not only representing but of constituting reality”26 (Bruner, 1991: 4-6). Accordingly, it is plausible to regard, on one hand, the garden’s form equivalent to its lexicon as the cumulative array of its various sensorial apprehended composing elements, its syntax as the spatial combination of the latter, organised according to garden styles’ correspondent to stylistic categories, and on the other hand, its semantics as their meaning’s interpretation and disclosure. Grounded in such hermeneutic approach considering non- verbal communication when addressing the garden’s semantics, a dualistic conception of a garden style’s specific appearance is endorsed, expanding the quotidian experience of its form simply as a physical thing resorting to the entire sensorial apparatus to the notion of a language-structure and an aesthetic object’s communication faculty, within which the

25 Hunt quotes Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses: “language exists in the gap that representation creates for itself” (Foucault, M., as cited in Hunt, 2000: 79). 26 Bruner’s work inserts in the “cognitive revolution” currents of the human sciences – psychology, anthropology, linguistics, the philosophy of language – championing the contribution of narrative to the construction, representation and understanding of reality, as opposed to the rationalist or the empiricist traditions which, albeit greatly contributing so such end “in terms of causes, probabilities, space-time manifolds, and so on”, little knowledge grant concerning the rich and complex domain of human interaction (Bruner, 1991: 4, 5-8). Escarduça 22

garden’s natural and artificial composing elements transcend their mere formal function as its constituent parcels and, considered words’ equivalents accompanied by their equivalent lexicology, syntax, stylistics, pragmatics to form the equivalent language of such garden style’s design, ally a perceptible multisensorial experienced expression, in this case, the garden’s apprehended aesthetic form as a representative object, to an imperceptible meaning as a represented object, conveyed by a text analogue describing or narrating the designer’s transmitted intentional statements and enabling their interpretation (cf. Jørgensen, 1998). As importantly as intentional representation, intentional interpretation is evidently summoned, since the communication process involves the form expressed by a garden’s designer and the meaning interpretation by a garden’s visitor. As a signifier, a container of information in its components to be processed by the observer, the garden, and with it each and every of its components, acquire meaning by means of the observer’s sensorial, imagination and reasoning cognitive processes’ stimulation, therefore constituting a complex of signs, the language element between the observer and the sign (cf. Posner, 2004). Thus, a culture analysis direction involves the discipline of semiotics and its elemental concepts, assuming the composing elements of a garden style’s specific appearance as signs, i.e. as objects of a particular language composing an author’s statements, and, most importantly, so constituting a sign process, further requiring an intentionally active interpreter, who is to ally a sign’s form to meaning through interpretation27 (cf. Jørgensen, 1998; cf. Posner, 2004). Furthermore, comprising an aggregated array of various sign processes since it is constituted by a multitude of signs, in turn, impacted by further circumstances, a garden style’s specific appearance constitutes a sign system as an integral part of the “semiosphere”28 (Posner, 2004: 57). Since a garden style’s specific appearance is presumed as an object of culture as per Williams, it is considered a particular type of sign system within the semiosphere when specifically regarding its discursive faculty according to Williams’ documentary category of

27 Anew Hunt’s observations to Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses enhancing that meaning is not statically fixed in representations, rather arise from a gap between the representative and the represented, in turn occupied by an active self-conscious observer who, when confronted by the representative object, “makes it a sign by analysing it and acknowledging that it derives meaning by virtue of that analysis” (Hunt, 2000: 79). 28 Posner enounces the concept of semiosphere, previously advanced by Roland Posner and Jurij M. Lotman, as the totality of existing sign systems in the world, and Jørgensen refers to semiosphere emphasising the relevance of semiosis with regard to all modes and layers of activity when commenting that “we live in a universe of signs” where “every object is potentially charged with codes through casual connections, convention, superstition etc - everything is connected in a continuos network of meaning.” (Jørgensen, 1998: 42; cf. Posner, 2004). Escarduça 23

culture: it is conjectured as a society’s symbolic form29 contributing to such social organisation’s specific culture, i.e. the traditions and conventional codes assisting the interpretation of signs in different sign processes shared according to criteria of similarity amongst generations of a specific social organisation, accordingly begetting interactions’ constancy between the members of such social organisation, as such mobilising the cultural semiotics sub-disciplinexviii (cf. Posner, 2004). As a cultural sign system encompassing a variety of sign processes, the communication faculty of a garden style’s specific appearance further confirms the complex of involved numerous media through which it mediates its discourse. A medium refers to the various factors of reception, transmission, operation, occurrence, purpose and code involved within a sign process, and is constituted when such various factors reveal stability concomitant to various sign processes, as such consolidating the interactions’ constancy between the members of such social organisationxix (cf. Posner, 2004). Correspondingly, as a complex of media, the conditioning of the sign processes to constant limitations during a specific period of time contributes to a garden style’s discrete differentiation. Therefore, the summoning of cultural semiotics’ diverse basic concepts indeed assists the investigation of culture, since culture is designated as “a system of sign systems” whose highly complex yet unified structure encompasses firstly, numerous sign users and sign receivers organised into diverse groups according to their collective signs, as such forming a society’s individual and collective institutions and their rituals, secondly, numerous texts affiliated to various media and organised by a diversity of text groups, as such forming a society’s material civilisation, and thirdly, a mentality consisting of numerous conventional codes and differently categorised in consonance with the rules governing messages’ conveyance and the properties of the signifiers and signifieds such codes correlate, as such forming a society’s ideas, values and conventions organising their expressionxx (cf. Posner, 2004: 65, 72). From this angle, the compliance of a garden style’s specific appearance to William’s documentary category of culture is posited when regarded as a cultural sign system composed by a complex of sign processes as such culture’s symbolic form, whose sign emitter is the , whose complex of signs is the multi-media transmitted

29 Posner references Ernst Cassirer’s terms of “symbolic forms” and the domain of cultural semiotics, which targets culture as its subject and, envisioning cultures as constituent parts of the semiosphere, investigates a culture’s sign systems and cultures as composed of sign systems, the identity and boundaries of culture(s), their relationships within the semiopshpere, and cultures evolving dynamics (Cassirer, as quoted in Posner 2004: 56). Escarduça 24

garden’s form and its composing elements implicating the production of the cultural semiotics’ ample conception of texts observing various conventional culture codes, multi- sensory received and interpreted by the garden’s visitors. As such, the perspective of a garden style’s specific appearance as a “text of this culture” is prompted, if it is regarded as part of such society’s spatial and temporal material culture, i.e. as part of its civilisation30 (Posner, 2004: 69, 71, 72). Furthermore, and equally relevant, the “examination of material culture provides access to the self-organisation and self-understanding of a culture” so enabling conclusions concerning its social and mental culture (Posner, 2004: 75). It is nevertheless imperative to accentuate that the meaning of a garden style’s specific appearance, while attainable, is inherently indefinite as a universal and essentialist formulation, as the interpretation process which appends a specific meaning to an expression is impacted by aspects contextual and endogenous inasmuch as situational and exogenous to the communication process between the garden and its interpreterxxi, as such impeding generalisations about interpretation of signs’ content and hindering “a general characterization of meaning construction in visual artworks which rests on principles that can be applied to the concrete analysis of a particular painting”31 (cf. Jørgensen, 1998; Bundgaard, 2009: 43). Similarly, when regarding a garden style’s specific appearance as “a text or a text analogue through which somebody has been trying to express a meaning and from which somebody is trying to extract a meaning”, Bruner corroborates its indefinite formulation of meaning since “there is a difference between what is expressed in the text and what the text might mean, and furthermore that there is no unique solution to the task of determining the meaning for this expression”, since interpretation is inescapably contextualised, firstly, by intention, i.e. “"why" the story is told how and when it is, and interpreted as it is by interlocutors caught in different intentional stances themselves”, and secondly, by background knowledge “of both the storyteller and the listener, and how each

30 A remark is mandatory when noticing cultural semiotics texts’ properties as perennial and reproducible sign systems (cf. Posner, 2004). Such properties conflict with the garden’s essential attribute as detailed in Annex A of impermanence and uniqueness. Such conflict nonetheless appears to be embraced by other garden’s essential attribute as mentioned in Annex A, that of the garden infused by unrestrained ambiguity, subjectivity, intricacy and idiosyncrasy, intellectually permeating various academic fields, amongst which semiotics is referred. Regardless, this conflict is considered not to affect the purpose of this report’s section, specifically the culture analysis of the garden. 31 Bundgaard’s remark is indeed uttered within a cognitive semiotics investigation of the principles governing both the construction and interpretation of meaning in visual artworks, particularly in painting. However, its adoption with regard to the garden is considered admissible since, on one hand, the garden is predominantly a visual work of art and, on the other hand, Bundgaard himself confirms such admissabel extension to “whatever visual art work” (Bundgaard, 2009: 42). Escarduça 25

interprets the background (Bruner, 2011: 7, 10). It is to note that a significant majority of such hindering aspects as enumerated in (xxi) is begotten by the notion of individuality, both that of the garden’s designer and of the garden’s interpreter, as Hunt stresses when commenting that landscapes, or, with regard to this report, a garden style’s specific appearance,

whether we focus on their making or the experiencing of them long after their creation, are a combination of object and subject, of the place made and the place-maker or place- user. It is, in effect, impossible to distinguish between these elements of the total landscape. They are neither geomorphological realities nor a “given” set of territorial facts; nor they are just what we impose on them – by way of association, sentiment, or fantasy. Rather, landscape comes into being as the creative coupling of a perceiving subject and an object perceived (Hunt, 2000: 8-9).

From such perspective, hinging on the condition of being considered a work of art, as such encasing an artist’s intentional statement, in the garden’s case conveyed by its physical appearance possessing aesthetic and expressive qualities, and requiring intentional interpretation by each and every of its individual experiencer, a garden style’s specific appearance adjoins to its material reality32 the enlarged realm of a virtual world, nonetheless objective; in other words, a work of art’s physical world is adjoined by its non-physical world, in the garden’s case, the shared virtual gardenxxii, “one composed of the maximally compossible set of experiences elucidated and extrapolated from that physical realm” (Ross, 1998: 179, 186). Equivalently, Harrison notes that “the garden contains all that exceeds what literally meets the eye. This way of seeing – call it “depth of perception” in the radical sense – is made possible by the way the garden discloses the presence of what doesn’t show itself to the eye, or by the way the garden calls forth into the realm of appearance all that remains latent in the phenomenon”33 (Harrison, 2008: 121). The inescapable indefiniteness of a garden style’s specific appearance absolute and universal meaning compels emphasising that Posner’s anthropological concept of a society’s social culture as referenced in (xx) perceives a culture’s social institutions not only as

32 Hereby regarded to correspond to various of the terms previously enunciated: both the representative object of a predominantly visual work of art and a parcel of a society’s material civilisation, semiotically equivalent to a text of its culture or to a text analogue. 33 Equivalently, that which other contemporaneity’s phenomena do not afford the required conditions to flourish: the invisibility and a contemporary lost art of seeing, as previously addressed in (vii). Escarduça 26

collectives of individuals but, as importantly, as individuals34, hereby regarded as a distinction both of mutuality, complementarity, and reciprocity between the individual and the collective35; that which Augé stresses as an impossibility of dissociation between collective identity and individual identity when asserting that “the idea of totality (…) restricts and, in a sense, mutilates the idea of individuality”, as such prompting distrust of “absolute, simple and substantive identities, on the collective as well as the individual level”, since the

experience of the total social fact is doubly concrete (and doubly complete): experience of a society precisely located in time and space, but also experience of some individual belonging to that society. But this individual is not just anybody: he is identified with the society of which he is an expression and, thus, the individual, while a social construction, interests the study of culture for “its representation of the social link consubstantial with him” and for its “synthesis, the expression of a culture which itself is regarded as a whole”36 (Augé, 1995: 19, 20-21, 22). As such, the meaning conveyed by a garden style’s specific appearance and, or, by each and every of its composing elements resides not in the garden, as also not in the observer, rather hinges on a mediation process between both since, much evoking the Ouroboros’s symbolising facet of the one and the all in an eternal movement of both renewed creation and lasting continuity, “on one hand (...) a culture is shaped by its members, and on the other hand (...) its members are shaped by the culture” (cf. Jørgensen, 1998; Posner, 2004: 72). In other words, acknowledging that “cultures (…) never constitute finished

34 In turn coherently following Posner references to Johann G. Herder’s and Edward B. Taylor’s earlier definitions of culture, as also mentioned in (xx), which similarly underline such distinction. 35 The complexity inherent to the investigation of culture as expressed by such mutuality, complementarity and reciprocity between the individual and the collective evokes and adheres to the garden’s attribute of ambiguity, subjectivity, intricacy and idiosyncrasy resulting of the multiple scientif domains summoned by when addressing the garden as an object of study as per Annex A’s (i) and, precisely for such complexity, encourage the garden’s attestation as an object for the theory and analysis of culture. 36 Augé’s comments are part of an introductory discussion addressing contemporary anthropology’s validity to the continuous investigation of cultures of proximity – those regarded as Western – in face of their post-modern mutant societies animated by a supermodernity’s abundance of events disseminated in contemporary time and space and experienced by a multitude of individuals, which include important new conceptions of alterity when compared to anthropology’s canon of exotic otherness, such as those of the individual’s social alterity and intimate alterity –; such discussion of validity focuses the various facets related to the differentiated topics of method and object, and proclaims that the continuity of methods does not endanger contemporary anthropology’s validity but instead, in face of such accelerated contemporary shifting dynamics, new objects and conceptions instilling research must be found and are inclusively offered by such dynamics of time and space abundance, such as those of the Non-Place, and of the Place as previously referred (cf. Augé, 1992 [1995]). Escarduça 27

totalities; while individuals however simple we imagine them to be, are never quite simple enough to become detached from the order that assigns them a position: they express its totality only from a certain angle.”, “you have to analyse a specific case to be able to speak reasonably about meaning in landscape (de)signs”, as it cumulatively implicates a range of varied specificities of a garden, a designer and an interpreter (Augé, 1995: 22; cf. Hunt, 2000; Jørgensen, 1998: 44). Regardless of such constraints, some principles governing the interpretation process of a garden style’s specific appearance interpretation as an aesthetic object may be formulated resorting to cognition investigations, inasmuch as an array of possible contents of semiotic signs may be generalised according to cultural conventions; yet, in both cases, not the prior determination of the interpreted meaningxxiii (cf. Bundgaard, 2009; cf. Jørgensen, 1998). Recollecting that this investigation of the garden orders the foundational framework for a culture analysis direction, the preceding observations are subsequently summarized as complementary to Annex A, inspiriting an ontology of the garden and encouraging a definition of the garden privileging the areas of knowledge interested by the Culture Studies field, if a metaphorical adaptation of the term ontology may be accepted from the Philosophy’s field. Primarily, an object instrumenting a theory of culture and its analysis according to the social, documentary and ideal categories of culture. Since such an object of culture is territorially manifested, it is posited as a constituent partial elementary form of an anthropological place, the object expressing a society’s identity, relations and history, and simultaneously enabling the analysis of its culture. Its status as a work of art convenes the attribute of an aesthetic object, predominantly yet not exclusively visual, encompassing the intentionality of both the artist, who creates a representative object conveying meaning, and of the observer, who is to interpret the representative object’s meaning by means of an intentional cognitive process involving the sensorial, emotional, intellectual, psychological and cultural experience, as such posited as the represented object. The garden’s form transcends its multi-experienced physicality and, conveying layers of messages, allies form to meaning through discourse mediation between the interpreter and the garden, involving a multi-media representation process, so constituting a semiotic sign system encompassing numerous sign processes. Its discursive faculty, operated by means of a non-verbal alternative language-structure and its equivalent linguistic categories of lexicon, syntax, Escarduça 28

style, pragmatics, and semantics, in fact, encompasses a descriptive or narratological verbal facet, as such constituting a text analogue. As an object of culture, it is semiotically regarded as a symbolic form of a society’s culture and, specifically as an artifact of such society’s material civilisation, it is considered as a cultural semiotics “text of this culture”. Each and every of the previous attributes encompass the notions of real world – the garden’s “inside” – and virtual world – the garden’s “outside” – which, in the ambit of this report, is regarded as the ideas assisting a society’s reality and self-interpretation, i.e. a society’s mental culture and its array of mentifacts.

Section 1.3 – The Accent on the Garden as an Object of Representation It is to stress that the validation of such an adapted ontology of the garden envisioning the intended culture analysis pivots on demonstrating the hypothesis initially admitted, i.e. the conformity of a spatially and temporally contextualised garden style’s specific appearance to Williams categories of culture. Moreover, it is considered that the demonstration of such a hypothesis implicitly and automatically validates the remaining forwarded considerations. In other words, it is to elucidate that the implicated processes of documentation and of communication and representation, i.e. processes of signification, indeed convey its social organisation’s culture, i.e. its values, ideas, thoughts, theoretical and artistic tendencies, technological proficiencies, evolution ideals, ways of life, rituals, habits and behaviours, as determined and organised by its individual and collective social, economic, political and religious institutions. As such, following chapters dedicate to such exercise, anew magnifying a garden artistic style’s two-folded facets of form – how it represents as a representative object – and of content – what it represents as the represented object. The conformity of a garden style’s content to Williams’ categories of culture is hereby regarded as subordinated and validated by Annex A’s attributes of representation, namely the relationship between the human and nature, the metaphysical conception of nature, the organisation’s social, politic, military, economic, technological, religious and mythological circumstances, and the human strive for utopia37. Conjointly, the following chapters detail the non-verbal language-structure recorded and expressed by a garden style’s artistic form which is considered to convey such

37 So finding support in Hunt’s assertion: “Representation in landscape architecture is particularly geared to invoke both what is actual, palpable in the material world, and what lives only in the wide spaces of the human imagination” (Hunt, 2000: 84). Escarduça 29

represented content, i.e. by its natural and artificial composing elements and the design of their spatial organisation observing its style’s conventions. . The assumption of the garden as an object instrumenting a theory of culture, hereby regarded to find echo in Hunt’s aforementioned assertion that its “inside” encompasses its “outside” by the relations established via the delimiting frontier’s porosity, when combined with the garden’s diverse etymologies as referenced in Annex A animating the notion of the garden as an enclosed demarcation of the territory, a specific and exiguous38 “inside”, are regarded to convergently concur with Foucault’s words asserting that “The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world”39 (Foucault, 1998 [1984]: 242). An ampler angle is yet further imposed, since it is to note that previous considerations largely refer to a specific garden’s style, i.e. its correspondent individual specific appearances, temporally and spatially contextualised. In this regard, it is to stress that the analysis of culture instigated by an object is to concretely relate with no abstraction to the referential specificities of the temporal and spatial context such particular theory of culture addresses and in which such object is ingrained (cf. Williams, 1998 [1961]). However, it is equally and additionally imperative to retain that, when agitated by the mutability dynamics of time and space, a multitude of different individuals’ and societies’ complexities generates and comprehends such an object’s form (cf. Williams, 1998 [1961]). Moreover, augmenting complexity, the garden assumes mutable forms according to various differing garden styles disseminating in the thick of temporal and spatial various differing culture contexts, since “(…) it is we ourselves (…) who have constituted and continue to modify these surroundings” and “(…) landscape itself is an ever-changing object of no mean scope in its own concentration of natural and cultural resources.” (cf. Hunt, 2000: 8, 9). Thus, on one hand, the examination of a particular culture, when resorting to a specific contextualised garden style and adopting its emblematic formalised inscription in the territory as an object of study, must comply with the historiography of the garden, i.e. to

38 The garden’s exiguous territorial inscription is hereby referent to each and all of the garden types as enounced in Annex A, both garden types inducing such exiguity impression as factually formalised within small enclosures and garden types whose territorial inscription may instigate the notion of extensiveness but whose spaciousness, nevertheless, is ultimately exiguous when referenced to the larger landscape in which it is inscribed. 39 Albeit Foucault’s expedient of the term “world” is unquestionably subscribed within the ambit of this report, subsequent chapters allude to nuances amongst concepts of “world”, “earth” and “nature”. Escarduça 30

variable referents in time and space and their correspondent variable values and meanings, regarded not as a disadvantage but as a genuine complexity, since the history of culture’s activities, either in its artistic, intellectual, politic, social, economic, familiar or personal modes of operation, additionally to the specificities of their contextualised relationships, hinges on the restoration with no suppression or hierarchy of a network of reciprocal affection and reflection relationships markedly traversing and exceeding temporal and spatial reference40 (cf. Williams, 1998 [1961]). On the other hand, it is to note that a theory of general human culture dedicates to the study of such extendedly integrated relationships, whose analysis attempts to discover the nature of the organisation which is the network of such relationships since, in William’s words, “If we study real relations, in any actual analysis, we reach the point where we see that we are studying a general organisation in a particular example, and in this general organisation there is no element that we can abstract and separate from the rest”, to which the pinpointing of patterns across time and space is fundamental, as both continuities and discontinuities are, as such, either expectedly confirmed or unexpectedly unveiled when, relating an object’s or activity’s particularity to the integrity of culture’s intra-relationships and inter-relationships41 (Williams, 1998 [1961]: 50-52). Such observations are regarded to intimately relate to Annex A’s attribute of the garden – in this case, assumed not as a garden style’s specific appearance, but as the all- encompassing theoretical object comprising and integrating the complex of historical garden styles – as a representation of the human history’s immensity. Summoning space, time and culture within a non-reductionist and integrative complex and interdisciplinary congregation of fields of knowledge, the tracing of the human artistic intervention in landscape as formalised by real yet temporally and spatially mutable physical microcosms retained by the garden’s numerous artistic historical styles, in turn engaged and mirroring their virtual

40 As such, while disseminated across the accretion of their spatio-temporal multiplicity, it is plausible to consider that each of the garden styles and their representative and emblematic appearances is not isolated from the remaining, rather passes beyond its contextualised specificity as a particular object and assumes an extended position in the more general tradition of the historiography of the garden (cf. Williams, 1998 [1961]). 41 When extending the term culture from a particular temporal and spatial context to general culture’s temporal and spatial comprehensiveness, the history of culture, regarded as transcending the summation of particular histories, is subordinated to the unbiased and egalitarian restoration of the intra-contextualised and the inter- contextualised active relationships of culture’s activities, thus determining the theory of culture to the formulation of such multiple dynamics of intra and inter relationships and the analysis of culture to the attempted discovery, examination and uncovering of culture’s integral complex within which such varied relationships occur (cf. Williams, 1998 [1961]). Escarduça 31

respective macrocosms in consonance with a kaleidoscope of aesthetic theories, is a representation capsule disseminating in time and space moderately yet consistently recording, documenting, archiving and disclosing the ever-evolving history of human culture, to which inherent hindrances or natural circumstances of dissonant disparities and continuity commonalities permeating processes of selection and accumulation are not to be disregarded, in turn, compensated by a temporally and spatially specific culture’s structure of feelings and by an accruing selective tradition of various cultures’ structure of feelingsxxiv. Since theoretical concepts are enriched when illustrated by the objectivity of definite examples, and albeit circumscribed by its extensiveness’s indispensable constraints, the subsequent organisation of this investigation of the garden according to its topics of representation as antecedently enunciated is animated by and enunciates factual gardens emblematic of their correspondent conventionalised style, spatially and temporally contextualised by their social organisation’s culture, inasmuch as to the interrelationships imbuing such selected accretion of historical garden styles’ appearances. From the perspective of such historical mutability, Foucault’s reference to the garden as the totality of the world is suggested to be extrapolated, albeit and necessarily observant of the conceptual constraints and liberties as expressed in (xxiii), to a suggested extended angle: the totality of the worlds42.

42 In this regard, the term worlds assumes both a generally sanctioned inasmuch as an individual and personal dimension. Concerning Parques de Sintra’s requisite for a contemporary photography exhibition resorting to Sintra’s historical gardens as the inceptive object for the artists’ creative and artistic progression within which such pre-observed condition is to be observed inasmuch as such liberties are to be permitted, the totality of the worlds is hereby regarded not only as the collective, generally sanctioned, history of culture, and, when temporally and spatially amplified, the history of cultures, as enabled by the scope of represented garden historical styles within Sintra’s gardens, but also as the personal, individually perspectived and affirmed, history of culture and cultures, that envisioned both by each of the artists and by each of the exhibition’s visitors. In other words, while resorting to the history of cultures embodied by Sintra’s historical gardens, both artists and the exhibition’s visitors are to be convoked accordingly to their personal perspective of contemporaneity’s structure of feelings, assuming the role of “visitor, learner, guest” in order to best apprehend, understand and express their personal and individual perspective on elected contemporaneity’s matters to which they are convoked by the exhibited art works (Williams, 1998 [1961]: 53). This matter is further clarified in this report’s Part III as its core topic. Escarduça 32

Chapter 2 – The Garden as the Representation of the Relationship with Nature

Section 2.1 – The Human Action, First Nature and Second Nature Albeit the garden’s attainment of prominence in the early-modern historical period of the epoch, its theoretical investigation as an object of culture imposes a regression reaching Ancient epochs. The human transition from nomadism to sedentarism signals a momentous mutation within the relationship between the human and natural territory since territory’s unaffecting occupation by an itinerant human cohabitating with nature becomes territory’s dominant appropriation by a settled human affecting nature to his benefit. Scantly a garden, conjecturally presumed to merely correspond to a fenced enclosure nearby the entrance of a sheltering cave granting protection, and thereafter enlarged for private , herding or leisure, the first and embryonic garden is assumed to be dated in the Neolithic Period, c. 10000 BC, intimately related to embryonic forms of settlement43 (cf. Ross, 1998; cf. Turner, 2005). During the period spanning from the fourth to the first millennia BC, larger forms of human settlement appear in Asia Minor, successively inhabited by the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Babylonians and the Assyrians, amongst others, progressively developing civilisational innovations such as irrigation canals and the plough, which much favoured the advancement of agriculture while cities developed (cf. Turner, 2005). Since then, the sedentary human incessantly inscribes such civilisational progression via the territory’s strenuous appropriation. Accompanying population growth and the technological and scientific sophistication of human civilisation, natural territory and natural resources are progressively appropriated and exploited by a multitude of deliberate human agencies commanded by functionality and productivity aiming survival and subsistence, such as urbanisation, agriculture, fishing, herding, industrialisation, mining, transportation or recreation (cf. Carver, 2013; cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Shapiro, 2013). When referencing Nietzsche’s terms of earth and human-earth, Shapiro comments the human-earth concept as the immanent physical site of known and embodied human existence, in turn prompting a correspondence between the impacting effects on territory of such existence and the geological era of the Anthropocene (cf. Shapiro,

43 Such assertion is elsewhere regarded as speculative and opposed by the conjecture that, responding to the human elemental impulse of reality’s transfiguration through illusion and, or, adornment, enclosed outdoor areas were previously created either for incipient ritualistic, ludic or aesthetic purposes by Paleolithic nomads, thus dislocating the origin of the garden from functionality to spirituality or artistry and receding its origin in time (cf. Harrison, 2008). Escarduça 33

2013). From an ample standpoint, Shapiro’s perspective of Nietzsche’s human-earth may be regarded as the tangible result of an evolvingly emphatic human action of cultivation in time and space44. By implication and contrasting comparison, an idea of absence of human deliberate physical transformations is aroused, consequently isolating and identifying the opposite to human cultivation, consisting of the territory’s absolute condition of immaculate authenticity and pristine wilderness antecedent to appropriation by the human transformative cultural dynamics (cf. Carver, 2013; cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Shapiro, 2013). Both conceptions – the wonder of a territory of natural and pure creation and its mutation by the human impacting criteria of functionality – are epitomised by Cicero’s terminology of first nature and second nature45 (cf. Carver, 2013; cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Turner, 2005). The tangible and perennial condition apparently implicit to the human’s cultural appropriation and intervention in the territory commanded by second nature’s rational and pragmatic criteria scope of productivity and functionality46 may be extended when scrutinising additional facets of the human existence encompassed by uncertainty and intangibility, ultimately involving a conceptual and, or, inducing a mental human intervention and appropriation of territory, yet retaining its signalisation as cultural significant and, thus, as a second nature’s residual demarcation from first nature (cf. Hunt, 2000). A territory is signalised either temporally or permanently for diverse cultural traditions and religious ceremonies, themselves either temporary, periodic or continuous, and, more importantly, consisting of symbols, such signalisation assumes a cultural isolation

44 Resorting Annex A’s reference to cultivation as the active altering of the territory’s natural status implying a factual human action of transformation, cultivation may plausibly herewith be considered the cultivation of urban infrastructures for habitation, government, worship, commerce and leisure, various modes of transportation infrastructures, agricultural and industrial infrastructures, the altering of geomorphology and soil texture, the altering of fauna and flora including deforestation, the altering of the soil’s mineral and fossil fuel composition, the altering of the hydrological cycle and its chemical composition and the altering of the atmospheric chemical composition, amongst other transformations of the territory and nature deriving from human action (cf. Carver, 2013; cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Shapiro, 2013). 45 Hunt comments that, in his treatise De natura deorum, when signalling the human planting of agriculture fields and , the soil’s irrigation and fertilization, the human manipulation of a river’s course, Cicero refers to the altered landscape resulting from human deliberate agency as a second nature within the natural world, a second of two natures, an alteram naturam, an alternative nature, thus implying a first, unaffected and primal nature within which a second nature is created (cf. Hunt, 2000). If the strategies and forms appropriate to second nature were isolated and instituted by Cicero as technical interventions of planting, irrigation, grafting or cattle raising and the resulting variety of the territory’s soils’ textures appropriate to agriculture, it is to note that the notion of second nature may and must be extended to the myriad of interventions accompanying the human technological and scientific cultural sophistication. 46 Functionality is hereby to be considered restricted to activities of human survival, as opposed to the various functions and uses a garden may be assigned, as mentioned in Annex A’s attribute of garden types encompassing supplementary functionalities not directly related to survival and productivity. Escarduça 34

of the territory from first nature’s realm47; further extending second nature’s conceptual scope, an area’s demarcation and appropriation may be exempted from factual human intervention, requiring merely its acknowledgement by an audience (cf. Hunt, 2000). Thus, opposing culture to nature, it is plausible to assert that the human enduring tradition for first nature’s deliberate appropriation as condensed by the concept of second nature corresponds to the territory’s cultural inscription and control.

Section 2.2 – The Human Artistry and Third Nature Stressing a garden’s artistry as mentioned in Annex A, presumably assumed as the technical extension of agriculture’s deliberate interventions therefore including design, variety and the ampler scope of artistic representation beyond functionality, a garden’s functions and uses include the indulgence of its refinement, elegance and grace, and of the sensorial experience of vast vistas or a particular garden element, thus extending, neglecting or even annulling the emphasis on productivity. Such noticeable artistry of the garden attains incubating prominence in the sixteenth century while, nonetheless, endures a period of progressive maturation such as referenced in Annex A’s (i), animated thereafter both by subsequent gardens’ artistic creations and conceptual publications referencing the art of the garden48 (cf. Hunt, 2000). Anteriorly, in the sixteenth century, the Italian humanist Jacopo Bonfadio exalts the edification of nature to the status of art as enabled by a garden49, elevating a garden within the diversity of the

47 Hunt advances examples: the temporary demarcation by a pole of an area’s immaterial boundaries for nocturnal secure encampment practised by ancient Australian aborigine tribes; the permanent demarcation by a standing stone of an area’s immaterial boundaries for social activities and, or, sacred rituals by Neolithic European peoples; the inscription of geolyphs in South America, as first nature’s cultural and ideological colonisation (cf. Hunt, 2000). 48 Spanning the following two centuries, an organic coalition of non-specialist practitioners and theorists dedicated not only to general and practical topics of the copious spectrum intimate to the countryside’s living and working model but also to a country estate’s agricultural management inaugurate the garden’s specificity as a work of art, discussing a garden’s location within an estate territorial domain, the soil’s characteristics, the arboreal, herbal and floral species designated as appropriate, a garden’s design inspired by a conceptual purpose of artistry signalling the abandonment of agricultural efficiency, or a garden’s decorative ornaments and compartments, amongst other concerns (cf. Hunt, 2000). 49 Hunt refers to Bonfadio’s enthusiastic description of his own villa garden, signalling the hyperbolised ekphrastic style and the fabulous imagery incited by allusions to the mythology of Classical prominent literature by means of which Bonfadio refers to the bliss incited from what is to be seen from his country retreat which words fail to adequately describe and is only attained if factually experienced, and emphasises his humor’s instant invigorating affection by the sumptuousness splendour of the lake’s and surrounding hills’ large, bright and clear open vistas, the exuberant glory of the garden, the continuously renovated delights of marvels and pleasures afforded by the ephemeral sensorial experiences granted by consecutive alterations of light and scents which appear as promises of something both unseen and eternal, and the pleasures of the enlivened mental conceptions which thus accentuate the reciprocal transition ocuring between the material and Escarduça 35

territory’s human cultural appropriations and distinguishing an additional concept when coining the neologism third nature to express the singular combination of nature and art50 (cf. Hunt, 2000). Reiterating that the territory’s appropriation and transformation for agriculture’s functionality and productivity foments Cicero’s formulation of second nature as a cultural landscape opposing first nature’s wilderness, Bonfadio’s notion of third nature instigated by the garden’s artistry institutes a more accentuated standard of sophistication and complexity enveloping cultural landscape and the human domain of territory, since artistry implies and requires a more elaborate effort and intense will of implementation and maintenance, a formal strategy surpassing compositional element’s mere functionality, the concomitance of formal elements and a philosophical dimension, intentionality both of the artist and of the observer, the various complexities inherent to dynamics of, representation, interpretation and signification and the appeal to the aesthetic presence of notions of beauty51 (cf. Hunt, 2000). Correspondingly, when isolating the garden’s particular aspect as the “attempt to sketch an aesthetics of the human-earth or a Geoaesthetics of the Anthropocene”, Shapiro’s comments addressing Nietzsche’s concept of human-earth appear anew to be correlated to the human culture conflicting intervention in nature, and to garden’s third nature as its apogee, according to which human-earth is transformed and cultivated into a garden-earthxxv (Shapiro, 2013: 69). Harrison’s considerations concerning the cultivation of care are immediately recognised as analogous to Nietzsche’s inasmuch as the Anthropocenic second

the immaterial, the sensorial and the mental (cf. Hunt, 2000). Hunt further mentions Bonfadio’s reference to the fruitful orchards and blessed groves of trees and green pastures in the surroundings of his garden and to the mountainous landscape surrounding the lake, hence suggesting Bonfadio’s reading of landscape as a progression inscribed in the territory from first nature in the distance, to second in the surrounding, and to third in the garden (cf. Hunt, 2000). 50 Simultaneously, yet seemingly independently, Bartolomeo Taegio, an Italian humanist contemporary to Bonfadio, uses the same term to express a similar conception (cf. Hunt, 2000). 51 Hunt further details when commenting “The claim that a garden’s specific features represent elements outside was derived partly from the fashion by which so many garden features had grown out of or were extrapolated from agrarian activity. Every item in a garden had some direct or more obscure origin in the world of second or even first nature, elements of which they took further (hence their characterisation as “third” nature)” (Hunt, 2000: 84). More specifically, clearings in a forest or a flowery meadowland became lawn and grass sward. Ornamental canals in Dutch gardens were an aesthetic extension of of drainage ditches in the low- lying polders. Terraces were derived from hillsides shaped for agriculture. (...). In similar fashion, and hydraulic systems grew out of irrigation needs and techniques, or the elaboration of allées and (groves) developed from the forester’s managment of woodland and hunting territory” (Hunt, 2000: 85). Escarduça 36

nature’s elevation to the garden’s third nature, its philosophical dimension, intentionality, complexity and the ethical dimension of aesthetics52. Bonfadio’s reading of his surrounding landscape according to Cicero’s first and second natures and the garden’s domain of third nature thus stresses and consolidates a symbolic triad of natures, spatially and temporally enabling the conceptual auscultation of territory (cf. Hunt, 2000). Contrasting numerous circumstances imposed to the Medieval creation of gardens53, garden representations of such progressive triad of natures as perceptible in Bonfadio’s account of the garden and landscape vistas bestowed when appreciated and experienced from his villa’s focal point flourishes during Florence’s Early Renaissance period (cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Turner, 2005). Fifteenth century’s Italian villa gardens are spatially organised according to a visual perspective which, firstly, egresses from the villa’s or mansion’s architectural centre volume, i.e. from a human’s second nature radiating form, with which deliberately artistically designed gardens integrate artistic and scientific interests54, secondly, axially orients according to an evolving sightline traversing less formalised interventions of orchards and groves and agricultural fields resembling Cicero’s second nature, and thirdly, meaningfully oriented towards an elected terminating point far in the distance, ultimately attains first nature’s unaffected surroundings (cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Turner, 2005). Emanating from the palace villa, such perspective axis thus extends outwards with diminishing artistry, palpably graduating the human’s appropriation and intervention in the territory and representing a depressing human control over nature. Located nearby the mansion contrasting distant wild nature, gardens are thus positioned as places of art and luxury allied to the humanities enhancing artistry above functionality, while the urge for the countryside’s delights beyond city and, or garden wall’s

52 However, while the notion of human-earth and garden-earth distinctively illustrate the human appropriation and intervention of nature gradated by a scale progressing from functionality to philosophical artistry, as intended within this report chapter 2’s ambit, the contrast of a jubilant garden-earth of abundancy and eternity as described by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra to Harrison’s remarks concerning Eden’s dehumanising existence is to be noticed. Such reference to the cultivation of the self as more approximate to Harrison’s considerations appears elsewhere in Nietzsche’s writings, as mentioned in Chapter 1. 53 As further referenced in subsequent chapters. 54 Prompted by and enhancing humanist reason’s diffusion in knowledge and artistic creation, assigning mathematics a decisive role in representation following Vitruvius’ observations on mathematics of proportion and Euclid’s’ Golden Number (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 37

enclosure, whose presence is perceptible in the open vistas’ distance, simultaneously blossoms 55 (cf. Turner, 2005). Distinguishing the Early Renaissance period from the High Renaissance period, the turn of the fifteenth to the sixteenth century marks Rome’s efforts to surpass Florence’s hegemony within Renaissance cultural dynamics56, while such dynamics also amplifies to other European regions57 (cf. Turner, 2005). Third nature’s artistic intervention as inaugurated by the Renaissance garden thus extends the deliberate human appropriation of territory and agency over nature, since the garden’s artistry opposes inasmuch as artificially combines culture and nature, thus demarcating the human’s ultimate separation from nature to the service not of functionality but artistry and distinguishes the garden as nature’s extreme opposite58(cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Panzuru, 2010; cf. Shapiro, 2013). Regardless of the plenitude of flora and fauna and the Edenic character of Renaissance’s gardens, Harrison emphasises artificiality as the opposite of nature, albeit combined59 (cf. Harrison, 2008). Seventeenth century’s Baroque exacerbates Renaissance’s fascination with distance in the organisation of landscape and its effects on the experience and understanding of nature (cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Turner, 2005). Expanding Bramante’s single axial structure of the garden, axes’ diversity assumes crucial dominance, evolving to combinations including transverse, cross and radial axes referencing focal points either

55 Much cultivated in Florence during Early Renaissance period by the consecutive generations of Medici’s men of wealth, scholarship and arts in gardens such as Villa Careggi, Villa Medici Fiesole, Villa Castello, and much evoking Decameron, Boccaccio’s frame story of ten characters’ storytelling while lodging in a country villa overlooking Florence and blissfully relishing the forest’s and garden’s freshness, fragrances and freedom (cf. Turner, 2005). 56 In Rome, as is the Sistine Chapel frescoes to Michelangelo and the pope’s private apartments to Raphael, Donanto Bramante is commissioned the architectural design for the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Basilica, including the Court, whose plan observes the dominance of a central axis and thorough consortium between garden and architecture through the use of optic perspective yielding spacious views (cf. Turner, 2005). 57 Notwithstanding differing nuances prompted by the infiltration of Renaissance’s canon of simplicity and rigidity by the designers’ stimulus for a personal creative signature, Renaissance’s garden principles expand during the sixteenth century, while yet present as designers observe common standards set by Renaissance grand masters and work according to their manner, hence indexing such sixteenth century’s second half tendency as Mannerism – the origin for such Renaissance’s Mannerism variations are further addressed in the subsequent chapter 3 (cf. Turner, 2005). 58 Water adornments and effects are some of the most impacting ullustration of such separation. Italian villas such as Villa Lante, Villa Farnese and Villa Torlonia feature the catena d’acqua, a water chain as the formalised version of a stream cascading down a hillside (cf. Hunt, 2000). 59 Harrison quotes Edith Wharton’s Itallian Villas and Their Gardens, so stressing such simultaneous opposition and combination of culture and nature: “”one day” the Renaissance architect looked out from the terrace of his villa and discovered that the “enclosing landscape” was “naturally included” within his garden. “The two formed part of the same composition”” (Wharton, E., as cited in Harrison, 2008: 86). Escarduça 38

within or beyond the garden, in which an instilled unifying fluidity of internal composition elements and unbounded vistas’ natural or artificial landmarks in the surrounding landscape is predominant to the point of suggesting the compositions’ expansion beyond permeate frontiers (cf. Turner, 2005). Baroque gardens’ large-scale compositions enhance artificiality and the human intervention to its utmost artistic degree since the garden appears to appropriate distant nature. Albeit the tendency is detected in some Italian Baroque gardens, Italy’s mountainous landscape ultimately reveals inadequate to comply with the Baroque design’s ideal ample landform (cf. Turner, 2005). Eclipsing Italian villas’ gardens in scale, French Baroque estate gardens decisively locate the building at the centre, from which wide and extensive avenues irradiate ample geometrical lines of perspective marking the garden’s layout, extending beyond and conveying the remote landscape into the garden, suggesting the appropriation and control of the remote and the horizon by the garden 60 (cf. Ross, 1998; cf. Turner, 2005). Positively surpassing a design option for the pleasure of a visual perspective, the grid of axis rather accentuates a more conceptual program, clearly enforcing the idea of three natures via the signalisation of contiguous, adjacent and circumjacent component spaces within the human’s organisation and control of territory, thus representing such specific human vision of the natural world, explicitly imbued with the human sovereign strive for nature’s dominance (cf. Hunt, 2000). Such utmost human separation from nature is imbued with further subtleties when considering innermost aspects of the human condition. Referencing Rudolf Borchardt, Harrison stresses a fundamental tension permeating a garden’s combination of culture and nature, since a garden conveys the discourse of human culture’s modes of order where the human is the deliberate and dominant external agent animated by the most sophisticated stages of civilisation, albeit also its slave, victim and martyr, whereas the flower incorporates a self-governing pre-human order disclosing an independent and intrinsic beauty, which the realm of the third nature aspires to create but can only recreate by means of the garden’s cultivation, however much never factually attaining, thus condemning the human to the inescapable prison of civilisation’s ultimate impotence regardless of its ever-progressing sophistication and to the nostalgia for the absence of such tensioning human order which the

60 The palace and standing as the most notorious example; other notable Baroque gardens in France are Fontainebleau (whose former Renaissance style was transformed to Baroque) and Vaux-le- Vicomte, intimately related to a French garden design tradition impelled by family dynasties of garden designers such as the Le Nôtre or Mollet families (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 39

flower so categorically embodies (Harrison, 2008: 47). Simultaneously, the garden appears to reflect additional facets of humanity, often unconscious, indiscernible and intimately related to nature, yet not reducible to the order of nature, such as the urge for creative self- expression, repose, and contact with non-human lifexxvi (cf. Harrison, 2008). Noticing that Bonfadio coins the term third nature in the sixteenth century and, more importantly, aesthetics arises in the eighteenth century as the scientific judgment of artistic pleasure, beauty and taste, elevating subsequent garden forms to a sophisticated apex as cultural objects in which artistry is exalted, an apparent incompatibility arises when confronting a garden’s third nature compulsory criteria of artistry, the multitude of garden types as enounced in Annex A and their correspondent determining objectives of utilitas and venustas. While the later accentuate delight, loveliness, and beauty to an extent excluding functionality, as implicitly and, or explicitly formalised and experienced in flower gardens, botanical gardens, landscape gardens, peace gardens or sculpture gardens, the former prioritise commodity, utility and convenience to a condition which may revoke any vestige of artistry, as manifested by some vegetable gardens, medicinal herbs gardens, workplace gardens, sports gardens or spiritual gardens. Seemingly, when considered the garden’s ontological extensiveness as addressed in chapter 1, numerous types of garden and the specificity of their formal appearances are either deficient or even deprived of artistry, hence antagonists to Bonfadio’s realm of third nature and curtailed to second nature’s. Such apparent incompatibility concerning garden types’ terminology is plausibly elucidated when observing Hunt’s comments regarding the intrinsic conceptual interpenetration and temporal porosity enfolding second and third natures. On one hand, the historiography of the garden’s physical particular appearances as demarcated by such enounced temporal milestones bestows a minimalist yet recognisable facet of delight, loveliness and beauty plausibly encountered in the experimentation of certain garden forms temporally independent of Bonfadio’s fifteenth century and aesthetics’ eighteenth century, since, either in the past or presently, the methods of implementation and maintenance and the element’s formal composition implicit to the preponderant functionality of orchards and ample vistas of agriculture fields, while not imposing the creator’s artistically designed intentionality, a philosophical dimension and, or processes of interpretation and signification, yet afford the pleasures of scents and the artistic visions of well-cultivated fields and vegetable and herb gardens (cf. Hunt, 2000). Equivalently, however much Escarduça 40

pleasure gardens primarily and, or exclusively observe their artistic destination, a functional intent is attributed to the flowers and herbs of pleasure gardens when constituting a critical raw-material to the manufacturing of perfumery, cosmetics, and medicinal products or when adopted as a culinary ingredient, inasmuch as social and politic functions may be enacted in gardens primarily created as artworks (cf. Hunt, 2000). On the other hand, time contributes an additional aspect clarifying such apparent incompatibility, since not only premature stages of the evolutive sophistication of civilisation impose the strive for a functional habitat of second nature where shelter and provisioning constituted the human priority but also third nature’s artistic gardening depends on the temporal evolution of culture affording the allocation of sufficient grounds to artistic uses, the development of the required skills, techniques and instruments, and the leisure time the creation, maintenance, and utilisation of a garden accompanies, thus implicitly suggesting that the artistry component of the garden could only arise after such temporal milestones61 (cf. Hunt, 2000). Conjointly, the garden’s essential attribute of its enclosing and concealing limits granting a privileged and private sheltering exile from the cultural context to which it intimately relates accentuates the temporally dependent cultural complexity a society is to gradually cultivate, as the emergence of such exile desire and relief necessity is incited by such cultural gradual complexity (cf. Hunt, 2000). Furthermore, however much a garden results from deliberate and physical human appropriation and intervention in the territory accompanying the civilisation’s evolutive sophistication, thus indicating that the garden consists of the extrapolation of second nature’s forms (cf. Hunt, 2000). Summarily, however much the historiography of the garden intimately dialogues with the complexifying evolution of human cultural history progressing from functionality to artistry, in turn intimately assigned to such temporal milestones, oppositely, the diagrammatic symbolism of the triad of natures entails no hermetic and rigid hierarchy62 when second and third natures are related to culture history, thus resolving the aforementioned apparent controversy when considering the latter’s complexities (cf. Hunt, 2000). Furthermore, as the opposite of nature, it is to emphasise that the realm of third nature does not limit to inscribe, juxtapose and represent a culturally sophisticated garden form as

61 A matter to be further specified in subsequent chapters. 62 To which resembles Wittgenstein’s previously addressed concept of family of resemblances, exonerating a garden’s particular appearance from rigid conformity with a hitherto instituted globality of the garden’s essential attributes, in this case specifically, that professing the garden as a work of art. Escarduça 41

the opposite to first nature’s wilderness, since simultaneous representations of the triad of natures are explicitly agglomerated by certain garden formal appearances, i.e. being the third of the triad of natures, the garden consolidates the remaining within its confines (cf. Hunt, 2000). In fact, garden styles subsequent to such temporal milestones elucidate. Discarding the Baroque’s progressive palpable demarcation of the three natures in the territory, an opposite artistic conception germinates during the seventeenth century and propagates to the eighteenth century63, altering and annulling the axis’ intrinsic symbolising character of the human’s tyrant power, regardless of preserving the representational attribute of the idea of three natures, thus evincing the relentless human necessity for a conceptual formulation of the human relationship to nature and its experience in garden design (cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Turner, 2005). Instead, replicating the aforementioned conceptual interpenetration and porosity within the triad of natures and contrasting Baroque grand estates’ demonstration of human authority over nature, the Neoclassical garden dissolves and overlaps the landscape’s contiguous, adjacent and circumjacent components, aiming for a congregating artistic garden form complying with agriculture’s and forest’s utility and functionality while simultaneously delving in the mysterious yet ordered universal and unadorned nature and reaching for nature’s unaffected beauty, i.e. a third’s nature formalisation encompassing both the second and the first natures, as mentioned in previous paragraph (cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Turner, 2005). Dating from the middle seventeenth century, the Neoclassical garden is incepted by the embryonic Forest style64 and evolves in the eighteenth century accordingly to different stages and garden styles: the Augustan, the Serpentine and the Picturesque styles65 (cf. Turner, 2005). The Forest style pursues Baroque’s open perspectival vistas transcending to the surroundings, yet dismissing the human imposed trouncing of existing trees’ logging to serve the artificial inscription of garden design’s axial and radial geometry, instead and foremost, accepting and adapting to the site’s natural irregularities in landform, groves’ prior existence, watercourses, rock formations and other natural existing elements congregated with the utilitarian agricultural plantation of irregular new forest gardens to offer open

63 Notwithstanding Baroque artistic trace’s continuation in the eighteenth century. 64 Cirencester Park was Lord’s Bathurst rural estate and it is regarded as one of Forest style’s leading and inaugurating examples (cf. Turner, 2005). 65 The Forest and Serpentine styles are addressed within this chapter’s ambit as illustrative of such radical deflection from the Baroque style, while the remaining Augustan and Picturesque styles are mentioned in subsequent chapters. Escarduça 42

perspectival views transcending to the surroundings (cf. Turner, 2005). Forming the garden axes’ irregular layout, groves margins’ alignments are accentuated by low shrub hedges, generating the intended garden linear avenues (cf. Turner, 2005). Such axes’ irregularity acceptance implies relinquishing on Baroque’s exigence for a rigid and rational geometric relation between the garden’s axes and the house’s axis and location, while low stone walls delimit the estate and bastions located in the perimeter’s angles where to garden’s axis converge to offer the aspired open vistas to the surroundings (cf. Turner, 2005). The eighteenth century’s third quarter exalts the Serpentine style66, the nature-esque garden style enhancing the garden layout’s emotional smoothness and celebrating nature’s similitude, i.e. the garden’s effortlessness and the flowing of informal elements as they exist in the site’s natural specificity, fluidly interpenetrating the artistic and the natural domain (cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Turner, 2005). Serpentine designs assume abstract configurations thoroughly using landform’s natural existing smooth morphology, woods and lakes, where serpentine curvilineal knots of trees ornament hills’ ascents as gently laid vestments, ample green meadows undulate in front of a Palladian mansion reaching the base of its external walls in its natural and unadorned condition oppositely to the intricate Renaissance and Baroque enveloping the centre palace, naturalised serpentine lakes calmly rest in landform’s depressions and a serpentine peripheral and enclosing belt of trees accompanies the landform’s gradients alongside an encircling track offering mild carriage tours while enjoying the landscape vista’s vastness67 (cf. Turner, 2005). Thus, the gardens fashioning both the Forest and the Serpentine styles as third nature’s manifestations yet consolidate representations of the remaining within their confines68. Moreover, accompanying the eradication of the Baroque’s rigid axis, the Forest and the Serpentine styles also eliminate

66 Also designated as the or Brownian style, evoking Lancelot “Capability” Brown, the most prominent garden designer during the referenced decades to whom is accredited the design of approximately two-hundred gardens and parks during this period and who had previously worked for ten years at Stowe under the supervision of William Kent; Brown’s trademark Serpentine style and the Serpentine term was compared to William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty, which registered the artist’s theories of visual beauty and grace, amongst which stands the theory of the Line of Beauty corresponding to an s-shaped curved line, and establishes six principles affecting beauty, namely, a composing element form’s fitness, the composing elements’ variety, a composition’s regularity or simplicity as a tempering and balancing factor for elements’ variety, a form’s intricacy which encapsulates a certain resisting and enjoyable mystery in its grasping, and quantity or greatness (cf. Turner, 2005). 67 The Blenheim Park at Duke of Marlborough’s estate, the Bowood Park, the Arcadian glade at Prior Park, the lakes at Luton Hoo, the riverside scenery at Chatsworth and the grand views at Petworth and Harewood are some of the most representative Serpentine style gardens (cf. Turner, 2005). 68 i.e. not rejecting the idea of the triad of natures, as previously exalted. Escarduça 43

the palpable and clear organisation of the triad of natures according to a scale radiating from the human centre69. Albeit radically reinterpreted, it is to note that the Baroque’s former urgency for the eyesight to be guided into the distance with no obstacles is yet endorsed by the Forest and Serpentine design styles as a fundamental principle, thus evidently perpetuating the human artistic inscription of a garden as appropriation and intervention in territory and the control and experience of landscape as a representation of the human vision and relationship to nature conceptually observing the idea of a triad of natures. Nevertheless, an explicit conceptual contrast is explicit: while the Baroque garden intends for the garden’s third nature to extrapolate the garden’s frontier from the garden’s irradiating human centre, thus invading and seizing the distant first nature’s wilderness beyond the garden’s enclosing limits, the Forest and Serpentine design styles aim to consort with and to import first nature’s wilderness from the remoteness of the garden’s external domain into the artistically humanised third nature’s territory. Annex B’s images 1 and 2 are regarded to thoroughly elucidate such corresponding different dynamics within the human appropriation and intervention in the territory. Resorting to a summary of the historical period spanning from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth century, the historiography of the garden hitherto mentioned therefore illustrates, or rather, confirms, as ambitioned according to this report Part I chapter 1’s final segments, that different human representational inscriptions of the triad of natures as the territory’s human appropriation, and of the correspondent relationship between the human and the nature, are temporally and spatially imbued with culture and ideology. Furthermore, such conceptual engraving of the human relationship with nature and of the human vision of the natural world in the garden, independently of the inward or outward direction, confirms and stresses the permeability of the garden’s enclosing barrier between the garden’s “inside” and a cultural “outside”, as previously mentioned. It is to note, however, that the emphasis of previous considerations on the garden as the artistic realm of third nature, which not only derives from but also expands the functional realm of second nature, conceptually accommodates an idea of first nature’s wilderness. Consequently, considering that this chapter concerns the human relationship to nature, i.e.

69 While also opposing the Baroque’s axis, the Picturesque style is to partially oppose the Forest and Serpentine styles’ tendency to merge and blend the organisation of the territory, as addressed in further chapters. Escarduça 44

to the wilderness, it matters to further excavate and to concentrate on such an idea of nature’s wilderness. In other words, since Cicero’s account of first nature as immaculate wilderness imposes exclusion of the human cultural transformative dynamics, the question of further specifying such territorial and, or conceptual isolation from human appropriation and intervention arises.

Section 2.3 – The Inexistence of First Nature and the Questioning of Nature Cultural history renders various versions for such a notion of human culture’s absence in the territory across different temporal and spatial culture contexts. It is enunciated by Cicero as both the unaffected territory providing the unaltered raw materials for human agency inasmuch as regarded as the divine, mysterious, and perhaps eerie, residency and nature of the gods; the Classical Greek culture assigns the spiritual realm emanating from the god’s abode in Mount Olympus; Christianity’s immaculate territory may be regarded as that of the divine being; the Book of Genesis celebrates an era of wonderful natural creation antecedent to any human appropriation of the territory; when alluding to Cicero’s conception, Bonfadio vividly describes his villa’s surrounding open vistas as the abrupt, harsh and menacing mountainous domain of gigantic summits darkened by claustrophobic fogs and incinerated by fiery lightning where strange and terrorising beasts and hermits inhabit the obscurity of caves and caverns (cf. Hunt, 2000). An additional rendering of immaculate wilderness is intimate to a more mundane notion of territorial remoteness, isolation and inhospitality, culturally associated to the high peaks of mountains, the distant dunes of the deserts, the glacial terrains of the poles, the inexpungable flora of the jungles or the void immensity of the oceans, encompassing the human deprivation of the habitual commodities and securities granted by second nature’s evolved civilisational context (cf. Hunt 2000). Such different notions of divinity, awe, fear, distaste or un-civilisation as previously enumerated appear to unite under a common trace of “otherness” (cf. Hunt, 2000). Furthermore, the threats of alteration and the evidences of elimination imposed by the human exploitative supremacy to the earth’s last territories of wilderness still remaining unaffected by human cultural appropriation and intervention induce a nostalgia for nature’s pure form, compelling contemporary multidisciplinary dynamics animated by the ransoming vindication and re-creation of natural wildernessxxvii (cf. Carver, 2013). Escarduça 45

However, such confrontations with primal nature and the existence of territories of pure wilderness and immeasurable otherness as enunciated above, to which the garden’s elaborate artificiality opposes, are questionable, if not paradoxically unattainable, when examining their compliance with Cicero’s condition of the human trace’s exclusion. On one hand, the ecosystem model of cores and corridors as mentioned in (xxvii) is contextualised by scientific perspectives, i.e. nonetheless a human intervention regardless of its priority and the ultimate goal of the earth’s (re)wilding. In other words, while pursuing first nature’s restoration, the notion of fourth nature as mentioned in (xxvii) approximates more of a combination of values and ideas of second and third nature (cf. Carver, 2013). On the other hand, primal nature’s conceptual and physical forms as previously itemised are incomparably imbued by correspondent antecedent cultural values and meanings (cf. Hunt, 2000). In fact, firstly, the various currents conceiving first nature as a spiritual and divine realm entail their correspondent religious perspective and, secondly, Bonfadio’s first nature interpretation precedes that which is to be philosophically termed in the eighteenth century as a sublime experience, translated from rhetoric to cultural commodities such as painting and garden design (cf. Hunt, 2000). Moreover, the remoteness, isolation and inhospitality of distant regions of the globe such as those enounced does not impede access by the human via the multitude and sophistication of available transportation modes and the subsequent appropriating connection and intersection of such territories’ experience with a variety of other human experiences and purposes, spanning science to recreation amongst others (cf. Hunt, 2000). Similarly, additionally to the access granted by transportation infrastructures to uncomplicatedly “natural” gardens such as national parks and reserves, such human representations of apparent wildernesses are not to be erroneously signaled as a first nature’s formalisation since their physical experience is subsequently multiplied and culturally consumed in painted, photographic or animated image (cf. Hunt, 2000). Finally, the mere demarcation of the territory by an enclosing boundary, regardless of its primitive incipience such as referenced in this chapter’s introductory paragraph, evinces a human intervention (cf. Hunt, 2000). The paradox is that once human attains any conception of first nature, it ceases to qualify as first nature and is dislocated to the realm of second nature, as such attainment is preeminently compromising and culturally “colonising”, thus transformed by a multitude of factors into an ample variety of cultural manifestations and experiences, i.e. albeit second Escarduça 46

nature is inscribed by the human within first nature, access to the latter is enabled by the former, hence inevitably inaccessible (cf. Hunt, 2000). Such paradox prompts the notion that first nature exists only as an idea and a cultural construction; or, rather, since the realm of second nature is inhabited by the human’s cultural diversity, ideas of wilderness are solely, yet plurally, imagined in time and space as formerly illustrated (cf. Hunt, 2000). Since the creation of culture, such paradox incessantly confronts the human with its ethos: the human as a dynamic and dominant agent of disjunction of what he does not accomplish to define as opposed to the human as an intrinsic and harmonious parcel of the wholeness he integrates but does not control70. Elucidating wilderness’s tenacious resilience in the human’s mind, such incessant human confrontation is permeated by first nature’s “otherness” conceptual transcendence, thus imbuing the human with supplemental tensions originated by the urge to grasp its conception (cf. Harrison, 2008; cf. Hunt, 2000). Within the historical human relation to nature, first nature’s conception appears as an essential instrument for the human vision and organisation of the physical world where human existence is experienced (cf. Hunt, 2000). As the combination of nature and culture deliberately inscribed in the earth, thus invested with the distinctive aptitude of locating the human on the verge of nature whilst simultaneously opposing it, the garden enables a human mode of thinking with the earth within a historical relationship reciprocally moulding both the human and nature through time and space (cf. Carver, 2013; cf. Shapiro, 2013). In fact, the garden complies not with the human aspiration to bring order and control to nature, instead gives order to the human relation to nature via such collective mode of thinking and the attempted grasping of first nature’s “otherness” conceptual transcendence, thus alleviating the human from the tensions of nostalgia for first nature’s wilderness irrevocable unattainability and desires for the flower’s self-governing and pre-human intrinsic independence (cf. Harrison, 2008; cf. Shapiro, 2013). Recalling Nietzsche’s concept of the earth as the locale of known and embodied human existence, its interpretation by Shapiro as a concept more circumscribed than that of nature

70 Similarly, the appeal for a human abdication of functionality, in which the human plunges in a cave of “graves, bones, and decay”, and regression to wilderness, or unmediated earth, by means of renouncing “all fantasies of an extra-earthly world” and rejecting “the all too limited and measured satisfactions of the last humans”, enwraps an ethical judgment of functionality where earth is to be cultivated with care and passion liberated from functionality’s distortion and decadence, and announces earth’s wilderness, that which Nietzsche entitles as a vivid garden-scene, a utopic and paradisiac garden waiting for the human, “rich in vegetation, animal life, birdsong, attractive fragrances, and tempting food” (Shapiro, 2013: 70, 73). The garden as a representation of utopia, or different utopias, and their impossibility, is to be subsequently addressed. Escarduça 47

is to be noted (cf. Shapiro, 2013). If nature is ampler than the earth, it is considered that first nature’s “otherness” conceptual transcendence may be regarded as Nature, i.e. the metaphysical conception of the natural physical world. Extending the investigation of the garden’s historical faculty for inexhaustible representation and for multidisciplinary induction of values and meanings qualifying the garden as an object of culture analysis as intended by this report’s Part I, the following chapter departs from the human urge to grasp first nature’s “otherness” conceptual transcendence embedding the human relationship to nature as anteriorly presented and concentrates on the garden’s historical representations of various metaphysical conceptions of Nature. Nature is hereby regarded as the inter-relationships of man, nature and God which, traversing time and space, animate the philosophical paramount quest concerning the provenance of the many from the unitary, i.e. the organisation of both living and non-living individual things which cannot occur by themselves and whose experience’s assessment is necessarily dependant of higher degrees of unity (cf. Corrigan, 2005; cf. Gerson, 2014). The history of human culture accentuates ancient epochs’ elementary conceptions and classical and modern epochs’ metaphysical constructions of Nature, at intervals induced and decided by religion, which, influencing correspondent various schools of philosophy, in turn affect evolving embryonic and matured aesthetics attitudes, so infiltrating in artistic expression and artistic experience and, therewith, in the principles directing garden design as an object of culture and a work of art. Thus, the question addressed by the subsequent chapter is which Nature is represented by the garden. More correctly when considering the history of human culture, which Natures.

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Chapter 3 – The Garden as the Representation of Nature

Section 3.1 – Universal Nature and the Philosopher’s Garden Albeit incipient when compared to more sophisticated formulations, ancient understandings of the natural world and of its creation, profoundly intertwining with mythology and religion, such as Ancient Egypt’s, where gods control the natural world and kings incarnate gods, and Archaic Greece’s, where the gods of nature intervene in man’s quotidian life, are yet considered relevantly opportune to this section’s ambit as thematically introductory for subsequent formulations informed by reason and philosophy, those regarded as indubitably pertinent to this chapter’s scope, as such inciting their further detailingxxviii. Not disregarding sixth century BC Pythagorean School’s accent on a mathematic understanding of the world and the criteria for nature’s ordered beauty regulated by harmonic proportion71, a mathematical order criterion which is differently appropriated by subsequent culture contexts serving differing formulations of Nature, the succession of late second millennia BC and early first millennia BC Archaic Greek’s prevalence of mythology and religion by fourth century’s BC Classic Greek’s emphasis on reason and philosophy decisively inaugurates an evolving distinct attitude towards the investigation of Nature. In Republic, Plato asseverates Nature as the perfection’s apex of universal truth about reality, to be apprehended only by the superior rational mind entrusted with philosophical knowledge which, oriented by ethical standards, reasons about the physical world, incomparably supplanting both the deceiving condition of the immediacy’s sensorial experience and the pernicious penetration of the quotidian by censored patterns and models of exaggerated emotion prompted by Homeric anthropomorphic immoral godsxxix (cf. Janaway, 2001; cf. Turner, 2005). Oppositely to the tangible world, inasmuch as to tradition and to religion, Plato’s ultimate criteria of universal truth about Nature lies in an abstract realm, the world of Forms or Universals, corresponding to the eternal, inexhaustible and absolute archetypal assortment of primordial and unique essence of natural forms, which not only independently precede as from which proceed the multiplicity of their Instances manifesting in the physical world of space and time (cf. Janaway, 2001; cf. Turner, 2005). Such truth is to be conceptually found in “(…) all the forms or characters of things. Each is

71 Which, within artistic expression, finds illustration in Pythagoras’s mathematical proportion of music’s harmony (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 49

in itself one, but because they appear all over the place, through their association with activities and bodies and with one another, each gives the appearance of being many” (Plato, [2003]: 476a). To the Form of a table correspond different real existing types of tables, i.e. “(…) a certain form or character – single form or character, always - for each plurality of things to each we give the same name” (Plato, [2003]: 596a). When producing a specific table, the carpenter creates not what a table is, but something like its original Form, however rather shadowy when compared to the truth; the carpenter imitates the truth value contained in the Form of a table, and all craftsmen indeed limit to produce particular imitations of the real and true idea of a primordially and absolutely natural Form (cf. Plato, [2003]). Hence, just as an individual’s eyesight may deceive his visual perception of things72, so imitation’s ethical destructive influence must be purged from the decent man’s nature and habits of body, speech, and mind (cf. Plato, [2003]). Accordingly, having deduced the presence of two contradictory and conflicting parts of the man’s soul73, the only acceptable arts are those who represent the order of natural and universal truth and whose ethical effect does not corrupt the good part of the man’s soul, while, evidencing the antagonism between the arts and philosophical reason, the inferior arts which recur to imitation74 are to be censored and stigmatized, since they operate in a domain distant from the true essence of natural things and ideas, as Plato extensively discusses75, and combine with the inferior part of the soul within a “(…) liaison and friendship from which nothing healthy or true can result” (cf. Janaway, 2001; cf. Plato [2003]: 603b). The design and use of a particular type of outdoor space involving the harmony of the body, the mind, and the spirit is impacted by Plato’s ethics and metaphysics. Profiting from peaceful ages between Greek city-states assured by Pericles’ commanding granting the secure liberty to egress from the city’s fortified walls and escape from the city’s commotion,

72 Plato exemplifies with the case of a rod when submerged in water; although appearing to bent, in truth it is straight (cf. Plato, [2003]). 73 That which is superior, calm and thoughtful, unpolluted commanded by truth and by the ordered rule of intelligence and the rational, and that which is inferior, indulgent and disordered, irrationally and affectedly biased by frenzied emotions, desires and drama and unruly distanced from the absolute truth (cf. Plato, [2003]: 603a, 439c-441c). 74 Plato’s focuses chiefly in painting, which creates merely appearances of things, as such twice removed from the truth, in poetry and tragedy, which recur uniquely to imitative discourse, in epic poetry, which combines imitative discourse and simple narrative, in songs’ and music’s composing elements of words, harmonic mode and rhythm, and further briefly generalises to other crafts and artistic practices, such as embroidery, weaving or building. Plato envisions imitation as per the concept of “image-making: making something that is not a real thing, but merely an image of a thing”, i.e. Plato addresses mimesis, regardless of not employing the term, yet regarded as a underlying concept of paramount relevancy in Republic (cf. Janaway, 2001). 75 Plato’s argument is further detailed in this report’s Part II. Escarduça 50

philosophers and their disciples withdraw to the serenity of surrounding groves, as such transformed in momentous locations of reunion instructed by reason and philosophy, as antecedently mentioned in (iv). Additionally to the educational facet comprising rhetoric and mathematics, invigorating exercise and reposing quietude are equally glorified (cf. Turner, 2005). Therefore, oppositely to the falsehood of imitative artistic adornments, the philosopher’s outdoor space where the universal truth about Nature is investigated through its absolute Forms is an existing grove of calmness where the tutor and disciples wander or seat while delving in the observation and experience of nature, the debate of the natural order and the relations between man, nature and the gods, further equipped with wrestling schools, stadiums for gymnastics and races, open colonnades for exercise and shade, pools for thermal baths, shelters and specialised yards for the educational and therapeutic practices76 (cf. Turner, 2005).

Section 3.2 – Divine Nature and the Monastery Garden Amongst Plato’s numerous paramount contributions to Western culture thus stands the conception of Nature as the abstract realm of essential Forms and only thereafter the physical world’s Instances. Oppositely, or complementarily, to the Platonic exclusiveness – either imitation or truth –, the Theory of Forms is subsequently relieved by Plotinus’ Neoplatonism77 from such exclusiveness. Organised according to the three basic and hierarchical principles of the One, the Intellect and the Soul, and the concept of emanation, the Neoplatonic metaphysical system is metaphorically conceptualised as the uncontrived and all-encompassing radiation of light from a transcendent central luminous mass, simultaneously immanent and omnipresent as it is undiminished by such radiation, mentally represented as a circle concentrically unfolding itself in successive circles whose centre, the core, is the circle itself (cf. Armstrong, 1937;

76 Such distinct uses of sacred groves surrounding the acropolis establishes the etymology of various adopted terms for educational infrastructures: gymnasium, from gumnos, standing for naked and gumnazo for exercise; academy, from Plato’s grove of Academe, named after the hero Academus; lyceum, from Aristotle’s grove of Lyceum, whose name relates to Lukeion, an epithet of Apollo; wrestling schools were designated as palaestra; the merging of intellectual, artistic and physical concerns and activities is found in universities’ campus or great sports complexes throughout the times, thus illustrating the historical and cultural relevance of the Classical Greece philosophers’ outdoor space (cf. Turner, 2005). 77 To which parallelly, equally noticeably, is to mention Aristotles’ opposing argument to Plato who, previously to Plotinus, in Poetics, while averting metaphysical considerations, instead thoroughly and analytically investigates poetry, clearly discharging imitation and image-making practices as ethically corrosive to the individual’s soul, as further mentioned in this report’s Part II. Escarduça 51

cf. Corrigan, 2005; cf. Gerson, 2014). The hierarchic system of principles and the process of emanation, which organizes the spiritual, the intelligible, the sensible and the real according to radiation, i.e. from an indivisible transcendent unity as the source of all being, existence and experience, and their progressive dividing derivations in which light is the binding element, indeed observes the world of Platonic Forms or Universals; simultaneously, Platonic ethics of goodness and truth is observed by Plotinus’ introduction of a mutual and reciprocal concentration of such hierarchic system, since a reductionist path contrary to radiation from the tangibility of existing things to the truth of Forms is necessarily comprised in the process of emanation, progressively integrating the world’s complexity and imperfection to the One’s simplicity and purity (cf. Armstrong, 1937; cf. Corrigan, 2005; cf. Gerson, 2014). By reason that all forms of the visible world emanate from a transcendent supreme being not directly apprehended and only mystically sensed and are formed in the image of an eternal Form, the arts are exempted from imitation78. Plotinus argues in The Enneads’ On Intellectual Beauty tractate by reason of the universal Forms of Beauty and Wisdom embedded in the work of art, in which emanation’s mutually dependent flows of radiation from the centre into its derivations and concentration of such derivation into unity are implicitly discernible, so ensuring art’s exemption from imitation, for the artwork is bestowed as an object of contemplation of the higher in the lowerxxx. In other words, “to admire a representation is to admire the original upon which it was made” (Plotinus, [2018]: 409). Mimesis is thus ethically reconciled with the world’s Truth by the Neoplatonic postulate that art is to imitate Nature, and artists are to create many particulars in order to grasp and to convey the clearest possible impression of the eternal Forms, thenceforth profusely influencing different Western varied aesthetics currents of artistic expression and artistic experience, within which the garden is included (cf. Turner, 2005). Initially steered by St. Augustine’s Christian reading of Plotinus’ pagan Neoplatonism, such influence is noted in Early Middle Age Christianity’s esteem for Plato’s argument that reason implies the existence of a perfect world, envisioned as the transcendent and vertically hierarchised order of things as God’s divine creation extended to the humblest organism via

78 The paramount importance of Plotinus’s process of emanation to the absolution of the arts from imitation incites its thorough investigation as presented in Annex C, complementarily to the synthesis presented in the preceding paragraphs. Escarduça 52

angels, saints, mankind and the animal kingdom, and revealed to man through religion as the exclusive test of truth, so demoting reason to the status of an argument for faith complying with the scriptures’ theological moral, natural and historical doctrine, and discouraging individual opinion and innovation (cf. Turner, 2005). Analogously to Plotinus’s pagan system of emanation from the One, since natural forms and everything in the visible world is God’s divine creation, imitative arts, and specifically to this section’s interest, monastery cloister gardens, are validated as symbolic expressions enabling the scripture’s doctrinal exegesis and the devoted contemplation of God’s perfection (cf. Turner, 2005). Considered lexicological symbols of the God’s language speaking to man and methodically arranged within the work of art’s composition in their individuality to disclose and glorify the divisions and subdivisions of the universe’s transcendent order, Christianity embraces the symbolism of composing elements in artistic practices79; numbers are accordingly assigned with symbolic meaning: incepted by Vitruvius’ acclaim of four as the number of man by reason that the distance between man’s extended arms equals his height, squares are regarded to manifest the relationship between man and God80 and five as the number enhancing the rose’s significance and its five petals81; colours are equally imbued with symbolism82 (cf. Turner, 2005). Convergently to such artistic symbolism, and resonating the Pythagorean orderly beauty of Nature’s physical forms, numbers and mathematic order are charged with further prominence by St. Augustine translating Christian austerity, since numbers and proportion create equality and order, in turn conveying the unity of universal Forms, so infusing the mathematic and regular order of geometry and symmetry in artistic expression (cf. Turner, 2005). Simultaneously, commanded by religion, divine beauty imposes Early Middle Ages’ garden makers to abjure earthiness, thus dictating their God-inspired design to exclude representations of human forms, regarded as profane, the presence of pagan gods, identified

79 Such as a vase of red and white roses with thorns, picturing martyrs and virgins surrounded by their persecutors, the ascendance of Virgin Mary to heaven as represented by the flourishing of roses and lilies in her tomb, the tortured flesh of a Christian martyr as an expression of his brilliant interior beauty, or the rose petals’ blooming and evanescence as the germination and terminus of the human circle of life (cf. Turner, 2005). 80 Quadrate forms are assumed to represent the Holy Cross, the four winds, the four seasons, or other sets of four, such as the four rivers of Eden, as addressed subsequently in the chapter concerning the garden’s dimension as a representation of paradise and, or utopia (cf. Turner, 2005). 81 Pentad forms are associated to the five books of Moses, the five wounds of Christ and other pentads (cf. Turner, 2005). 82 White for virginity, red for Christ’s blood, blue for truth and justice (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 53

as malignant and deceitful demons, and any connotation to paganism, such as sacred groves, statues, and sanctuaries (cf. Turner, 2005). Monastery gardens thus assume an abstract and geometric design, which, furthermore, is to exalt restraint from material luxury, exuberant recreation, sensorial beauty and immoral lust, regarded as the soul’s perils, and to translate asceticism, so obeying to the monastic tradition descending from the Egyptian Christian monk St. Anthony of the Desert83 (cf. Turner, 2005). Once adopting Christianity after 313 AD, the Roman Empire radiates the sowing of monasticism during the fourth and fifth centuries84; the monastery garden thus becomes a microcosm revealing the perfection of nature by the work of Divine Providence85, whose reduced enclosed area symbolises and imposes absolute abstinence for mundane and material passions and vertically induces the contemplative eyesight towards the divine grace of the macrocosm, composed by a perfectly proportioned square interior cloister, a peripheral colonnaded court and arcades mathematically disposed, an unroofed centre area, i.e. deriving from Roman peristyle courts, and its planted area, designated as garth86, corresponding exclusively to a grass planted area deprived of ornamental elements, often including a pentagonal in a circular basin, located either in the centre or at the edge87 (cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Turner, 2005). Similarly, initiating in the seventh century and evolving in the following centuries, Islamic gardens representing divine beauty and perfection adopt akin design criteria of symmetry and absence of anthropomorphic references, as Islam philosophers are influenced by Plato and Plotinus, and inherit the First Persian Empire’s

83 Who abnegated his father’s estate heritage to the poor’s benefaction imaging Christ’s self-denial and poverty, and, brimful of inner peace, goodness and simplicity, lived in remote isolation and dispossession cultivating a modest garden in the late second and early third centuries (cf. Turner, 2005). 84 Expanding from West Asia to the northern regions of Europe for the five centuries following Rome’s fall in 476 AD within a continent of warring factions where the Roman Catholic Church stands as the only regulatory institution and, observing the Christian doctrine (cf. Turner, 2005). 85 Contemporary literature illustrates: in The Name of the Rose, Eco has the herbalist monk Severinus of Sankt Wende describing the monastery gardens dedicated to as “In summer or spring, through the variety of its plants, each then adorned with its flowers, this garden sings better the praises of the Creator” (Eco, 1984: 43) 86 Adding to the garden’s etymology comments previously advanced: cloister relates to enclosure and garth to garden, although medieval garths corresponded only to a grass planted area deprived of ornamental plants (cf. Turner, 2005). 87 The plan of St. Gall, in Switzerland, monastic architecture’s oldest existing document dating from the early ninth century, is regarded as a model for the ideal monastic cloister design, evincing a perfect square area, proportioned and symmetric colonnades, arcades and buttresses, and a quadripartite garth with symmetrical crossing paths (cf. Turner, 2005). Records exist of other notable monastic cloister gardens, such as San Lorenzo fuori le Mura, in Rome, and Salisbury Cathedral’s, in Wiltshire, albeit such monastic gardens design trace has been transformed across the centuries; further cloister examples correspond to Monasterio de Pedralbes’s, in Spain, San Giovanni’s, in Rome, and Westminster Abbey’s, in London (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 54

observance of order, in turn assimilated from Mesopotamia’s pre-Islamic Persia religious heritage of Zoroastrianism (cf. Turner, 2005). Albeit differentiated in their function and degree of adornment, Islamic palace gardens and mosques’ gardens observe similar design criteria, since religion permeates every life’s dimensionsxxxi. Either Christian or Islamic, God’s beauty is the apex of perfection and of Middle Ages’ arts; oppositely to an end themselves, Middle Age’s arts serve the representation and contemplation of divine truth forbidding the human reference via abstract mathematic patterns and compositions while simultaneously firmly resorting to visual symbolism (cf. Turner, 2005).

Section 3.3 – The Nature of Human Reason and Renaissance’s Garden Partially due to Byzantine philosophers’ and artist’s exodus on the aftermath of Constantinople’s fall to the hand of the Turkish invasion in 1453, to the migration of ideas accompanying trade in the Mediterranean reaching the shores of Italy, and a myriad of other factors, Medieval philosophy’s test of truth afforded only by faith is surmounted by the Italian Renaissance Humanism’s restoration of reason as the ultimate criteria of truth, the prescription of its diffusion in every branch of knowledge and artistic creation, and the encouragement of individual reasoning (cf. Turner, 2005). Containing many schools of thought, Renaissance Humanism is not attained by a conclusive single formula; however much, common denominators, propositions, and attitudes are discernible, such as an indissociable conjugation of form and substance arousing man’s will informed by reason at the service of virtuexxxii (cf. Gray, 1963). Similarly to scholastic monasticism, Renaissance scholars-artists envision mathematics as fundamental to Nature’s perception and representation88; however, Renaissance’s Humanist mathematical conception of Nature is aroused not by religion and God’s order, rather by man’s mathematics order89, to which contribute the prominence reacquired by Vitruvius’s classic prescripts of proportion90 and the enthusiasm for the

88 God is alleged as a mathematician himself (cf. Turner, 2005). 89 A disjunction supremely illustrated by the Vitruvian Man: oppositely to the Medieval Christianity geometrical adherence of man to the order of God grounded on the square determined by the man’s extended arms and his height as previously mentioned, Da Vinci’s diagram abstains from religious references and enhances the relationship between square, the circle and the human body (cf. Turner, 2005). 90 In De architecture libri decem (The Ten Books on Architecture), Vitruvius’s classical manual for various structures’ design as formerly mentioned, which, singularly relevant, is encountered in 1415 in the medieval and monastic Abbey of St. Gall referenced in previous paragraphs, whose preservation is greatly due to Escarduça 55

geometry of circles, squares, proportions and geometric patterns fostered by Euclid’s Golden Section, while eminently, the theory of linear perspective is incepted and expansively explored in artistic expression, including garden making and the integration of the architectural presence of palatial construction and its accompanying garden, as if the villa’s house is an ornament to the garden inasmuch as the garden is a setting for the villa’s house (cf. Turner, 2005). Furthermore, notwithstanding its Christian religious context, Renaissance’s Humanism reconciles with Classical Greek’s and Ancient Asian’s pagan cultures, fostering the resurgence of and the allure for such heritage91 as ethical allegories mediating the world’s and Nature’s representation and understanding, so assumed as inspirational references for the arts, evinced by the imagery of Renaissance’s garden sculpture (cf. Turner, 2005). Under the Medici’s auspice, Villa Careggi is Renaissance’s epicentre in the fifteenth century’s second half by means of the inauguration of the Platonic Academy in 1462, to whose garden’s haven converge in the following decades a spirited and energetic community of leading scholars, philosophers, poets, artists, devoted to the beautiful and divine, the poetic and mythic, and to the quest for Platonic wisdom by means of the systematic and rigorous study of rhetoric, jurisprudence, ethics, music, and metaphysics within an atmosphere of salutary discussion and camaraderie, and advocating for observation, reflection and perception of natural forms as rational contemplation of Platonic Forms, so regarded as the necessary condition for artistic creation and beauty’s experience, thus observing the Neoplatonic postulate that art is to imitate Nature92(cf. Harrison, 2008: 105-107; cf. Turner, 2005: 219). Passionately emphasising the spiritual transcendent order of an ideal of beauty according to Plato’s legacy, the Academy is envisaged by the Humanists as the enchanted place where the divine harmoniously reconjoins with the human; nevertheless, oppositely to the monastic silent and contemplation of God, whose vertical oriented flux is grounded by the pursuit to elevate the human towards the divine, the Academy summons the gods to descend to earth and commune with the

Charlemagne and the efforts of his court of religious scholars of the Carolingian Renaissance to preserve and rewrite Classical manuscripts, the relational proportioned dimensions of peristyles, columns and colonnades is prescribed as: “Peristyles, lying athwart, should be one third longer than they are deep, and their columns as high as the colonnades are wide. Intercolumniations of peristyles should be not less than three nor more than four times the thickness of the columns. If the columns of the peristyle are to be made in the Doric style, take the modules which I have given in the fourth book, on the Doric order, and arrange the columns with reference to these modules and to the scheme of the triglyphs” (Vitruvius, as cited in Turner, 2005: 101). 91 With prominent contribution by the Medici dynasty as previously mentioned. 92 Erasmus argues that the Humanism’s man imitation of other beings affords the faculty to represent himself, his mind and ideas (Erasmus, as cited in cf. Gray, 1963: 513). Escarduça 56

human in the garden of philosophy (cf. Harrison, 2008: 106-108). In other words, if knowledge of Nature is afforded via the Greek and Roman Classics, Renaissance gardens patronised not by the Church in monasteries but by privileged and educated men in their villas and palaces is to emulate the gardens of Classic Roman villas93 (cf. Turner, 2005). Classical models’ imitation corresponds to the translation of knowledge and activation of action to the attainment of a virtuous life (cf. Gray, 1963). Oppositely to the Medieval cloister’s verticalised contemplation axis worshipping God’s transcendent order, Early Renaissance period’s restoration dynamics of Classical culture initiated in Florence in the fifteenth century so inaugurates and patronises several Albertinian villas and gardens94, still places of retreat and contemplation, albeit differently oriented by horizontal axis privileging ampleness oppositely to Medieval cloister’s closeness, symbolising Humanism’s possibility of an immanent intellectual human intuition of universal order and its attainment via the garden’s exploration, evoking Classical Greece’s philosophy’s and reason’s gardens of Plato, Epicurus and others, whose prevailing ideas are plenitude and perfection, reinforced by astrological and mythological symbolism, whose composing elements, through analogy and similitude, intend to correspond to the cosmos, as such envisioned not as “opening onto a free and unregulated nature but as exhibiting in miniature the structure and contents of a universal order” (Shapiro, 2004: 109; cf. Turner, 2005). The Renaissance’s garden so emerges as an object of study for humanists, in which

art neither dominates nature (as in Versailles, for example) nor flatters nature (as in eighteenth-century English landscape gardens), but instead collaborates with nature to create a humanised space that is at once highly formal and perfectly “natural,” in the sense that it puts nature’s species and landscapes on informal display95 (Harrison, 2008: 86).

93 Due to this report’s thematic organisation, the Classic Roman villas’ and houses’ garden design is to be detailed in the following chapter addressing the garden as the representation of political, social, economic and technological context. 94 The Albertinian designation results of Leon Baptista Alberti’s On the Art of Building design standards on architecture and gardens dating from 1485, considered to have been much inspired by Pliny the Younger’s letters describing the enchantment of his villa’s gardens and the delights of his activities, and observing Vitruvius’ Ten Books on Architecture (cf. Turner, 2005). 95 Harrison’s reference for Versailles’ Cartesian Illuminism nature domination and, or, British Empiric Romanticism nature flatter indubitably resonates chapter 2’s concept of third nature in its varied formalisations by man across centuries as translated by the garden; simultaneously, when referencing the Renaissance’s garden as nature’s neither dominant nor flatter intervention by man, Harrison’s account however appears incongruent with chapter 2’ argument that the garden, either in its most embryonic version such as the mere fenced enclosure nearby the entrance of a Neolithic sheltering cave granting protection as mentioned in chapter 2’ introductory paragraphs or in its more sophisticated design such as Italian Humanist Renaissance’s is not a third nature’s manifestation, rather a balance between man and nature, so corresponding not to a third nature manifestation and even not to a second nature’s, so contradicting chapter 2’s line of thought. Nevertheless, Escarduça 57

Renaissance’s palace and villa’s gardens include a geometrical relationship with the palatial house, square and rectangular terraces and clipping edges at various horizontal plans96 resembling castle ramparts accompanying natural slopes and hills much as appreciated by Pliny, where square and rectangular planting beds are disposed and topiary is planted in patterned curved and liners shapes much similarly to Asian carpets patterns and inspired by the Golden Section, as such arousing the designation of “knot gardens”, whose order, unity and regularity is to be appreciated from the above garden horizontal terraces or the villa’s windows, the restoration of pagan statuary’s pedestal and the re-enactment of pagan myths, fountains and other symbolic scenes inspired by Classical Greece’s and Rome’s literature of Homer and Ovid97, neglected by Medieval thinkers on account of their paganism, while plant collections congregate artistic and scientific interests, so intellectually contrasting the Middle Ages monasteries’ physical, spiritual and intellectual inwardness and closeness of the hortus conclusus (cf. Turner, 2005). Roman High Renaissance’s Belvedere Court98 comprises an emphatic central axis, monumental stairways between unlevelled spacious terraces as partial enclosures, niches and fountains arranged in relation to the axis design layout, numerous and noble antique pagan statuary, flowers and fruit trees in terracotta pots disposed in geometrically arranged sand or gravel pathways and a garden theatre, and is to influence Renaissance’s garden design

Harrison’s quote is yet regarded as illustratively relevant to chapter 3’s thematic ambit, as following defended. Furthermore, such possible misleading lapse is curiously responded by Harrison himself, as such granting its advancement with reliant confidence and restoring conceptual coherence with chapter 2. Harrison relies on Boccaccio’s description of the Renaissance garden’s experience, previously referenced. Indeed, when commenting Boccaccio’s description of the Renaissance’s villa garden, Harrison stresses its double oppositeness: on one hand, an Edenic evocation beyond any measure of realism resulting of the plenitude of flora and fauna and of the peaceful inwardness granted to its visitors, so inflaming a pristine realm of purity inducing the ideal of first nature; on the other hand, and contrarily, the harmonious composition of its individual elements and their carefully and enchanting engineered artifices, emphasising that such garden ultimately is a human creation and intervention in nature (Harrison, 2008: 87). The realm of third nature is as such confirmed. Moreover, Harrison envisions Boccaccio’s tale not as a doctrine, rather a particularly extraordinary and refined style of storytelling, “at once lucid and complex, bold and subtle, colloquial and learned” (Harrison, 2008: 90). Such observation is regarded to clearly evoke Gray’s observations on Humanism’s general conception of eloquence as referred in (xxxii), thus strengthening the relevance of Harrison’s observations to this chapter 3. 96 To which further appends the affording of perspective vistas of the external, long distant, wild nature, as opposed to the internal, proximate, and humanly intervened nature as mentioned in chapter 2. 97 As stressed by Gray, and illustrated in (xxxii). 98 Referencing Rome’s early XVI centrury enterprise to outrank Florence’s Early Renaissance dynamics; the Belvedere Court was however ravaged decades later before completion when the Protestant peril induced the Roman Church to restore austere criteria, thus eradicating pagan statuary and theatre from gardens and ordering the construction of a theological library across the court (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 58

authorial numerous variations in impressive noble villas and palaces in Europe, which are to include also ornamented grottoes, parterres and colourful tiles decorative panels, resulting of Humanism’s simultaneous discernible common attitudes, following the masters, and individual intellectual perspectives99, as mentioned when referencing Gray in previous paragraphs and in (xxxii), so categorised as fifteenth century’s Renaissance Mannerismxxxiii (cf. Turner, 2005).

Section 3.4 – Enlightened Nature and the Cartesian Garden Seventeenth century’s acceleration of reason and science prompted by “non-specialist” Humanist men of sciences, letters, philosophy, theology, arts, education, government, prominently its mathematics’ augmenting advancements in geometry, optics, perspective, statics, kinematics, mechanics, contribute to the understanding of the sensorial world100 evincing a vision of Nature as the human dominion101, the Enlightenment “scientific revolution” bringing light to earlier dogmas, reluctantly yet eventually accepted both by the Catholics and Protestants to the Church authority’s and religious faith’s progressive decline as the orthodoxic test of truth. Relevantly, such Nature conception is permeated by the Cartesian interpretation of Neoplatonism (cf. Turner, 2005). Cartesian rationalism and mechanical philosophy agglomerate the epistemological immanence of the methodical doubt, which introduces the paramount question of certainty beyond doubt in the pursuit of knowledge, to the formulation of a metaphysical conception of Nature and existence, clearly and distinctly demonstrating the incontrovertible ontological dualism of mind and matter comprising a Nature’s system of substances and essences governed by God’s created laws of Nature, validly explaining existence only if by means of intellectual reason as opposed to sensorial experience and imagination102. Cartesianism so

99 Additionally to concrete examples mentioned in (56) and (59), notorious gardens evincing Early Renaissance’s design are Villa di Careggi, La Petraia or Edzell Castle, the latter in Scotland, and displaying High Renaissance’s design are Villa Madama, , Wallenstein Garden in Prague, Fronteira Palace in Portugal, or the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris; with regard to Renaissance’s Mannerist period, illustrative examples are Villa d’Este, Villa Lante, Villa Orsini, Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola the Hellbrun in Salzburg (cf. Turner, 2005). 100 Such as Copernicus’, Galilei’s, Kepler’s and Newton’s conjoined works consolidating the heliocentric model of the universe’s organisation (cf. Turner, 2005). 101 As previously introduced by chapter 2, referencing the concept of third nature as formulated during the Renaissance period and, as a Renaissance’s thought, inpired and incited by the concept of second nature as formulated during the Classic Roman period. 102 Further detail on the Cartesian formulation of Nature is presented in Annex C, similarly to the aforementioned Neoplatonism’s. Escarduça 59

insinuates the world to be created and explained by optics and geometry, albeit resorting to some sense of an artifice when only so suggesting, and when observing that it is “more plausible that from the beginning God made it as it was to be” and that it is certain that “the act by which He conserves the world is the same as that by which he created”103 (cf. Descartes, 1637 [2006]: 38). Albeit Cartesianism addresses not aesthetics, artistic expression and, to this report’s interest, garden design, the Cartesian interpretation of Neoplatonic conceptions, concealed by its rationalist philosophy and by the postulate that reason and science reveal Nature to man, so inspire artists to emphasise man’s reason and intellectual certainty according to “rules of taste” observing mathematical order while, inheriting from Renaissance’s appraisal for Classic antiquity, appeal to long-accepted standards such as Euclid’s Golden Section, so penetrating the arts and fomenting the Baroque artistic period, accompanied by garden art, thence regulating garden design according to the scientific rigidity of geometry and perspective (cf. Turner, 2005). Equally contributing to the Baroque period as its preamble, inheriting its composing elements such as a plan of axes which, while still confined within the garden enclosure, nevertheless acquire powerful push against and beyond permeable boundaries departing from the man’s architectural central presence and combining a geometrically traced grid of transverse, cross and radial large avenues as mentioned in chapter 2, so contrasting Renaissance’s prior composition codes of simplicity, Baroque artists chiefly amplify Renaissance Mannerism’s momentum for an intellectual and artistic personal signature and, favoured by an array of technological advancements endowed by geometry, optics, perspective, cartography, hydraulics and engineering, orient their design creations to integrative compositions of a multiplicity of phenomena which escalate Mannerism’s tendency for dynamism, novelty, openness and drama to the pinnacle of grandeur, extravaganza, exuberance, movement, surprise, invention, enchantment and energy (cf. Turner, 2005). Garden design integrates relentless rectilinear axial symmetry

103 In A Discourse on the Method, with a sense of autobiographical narrative, Descartes often alludes to his discoveries explained “in a treatise which certain considerations prevent me from publishing” (Descartes, 1637 [2006]: 35). However, Descartes only briefly describes such discoveries, resorting to the strategic artifice of God’s creation of the world plausability. Such treatise is regarded as the at that date unpublished The World, or Treatise on the Light, an ambitious account of the physical world on mechanistic principles, in which albeit the realms of geometry and physics are somehow mutually entangled addressing bodies in three.dimensioal space since bodies and space are not distinguished as both derive from matter, whose publication is deliberately supressed on the aftermath of the penalties and severities endured by Galileo, Copernicus and others for advocating an heliocentric theory as mentioned in (96) (cf. Maclean, 2006). Escarduça 60

aided by perspective and optical effects various optical effects controlling and manipulating the observer’s perceptual experience, geometrically regular-shaped elaborate parterres of clipped boxwood, plants, flowers and woods as resultant of the variously directed avenues which not only unify the garden’s elements in harmonised discipline, proportion, diversity and novelty but also the monumental architecture and surrounding landscape’s or distant symbolic focal points, each and all in relations with each other, while the artistry of theatrical drama is conveyed by coloured gravel traced ornate patterns, exquisite topiary green walls, terraces at various levels adapting to landform, pathways, stairways and bridges, the crucial abundance of elaborate hydraulic works of canals, basins, fountains, pools, cascades flowing and sprinkling streams of water, sculpture and an array of adornments and virtuoso features incrusted in exotic sculptural frames, bosquets or groves adjacent to the large avenues as intimate areas balancing the centre’s formality and rigidity104 (cf. Ross, 1998; cf. Turner, 2005). Oppositely to contemplation and retreat, overwhelmingly subjugating nature, world, and earth to pure form under the Humanist proud and fierce hands of the omnipresent evidence of man’s scientific will and potency to control God’s random and chaotic creation of matter to the point of its extinction105, so proclaiming man as “the master and possessor of nature”, “an aesthetic drive to tame, and even humiliate, nature into submission”, the Cartesian garden’s emphatically rigorous and symmetrical design of the Baroque period, inspired by its correspondent metaphysical conception of Nature, while not mirroring nature, represents Nature in its temporal and spatial context as “a demonstration of the human ability to shape, structure and master human and natural forces, subordinating them to a central plan” (Harrison, 2008: 111; Descartes, as cited in Harrison, 2008: 113; Shapiro, 2004: 109).

Section 3.5 – Unadorned Nature and Romantic Gardens

104 The evolutive and vigorous permeation of geometry and perspective in garden design as introduced by Bramante from the High Renaissance period to the Baroque period is synthesised as: Belvedere Court’s single axis, Renaissance Mannerism’s transverse axis and focal points within boundaries, Italy’s Early Baroque period with strong and transverse axes and remote focal points, illustrated by the cases of Villa Montalto, in Rome, Villa Ludovisi, Villa Mondragone and Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati, Villa Garzoni in Collodi, Isola Bella in Lake Magiore, France’s High Baroque period with radiating and cross axes and external focal points, whose monumental examples are Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles; Baroque garden design expanded from France to Europe with different accents, such as the cases of Drottningholm, in Sweden, Het Loo in the , Nymphenburg and Grosser Garten in , The Belvedere Garden in Austria, the Peterhof, in Russia, Queluz Palace in Portugal, or La Granja.in Spain (cf. Turner, 2005). 105 Harrison references that which Saint Simon describes as ce plaisir superbe de forcer la nature (Harrison, 2008: 109). Escarduça 61

Altering Enlightenment ideals burgeoning during the seventh century and flourishing in the eighteenth century contend Cartesian rationalism, as it is regarded as unenlightened and unnatural to man (cf. Turner, 2005). Amongst the Enlightenment men of letters and science stands Alexander Pope who, addressing poetry’s critics in An Essay on Criticism, acutely censures deformed judgment and taste when cultivated by false learning, since they apart from nature, which plants their seed:

If we look more closely, we shall find Most have the seeds of judgment in their mind: Nature affords at least a glimm’ring light; The lines though touch’d but faintly are drawn right; But as the slightest sketch, if justly trac’d, Is by ill-colouring but be more disgrac’d, So by false learning is good sense defac’d: Some are bewilder’d in the of schools, And some made coxcombs Nature meant but fools, In search of wit these lose their common sense And then turn critics in their own defense: (Pope, 1711 [1812]: 19-29).

Pope further stresses that judgment and taste are determined by Nature and recommends no further ambition:

Be sure yourself and your own reach to know, How far your genius, taste, and learning go; Launch not beyond your depth, but be discreet, And mark that point where sense and dullness meet. Nature to all things fix’d the limits fit, And wisely curb’d proud man’s pretending wit. (Pope, 1711 [1812]: 48-53).

Thus, Pope urges for judgment to observe nature and exalts Nature, one invariable and universal light divinely bright, as the source of life, force, beauty, and art, inasmuch as the latter’s end and test, however much a Nature whose liberty is not to be restrained by method, but to follow primordial Nature’s rules:

First follow Nature, and your judgment By her just standard, which is still the same: Unerring nature! still divinely bright, One clear, unchang’d, and universal light, Life, force, and beauty, must to all impart, At once the source, and end, and test of art. (…) Escarduça 62

Those Rules of old, discover’d, not devised, Are Nature still, but Nature methodiz’d: Nature, like liberty, is but restrain’d By the same laws which first herself ordain’d (Pope, 1711 [1812]: 68-73; 88-91).

The old rules of Nature are regarded as Plato’s Universal Forms: “Hear how learn’d Greece her useful rules ordain’d”; whereas, elsewhere, Pope further addresses nature in some fashion resonating intact wild nature, that which is referenced as unadorned nature in chapter 2 and is prominently reinstituted with energetic interest106 (Pope, 1711 [1812]: 92; cf. Turner, 2005). Pope’s contributions, amongst various other from fellow Enlightenment men, incite the emergence of a philosophical current exhorting a differing Nature’s conception and apprehension from Cartesian rationalism. Equivalently, noticing Pope’s assertion of nature as the source of art, an alternate interpretation of the Neoplatonic artistic axiom that art is to imitate nature contrasting Renaissance’s and ’s is begotten, reverencing nature’s preservation in its wilderness and comprehensive diversity of natural elements as man’s and nature’s balance observing a natural law and their sensorial experience and apprehension as indeed existing and observed, so discarding the Baroque symbolising character of the human’s rational power107 (cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Turner, 2005). Such alternate interpretation of the Neoplatonic postulate is conducted by the Empiricism current with numerous contributions emphasising the sensorial experience of nature and art for the judgment of beauty, encompassing the paramount development of aesthetics as a philosophical science throughout the eighteenth century108. Rather of envisioning Nature as the nature of the world, as antecedently, Empiricism’s Nature corresponds to the world of nature, the nature’s particulars and everything which is not human – resonating the idea of first nature –, as such introducing once more a distinct interpretation of the Neoplatonic axiom that art is to imitate nature (cf. Turner, 2005). Empiricism is translated by the garden by means of the presentation of an ample range of natural, artificial and emotional phenomena (cf. Turner, 20015). Subsequently to late

106 Turner cites Pope’s On gardens’, dated from 1713 and published in The Guardian: “the amiable Simplicity of unadorned Nature, that spreads over the Mind a more noble sort of Tranquillity, and a loftier Sensation of Pleasure, than can be raised from the nicer Scenes of Art” (Pope, as cited in Turner, 2005: 29). 107 As also from Middle Ages’, which imbued theological doctrine in the Neoplatonic metaphysical nature’s conception. 108 Following previous remarks concerning Middle Ages’ Neoplatonism and Enlightenment’s Cartesianism, eighteenth century’s Empiricism is more expansively detailed in Annex C, albeit such perspective is yet inescapably a brief summary, in face of such period’s momentous aesthetical and philosophical production. Escarduça 63

seventeenth century’s Forest style, which incipiently ransoms the idea of unadorned nature to be sensorial experienced in its garden’s specific appearances dismissing the scientific artificiality incrusted by geometry as referenced in chapter 2, such tendency enters the eighteenth century’s first half to alteredly disembogue on the Augustan style109, a guardian of the Forest style’s values and ideals while, simultaneously, professedly thematic in its Neoclassical embracement, exaltation and resurgence of Classical mythology, arts and culture110, as the rationally Enlightened and natural to man aesthetic and artistic response to the Cartesian reason supremacy, as such prioritising values of temperance, honour and civility contesting the human reasons’ inflicted excesses in nature (cf. Turner, 2005). Once more, Pope’s verses, accompanied by other early eighteenth-century Augustan men of Light, are elucidatory of such Neoclassicism in various acclaims to Greek poetry:

Be Homer’s works your study and delight, Read them by day, and meditate by night; (…) When first young Maro in his boundless mind A work t’ outlast immortal Rome design’d, Perhaps he seem’d above the critics’ law, And but from Nature’s fountains scorn’d to draw: But when t’ examine ev’ry part he came, Nature and Homer were, he found, the same. (…) Learn hence from ancient rules a just esteem; To copy Nature is to copy them. (Pope, 1711 [1812]: 124-125; 130-135; 139-140).

Similarly to Pope’s poetry, Claude Lorrain’s painting inspired by landscape vistas from Greece and Italy, and not by in-walled residential and palatial man-made gardens, finds adherence to Homer’s wordsxxxiv, and is admired for its romanticised representation of harmony between man, nature and the gods as an idealised world of Classical sacred groves adorned with temples, populated by gods, heroes and shepherds and emphatically inspired in Classic mythology. The Augustan drive fosters “natural and polite gardening”, allying forest style’s nature reverence and preservation to the influence of the genius loci111 (cf. Turner, 2005). Hence,

109 The term results from the intended recreation of Rome’s brilliance during Emperor Augustus period (cf. Turner, 2005). 110 To which contributed the archaeological discovery of Pompeii (cf. Turner, 2005). 111 The Classical religious concept of a place’s divine guarding spirit. Escarduça 64

existing irregular woods, meadows and lakes combine with further trees, shrubs and hedges plantation and flowing watercourses yet conserving a natural and irregular design, and Classical allegories such as small temples, and roofed bridges observing Palladian inspired architecture embellished with quotations from Roman poets, grottoes, pagan statuary, rustic cascades and other waterworks, colonnades and , populate the Augustan garden, clearly disfavouring geometry (cf. Turner, 2005). Continuing the conceptual conversion of the garden’s enclosing physical element markedly initiated by Baroque gardens aiming to dematerialise such opacity and seemingly merge the garden and the surrounding landscape, the Augustan garden innovates and introduces ditches as the garden’s boundary, further enabling the impression of continuity and fluidity112 (cf. Turner, 2005). Augustan gardens are landowners’ places of election to be appreciated during a perambulation rather than from a central point, suited for reflections, to relish and discuss literature, history or natural science’s advancements, while strolling through the grounds or comfortably taking tea113 (cf. Turner, 2005). The eighteenth century’s second half further intensifies the mutation from Baroque’s regularity and rationalism incepted by the forest and Augustan styles to irregularity and

112 Designated as the ha-ha! fence, resulting of people’s surprise expression when suddenly finding such unperceived obstacle; subsequent garden styles in the eighteenth century intensively adopt the ha-ha! fence (cf. Turner, 2005). 113 Affirmed during eighteenth century’s first half, the tradition of Augustan gardens is primarily represented by Chiswick, Stowe and Castle Howard, amongst others such as Claremont, Rousham, Painshill, Stourhead, Duncombe Park, Studley Royal and Middleton Place, the latter in South Carolina, USA – when reading Stephanie Ross, these seem more like Serpetine or Picturesque style (cf. Turner, 2005). Garden design is conducted by proprietors themselves, however much with assistance from leading garden designers William Kent, Stephen Switzer and Charles Bridgeman, the latter often inspired by Palladio (cf. Turner, 2005). Chiswick is considered the inaugural Augustan garden and much appreciated by Pope as respecting the site’s genius loci: under Lord Burlington’s ownership and supervision, the original simple Renaissance garden is initially transformed in a Roman garden however much including some Baroque influences, comprising avenues, geometrical pools, an amphitheatre, a topiary maze and several small pavilions and temples; Kent’s alterations imply the removal of the maze and the introduction of a “natural taste in gardening”, to which follow an construction, an planting and the “naturalisation” enhancement through the removal of water basins (cf. Turner, 2005). Stowe initiates as an Italian Early Baroque garden and evolves to a High Baroque estate in early eighteenth century, before subjected to various successive alterations aiming classical sceneries, including ponds and lakes of wavy-lined shores, a Palladian bridge, temples, a Grecian Vale and its sacred grove, and the use of an existing diagonal old lane to form the Great Cross Lime Walk (cf. Turner, 2005). Castle Howard’s Augustan garden is encapsulated in two relevant milestone decisions in terms of garden designing: on one hand, instead of lacerating the existing knot of mature trees to fabricate a Baroque orthogonal avenue from Castle Howard, Wray Wood is preserved and endowed with labyrinthine paths and waterworks and, on the other hand, Henderskelf Lane, a path skirting the southern flank of Wray Wood, is retained from elimination or artificial straight designing and maintains its curvilineal shape (cf. Turner, 2005). Hyde Park’s current lake, the Serpentine, is the result of a designed merging of previously existing small ponds specifically intending for its arcuate natural shape (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 65

empiricism, distinguishing Romanticism Serpentine style’s and Picturesque style’s infiltration in garden designing (cf. Turner, 2005). Devaluing Platonic Forms’ universality symbolising character conveyed by Classical allegorical elements, which were exceptionally adopted only if considered to improve the composition, and intending to arouse sensations of naturalness and serenity symbolising the proprietors’ subscription of Enlightenment values, the Serpentine style’s romantic celebration of nature’s similitude, i.e. the garden’s effortlessness flowing of informal elements as existing, aiming to enhance the visibility of nature, has been addressed in chapter 2. The evolution of taste and of conceptions of beautiful and sublime originates severe criticism of the smoothness and mildness of the nature-esque Serpentine style from the Picturesque style’s advocates114 during eighteenth century’s last decades and onwards, accusing it of insipidity, timidity, puerility and even absurdity, arguing its polite style and intended artistic character as artificially incoherent to nature’s authentic representation, and reclaiming garden design to observe the crudeness and sharpness of harsh, abrupt and rugged sceneries where irregularity is to be heightened to its apogee (cf. Turner, 2005). Arguments consist of pastures’ gentle undulation and broadness to be transformed in abrupt and arduous escarpments or shattered rude grounds disfigured by randomly placed heavy stones and spinous brushwood, flowering shrubs and tame groves to be replaced by arbitrarily placed rugged trees and thorny bushes and weeds, and pathways’ and carriage track’s curvilinear docility to be trimmed with track edges’ direction abrupt variations and raucous soils (cf. Turner, 2005). Similarly to the Serpentine style, the Picturesque style privileges Romanticism’s informal irregularity and variety as opposed to Rationalism’s logical regularity of Platonic Forms, hence also striving for the utter and ardent representation of unadorned nature as visible in its absolute glory, so influenced by Empiricism (cf. Turner, 2005). However, translating Romanticism’s superlative extent during eighteenth century’s late decades and nineteenth century’s early decades, the Serpentine style’s drive for calmness

114 Empiricism’s influence in theology withdraws Neoplatonism and Platonic Forms as the abstract concept for the wonder of creation and assigns emphasis to the visible world, thus driving William Gulpin, a vicar, to write essays addressing eighteenth century’s garden design, thence setting the criticism to the Serpentine style; Sir Uvedale Price follows Gulpin’s comments to write an essay on the Picturesque and the study of pictures aiming the real landscape’s improvement and Richard Payne Knight, Price’s wealthy neighbour, designs his castle’s garden and park according to Gulpin’s and Price’s writings; as a garden designer and essayist, John Claudius Loudon admires romantic irregularity and Picturesque conceptions during his early career (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 66

is diametrically opposed by Picturesque style’s overwhelming emotional exaltation of landscape’s roughness, asperity, vastness and details’ intricacy115 (cf. Turner, 2005). Picturesque rural gardens and parks are primarily designed observing an aesthetic conception emphasising ample vistas of beauty unpolluted by the expendability, futility and wantonness of Renaissance’s and Baroque’s artificial adornments, enhancing the balanced unification of man and nature and the arousing of affectedly intense emotions scoping extremes of placidity, consternation or contemplation to be experimentally stirred within the driftlessly of unpremeditated perambulation116 (cf. Turner, 2005). Whatever be the particular style in case, the Romantic garden abandons both the transcendence and human sovereignty (cf. Shapiro, 2004). The fundamental Empiricist distinction between eighteenth century’s Romantic gardens and previous styles, such as the Baroque and Renaissance, is that the scale of the triad of natures is geographically demarcated by the latter according to the garden’s limits, notwithstanding their tendencies to dissolve the frontier’s opacity – to this matter, the Medieval clearly imposes the frontiers’ opacity –, whereas Romanticism declaredly aims at the conceptual annulment of the garden’s frontier, i.e. the incorporation of the triad of natures within the garden. Furthermore, while both strictly within the garden, the Serpentine style’s retraction of artistry aims at the dissolution of the scale regulating the triad of natures, whereas the Picturesque’s artistry enhances such scale (cf. Hunt, 2000: 45, 51, 81). Empiricism’s method for experimenting and expressing nature, either an individual’s inner nature or the world’s visible nature, resonate in France117 and other regions of Europe, where England’s various styles of Neoclassical and Romantic gardens assume influence, albeit adopting varying accentsxxxv (cf. Turner, 2005). The reasonable thorough yet summarised perspective of the conceptual and factual complexities intertwining man, Earth, world, nature and God, conceptually translated by the inter-dependent and inter-disciplinary relationships of philosophical theories and aesthetic

115 Hawkstone Park was commissioned by Sir Roland Hill to be designed as a Picturesque estate, attaining much attention from visitors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, described as a dreadful and sublime dramatic composition of hills, woods and stones (cf. Turner, 2005). 116 A type of scene midway between Burke’s concepts of the sublime and the beautiful – Claremontle, amongst others, in which not only landscape but also the skies’ temperamental textures and sharp luminosities instill such notion. 117 Much propelled by the Enlightenment philosophers Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau, stirring ideas of man’s natural rights of liberty, equality and freedom to express their nature, being such nature explored through empirical observation; the philosophers admired English gardens (cf. Turner, 2005). Further references are presented in (xxxv). Escarduça 67

tendencies that garden design practices represent, attempted by preceding chapters 2 and 3 aim to enhance the garden’s paramount representation faculty of a decisive matter of human culture:

a correlative tension within human beings, (…) that stretches between two impossibilities, or two irrevocable losses: nature and God. (…) a tension, say, between a longing for closure and the open-endedness of human existence, between our craving for reality and our craving for deliverance from reality (Harrison, 2008:47).

Yet, the complexity of human culture evidently encompasses further inter- disciplinarily dimensions, in whose representation by the garden the following chapter delves. The recurrence to the term culture in the following chapter’s title intends to approximate to the human culture’s spatial and temporal multifaceted circumstantial conciseness in which a garden style’s specific appearance manifests, albeit beforehand acknowledged as inaccurate to some extent, for human culture comprises the matters addressed in the present and preceding chapters. It is to note that, by reason of its artistry dimension, the realm of third nature customarily evolves from the second nature’s realm, previously referenced as the territory’s inscription and control by a culture’s individual and, or collective institutions of its traditions, rituals, practices, functions, relative to such culture institutions’ organisation and modes of living (cf. Hunt, 2000). In fact, summoning an ample cluster of motifs and motives, third nature’s objects of artistry are engaged in dialogue with the realms of second nature and first nature and, with regard to its utmost peculiar specificity involving and combining artifice and nature, the garden not only encompasses and represents human attitudes towards the transcendent, the cosmos, religion, nature, and humanity as is also deliberately and multifacetedly engaged with the cultural locality in which it is set, since “each age and country leaves its own legacy representing in large measure its type of governance, degree of wealth, and level of construction skills, as well as its political character and religious beliefs” (cf. Hunt, 2000; Panzuru, 2010: 407). Thus, with no disregard for the garden’s stature as a work of art representing philosophical currents of metaphysical conceptions of Nature, the expansiveness of human supremacy over nature, aesthetic theories informed by reason, religion or cosmological myth inciting human conceptions of artistic beauty, accompanied by scientific advancements and technological proficiencies, as addressed by the present and the preceding chapters, the Escarduça 68

following chapter concentrates on the garden’s representation of the spatial and temporal circumstantial conciseness of individual and, or collective social institutions, political governance and military conditions which, additionally to the former topics, densely intertwine to mould the cultural context in which a garden appears, and which it represents.

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Chapter 4 – Additional Representations of Culture

Section 4.1 – Domestic Gardens and the Organisation of Social Classes This section’s title nomenclature of domestic garden, i.e. that created and integrating a residency, manifestly pinpoints gardens adjoined, on one hand, to palaces, castles, monumental urban and country villas, and rural manor houses, whose objective is ostensibly related to venustas, i.e. delight and beauty to the satisfaction of pleasures and entertainment targeting the spirit, whereas, on the other hand, to the modest and ordinary household, detectably complying with opposite objectives of utilitas, i.e. commodity observing practical needs of subsistence targeting the body, thus constituting an evident token of the proprietor’s social stature and wealth and, as importantly and correspondingly, of habits, customs and existing models of social inter-relationship. Such domestic garden’s representation of differentiated social classes is as embryonic as the human transition from nomadism to sedentarism mentioned in chapter 2’s opening paragraph and progressively evolves reaching the Roman Empire. Such progression is translated by the Mesopotamia’s Assyrian palace gardens, incomparably stressing the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Ancient Persia palace gardens and the internal yard of the common man’s residency, whose archaeological traces are detected to reach the eighth century BCxxxvi. Similar observations are applicable to Egyptian king-gods’ palaces as their mundane abode before transiting to the afterlife118 and to the Egyptian commoner’s household119, inasmuch as to Ancient Greece city-states king’s palaces and humble families’ living rooms120. Archaic Greece’s palace courts shelter the king’s family quotidian domestic

118 Evincing profound infiltration of religion and its political power facet in the ancient Egyptian society’s everyday life, once mundanely dead, the king-god pharaoh’s life continues abiding in his tomb and temple since the duties of his king and deity congregated character as previously described in (xxviii) continue in his after-life, so requiring a perennial after-life residency, enriched with terrene goods destined for the eternal spiritual resident’s existence, temples and tombs, their engraved and textual magnificent ornaments and their incorporated gardens (cf. Turner, 2005).. 119 Egyptian palace gardens, similarly to wealthy families’ private gardens albeit differing in their larger dimension, comprise several courts and yards, pools and ponds serving plant’s irrigation and air cooling through evaporation or fish keeping, and the royal family’s private life and outdoor relaxation, recreation, ornamental and edible plants’ recreative cultivation; conversely, Egyptian modest domestic gardens are destined for the functionality of cooking, animals’ keeping and craftsmen’s working, as mentioned in chapter 1’s introductory paragraphs (cf. Turner, 2005). 120 Archaic Greece’s palace courts shelter the king’s family quotidian domestic life and wealthy families’ houses include unroofed accommodations, whereas humble families’ living rooms open directly to narrow streets inside towns’ walls (cf. Turner, 2005). Productive gardens are located at close distance outside towns’ walls and serve for fruits’ and flowers’ cultivation by farmers (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 70

life and wealthy families’ houses include unroofed accommodations, whereas humble families’ living rooms open directly to narrow streets inside towns’ walls, while productive gardens at close distance outside towns’ walls serve for fruits’ and flowers’ cultivation by farmers (cf. Turner, 2005). Contrasting Egypt’s fertile existing archaeological information, the deficiency of archeological artifacts furnishing outdoor emplacement in Ancient Greece is compensated by Homer’s oeuvre, conceding the discernment of palace courts and productive gardens; similarly to Homer however advancing approximately four centuries to the Classical Greek period, references to domestic outdoor courts may also be perceived in Euripides’ Medeaxxxvii. Both the Hellenistic Empire’s wealth and the acquaintance of Asia’s splendid gardens121 resulting from the empire’s geographic magnitude foster, as cities develop, Hellenistic noble families to situate residential palaces and their private enclosed gardens at a dominant locale from where the city, temples, gymnasiums and surrounding fields form a panorama view (cf. Turner, 2005). The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476AD interrupts such progressive evolution in the western hemisphere for the following five centuries, more specifically that affiliated to palaces122. It is the simultaneous flourishing of the Islamic culture and its intercontinental expansion absorbing and merging Mesopotamian, Persian, Greek, Roman influences which, propagating to the Late Middle Ages period, continues such dynamics. Middle East’s Islamic palaces and gardens dating from the eighth century comprehend various internal courts, whose scarce archaeological vestiges disclose mosaic, tile, ivory and other materials magnificent ornamentations in pavements, walls and colonnades, decorative fountains, basins and water canals, perfuming flower beds, peristyle courts, bathing pavilions, a mosque and large enclosed areas for plants and animals, further complemented by seventeenth century Western visitors’ descriptions of libertine entertainment123 (cf. Turner, 2005).

121 Referencing the Akkadian Hanging Gardens and the Persian ordered garden designing as previously described. 122 Such circumstances are addressed in this chapter’s subsequent sections. 123 Dating from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Spain attests for two prominent examples of Islamic palace gardens: the Alhambra’s and the Generalife’s palace gardens. In Alhambra, one of the most magnificent examples of Islamic architecture, the Court of Myrtles resembles a rich Roman villa or large town house’s garden, whose peripheral roofed porches supported by colonnades superbly ornamented with wooden and stucco filigree and religious inscriptions access surrounding chambers and frame the centre of white marble paved floor, a central rectangular large pond and fountains surrounded by decorative myrtle bushes, whereas the Court of Lions observes the Persian ordered and proportioned regularity and symmetry of the quadripartite model with a centre marble fountain decorated with sculpted lions and dividing water channels, elaborately tile and filigree ornamented walls, marble colonnades and surrounding domed roof porches adorned Escarduça 71

Albeit forced to reduced dimension and varying shapes due both to religious asceticism and to available space shortage, the western hemisphere’s tradition of the palatial garden is resumed in the ninth century by means of the yards and gardens within the castle’s walled exiguous enclosure of regional social institutions of nobility (cf. Turner, 2005). Existing Medieval books render various illustrations of small organic ornamental gardens composed by flowery lawns, trellis fencing, turf seats, tunnel-arbours, sweet-scented flowers, basins, sundials and summer houses, offering private refuge and calm relief from the bailey’s diseases, stench, noise and grime to such kings’, dukes’ and other nobles’ vast escort of numerous dependents (cf. Turner, 2005). Confined to domesticity, medieval women consist of the castle gardens’ makers and users124, often specialising in medicinal herbs and horticulture (cf. Turner, 2005). Larger portions of land external castle are used by nobles for hunting or joust, similarly to Mesopotamian kings’ hunting parks or Greece’s gymnasiums, while maidens assist nearby in orchards’ pavilions (cf. Turner, 2005). Small portions of land in the surroundings of nobles’ castles are assigned to poor servant tenants for agriculture as introductorily mentioned in chapter 1; evincing the profound social and economic chasm, such land is the noble’s propriety, inasmuch as the harvest (cf. Turner, 2005). Middle class house-owners’ dwellings in densely populated medieval walled towns, such as those of merchants, craftsmen, and other professionals unbound to any lord, are adjoined by ornamental gardens if space is available, composed of flowery lawns, arbours and seats, fountains, fishponds and dovecots, whose irregular shape is limited by walls, hedges, fences or ditches (cf. Turner, 2005). Antecedent chapters’ considerations on the various garden styles subsequent to the fifteenth century are presumed to illustrate the domestic garden as distinctly patronised by privileged social agents.

with arabesques, and decorative tiles paving the floor (cf. Turner, 2005). Alhambra’s enclosed gardens and welcome outdoor living for the monarch’s family inspiring privacy, relaxation, enjoyment and coolness (cf. Turner, 2005). Resonating Roman’s influence as well, however much the current design is considered not to observe the original’s, the Court of the Long Pond, Generalife’s centre garden, is enclosed by two opposite pavilions, a high wall and an arch roofed gallery, decorative tiles pave the floor, adorning jets of water arch over its centre long pond, which is framed by flowerbeds and bushes (cf. Turner, 2005). 124 Often absent in medieval marriages due to strategical interests and notwithstanding religious austere conduct, love and romance are aspired, much resulting from the imagination’s instilling effect of love and chivalry found in Roman de la Rose, the oneiric medieval poem about courtly love whose background is a garden, attributing castle gardens as the covert space for a maiden to award an admirer with a forbidden kiss to the sound of a troubadour (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 72

The Renaissance’s villa garden is fostered by noble dynastic families of wealth in Italy’s kingdoms for intellectual contemplation of nature, leisure and intimacy; the Baroque estate garden is championed by kings and other noble landowners with specific purposes as subsequently addressed, whose utmost privileged social and economic status is further affirmed by the fact that such large estates observe no agricultural objective whatsoever; the Neo-Classic, Brownian and Romantic rural landscape parks are promoted by noble and wealthy families whose social and economic privilege is further attested by one specific factor additionally stimulating the artistic and cultural ideas originating such garden styles, the Grand Tours125, and accommodate not only domestic functions since, notwithstanding the proprietors’ wealth, the preservation of natural grasslands as a design element observes a productive and functional dimension serving for cattle’s pasture, but primarily and specifically the aesthetic experience of the garden, inasmuch as social recreation and outdoor activities (cf. Turner, 2005).

Section 4.2 - The Garden and the Organisation of Government Institutions The preceding section emphasis on the garden as the historical enterprise of social and economic privileged ancient Middle East kings, Egypt’s pharaohs, Greece city-states’ kings and noble families, Roman emperors and other dignitaries of the Roman Empire’s military and political hierarchy, Middle Age’s kingdoms, dukedoms and other nobility institutions, Italian Renaissance kingdoms’ wealthy family dynasties, and subsequently, European nations’ kings and noblemen inherently incites such garden appearances’ extrapolation from their dimension as private enclosures destined for intimate leisure, relaxation, entertainment, sensorial delight, intellectual exploration, and aesthetic experience, and their assumption as a political symbol while a parcel of such authority men’s residential compound. Furthermore, and most relevantly to this report’s investigation ambit, such political character is not confined to symbolism; it is factual, since politic power, government, and authority are indeed exercised from within the boundaries of such residential compounds and, implicitly, in their gardens: Assyrian palaces’ internal outdoor courts accommodated institutional activities such as official parades and receptions; in Egypt, not only palace

125 Young gentlemen’s education is completed by a comprehensive tour in Europe whose ultimate destination is Italy, affording contact with different types of landscapes such as that from the Alps and of from Rome’s campagna, during which the legacy of Rome and Greece, the spirit of antiquity, classical art and culture is significantly appreciated, and during which large art collection is acquired, so cultivating and enlightening the connoisseur, man of taste and amateur of the arts (cf. Ross, 1998; cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 73

gardens host official receptions, institutional coronations and royal visits but also temples, and their gardens, consist of a network of great sacred compounds where high-priests, as the pharaoh’s ministers, propagate the pharaoh’s law and order serving an integrated power system of religion and government commanded by the king-god; Roman emperors divide their private life and public affairs within their palatial compound; the regional kingdoms, dukedoms, and tribes following the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and oppositely to Roman forts’ temporary occupancy during military campaigns, originate Early Middle Ages’ hill-top stockades corresponding to local and regional power singularities inhabited by the ruling lord, and architecturally evolving into Late Middle Ages’ castles, albeit conserving similar power dynamics over its encircling servant population (cf. Turner, 2005). Since the Middle Age’s period is positively marked by the law of faith inasmuch as by such variously fragmented warring feudal dominions, the Roman Catholic Church singularly prevails as the unique transnational organisation, whose power prominently emanates from the repository, concentration, and control of knowledge within the walls of monastic monasteries, common people education’s command, moral standards’ determination and manufacturing skills’ primacy126 (cf. Turner, 2005). The permeation of religion in every instance of the Islamic quotidian assigns educational, social, and political dimensions to Islamic mosques’ spiritual and religious character (cf. Turner, 2005). While cultivating Humanism’s universal ideals formerly detailed in Section 3.3 and in (xxxii), dynastic families of Italian Renaissance’s second half of the fifteenth century institute a political regime spearheaded by successive generations of autocratic princes and their individual monopolisation of power within regional kingdoms in a “godlike role of judge and dispenser of justice”, assigning great power to the family and the city, prominently epitomised by the Florentine Medici’s, further seconded by the Pope and even acquiring control over the former Church’s authority which ostensibly fades to some extent, so

126 Cloisters and garths serve studying and reading, walking and exercising, handcrafting and working, and are the centre of the monastery dynamics, surrounded by the church, the refectory, the kitchen, pantry and cellar, and dormitories (cf. Turner, 2005). Such dynamics favours the clericals’ absolute isolation, further enhanced by the fact that common people’s access to monastic cloisters is necessarily prohibited; oppositely, some communal churches and cathedrals include a public church, an infirmary or a school and adopt a cloister due to its offered pleasures and benefits of calmness, retreat and contemplation (cf. Turner, 2005). Progressively traversing centuries, monasteries assume immense social power and material opulence, eclipsing spiritual and ascetic austerity; such tendency transforms monasteries’ cloister gardens deprived garth into luxurious layouts composed by sumptuous ornamented flower parterres, elaborate hedges and splendid fountains, equalling twelfth and following century’s public cathedrals (cf. Turner, 2005).

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annexing Renaissance’s Villa gardens not only to the princes’ private retreat of intimacy and comfort, but also to the exuberant and grandiose embellished symbol of their regional power, that which does not subvert the revival of Classic antiquity’s arts, culture and the quest for knowledge, however still partially subverts Humanism’s whole sphere of valuesxxxviii (cf. Harrison, 2008: 102-108; cf. Turner, 2005). Analogously to the Renaissance’s garden, whose artistry figures as nature ‘s enhancement intermediary rather than its dominator, so such sense of Humanism’s incompleteness of the fifteenth century’s second half translates Florence’s republic decline, i.e. the political de-republicanisation of the civic Humanism previously forged (cf. Harrison, 2008). Italian Renaissance’s dynamics of the fifteenth century’s first half embraces a civic Humanism abiding in the public space and the citizens' responsibility and engagement in the exercise of self-governance, regarded as ideologically inspired by the Classic agora. In Greece, during the temporal progression from the late first millennia BC Homeric period to the Classic Period of the philosopher’s reason, pagan sanctuaries in hills’ plateaus and groves devoted to their important presiding deity evolve into walled compounds beneath which enclosed towns settle, including a public space – the agora – often decorated with colonnades and trees destined for public meetings, markets and the philosophers’ discourses destined for the people’s education and the institution of public order (cf. Turner, 2005)127. Politically, oppositely to the Humanism princes’ sovereignty, the life of Florence’s republicanism is grounded in and blossoms through the discourse of one’s thought, plurality of ideas and voices, discussion, and debate within a public forum open to free citizens to the exercise of their wise, rational and consensual civic deliberations submitted to the test of argument and counter-argument; a government model of communal and egalitarian political responsibility and activism which, furthermore, cultivates and requires the Humanist virtues of eloquence and rhetoric, since reasoned persuasion not only dethrones autocratic and arbitrary decree, blind prejudice and ignorance, but also, dislocating the focus from salvation to self-determined liberty, disfavouring the contemplative silence and advocating the active discourse, fostering learning, knowledge and thought not by means of secluded books’ study but via their indiscriminate disclosure and further productive conversation, antagonistically combats and defeats the medieval ascetic “tyrannical barbarism” perpetuated on the

127 Corresponding to the emergence of the Acropolis (from akron, summit and polls, town) in Athens, devoted to Athena, the goddess of wisdom and knowledge, to which adds the urban settlement of Delphi, originated by the sanctuary dedicated to Apollo, and the sacred and athletic compound of Olympia (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 75

Classical culture which fails to safeguard its legacy and to nurture the dormant seeds of its works, examples, and ideals128 (cf. Harrison, 2008: 97-102). Fifteenth century’s geographic dispersion of the political structure progressively dissipates by means of military circumstances as subsequently addressed, favouring the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ consolidation of central powers escalating the ideological contrast to civic Humanism, and culminating in the apogee of unlimited political power embodied in the French monarch’s absolute authoritarianism, and in the French monarchy’s institution as Europe’s political fulcrum (cf. Panzuru, 2010; cf. Turner, 2005). Baroque art is patronised by the French regime as the representation of such power and global ambition and, in the garden’s case, Versailles’s unsurpassable objective as its symbol (cf. Turner, 2005). With decisive contribution from France’s economic prosperity and wealth, Versailles’s style of magnificence and monumentality intentionally imposes a political program of subordination and oppression, since the entirety of the garden’s elements and their composition are thoroughly planned as unyielding references conveying the radiation of the sun-king’s absolute authority, instilling modesty, humbleness and subjugation in his obedient court as a self-protective reaction while promoting luxurious outdoor social gatherings (cf. Harrison, 2008; cf. Shapiro, 2004). The French Baroque gardens’ tangible and symbolic brilliance propagates to Europe’s nobility assuming formal gradations in scale and magnificence in result of their proprietors’ financial resources, politic conjuncture, climate adequacy, water abundance and undulating landform balancing a composition of variety and unity, signalling a late Baroque period during seventeenth century’s final decades129 (cf. Turner, 2005).

128 Florence republicanism’s axial source in the early fifteenth century is Roberto Rossi’s villa in the city’s surrounding and its garden, embedded with a factual and ideological openness unconfined by its walls, as opposed to the silent enclosure of both the medieval cloister and the Renaissance prince’s villa garden, where other men of letters gather enjoying open vistas over the metaphorical blossoming of Florence’s splendorous garden of Humanist republican values cultivated by citizens, artists, noble families, artists, poets and men of knowledge (cf. Harrison, 2008: 97-102). 129 Constrained both by financial insufficiency and by subsequent opposite liberalist and empiricist ideals, England’s ephemeral welcoming of Baroque style’s scientific standards and totalitarian symbolism moulds minor adaptations in existing gardens, such as parterres at the Queen’s House at Greenwich Park and canals and avenues at St. James Park ordered by Charles II, and gardens at Hamptons Court ordered by William II (cf. Turner, 2005). Despite military and political clashes, Holland’s prosperity conjoins with cultural influence permeating from France to prompt Het Loo Royal Palace and gardens (cf. Turner, 2005). Germany’s dissemination of states resulting from theological and territorial disputes favours the propagation of palaces and gardens observing the Baroque style emanating from Versailles, such as the Grosser Garten at Herrenhausen or the gardens (cf. Turner, 2005). Once ceasing the conflict with the Ottoman Empire, gardens flourish in Austria, such as the Belvedere Garden near Vienna, inspired by Versailles albeit smaller in scale, the majestic Schönbrunn Palace and gardens, known as Austria’s Versailles (cf. Turner, Escarduça 76

Seventeenth century’s reign of James II in England ideals similar absolutism which, so criticised as unenlightened and unnatural to man as previously mentioned and intolerantly disapproved as subdued to France’s cultural and artistic hegemony, originates a progression of armed turmoil and socio-political-cultural altering episodes under liberalism’s tendency responding to absolutist despots’ excesses and forging the preamble model for representative democracy, its consolidation in the eighteenth century and its henceforth propagation to Europe (cf. Turner, 2005). The Neoclassical, Serpentine and Romantic garden are political actions, symbolising Enlightenment values of social and political freedom and equality and the aspiration for a democratic better world (cf. Turner, 2005). Eschewing and disavowing the Baroque’s and Renaissance’s courtly social, noble landowners retreat to their rural estates, where calm perambulations in the garden welcome debates about the public affairs of the day accompanied by fellow noble Parliamentarians (cf. Turner, 2005).

Section 4.3 – The Influence of Military Circumstances in the Garden Resulting from a particular circumstance, the fifteenth century positively signals a historical mutation of the principles guiding garden design. The deployment and dissemination of the canon correspond to a previously non-existent military tactical advantage for the forces of attack to supplant the former supremacy of defensive walls, transferring the defense duties of cities and populations from fortification walls to the organisation of permanent armies stationed outside (cf. Turner, 2005). The endowment of security from the army and the redundancy of enclosing walls decisively liberates quotidian life and, accompanying, the garden, from firstly, enclosed location within the fortification so enabling its displacement to the countryside, secondly, the fortification exiguity confining the garden’s extension to internal courts and yards, thirdly, objectives of firmitas constraining the garden’s artistry (cf. Turner, 2005). Accompanying previously referenced simultaneous factors relevantly conducing to its emergence, the reinvented garden is inaugurated by Renaissance nobles’ country villas located in the city’s surroundings (cf. Turner, 2005). Furthermore, differentiating wealth determines an army’s power and its technical and strategic advantage, consequently eroding the geographic dispersion of the political structure, contributing to the prevalence of more

2005). Introducing Europe’s arts, sciences and technologies in Russia aiming for its sophistication, commissions Russia’s example of a baroque garden: Peterhof, the magnificent Royal Palace’s gardens at S. Petersburgh (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 77

powerful kingdom’s and the consolidation of central powers to which the previous chapter alludes130, and the symbolism of the garden styles fostered subsequently to the fifteenth century (cf. Turner, 2005). Contrastingly, bereft of a unifying government fostering not only national union amidst warring neighbours but also potentiated armed effectiveness against invading foreigners, so enforcing reclusiveness for security demands, Late Middle Age’s fortified enclosed compounds of stone castles and exiguous yards within cities’ defensive outer walls, established in any location that the exigencies of defense or other building and land use direct, permit only gardens in exiguous yards within cities’ walled enclosure131, within castle walls, in nobles’ case, and within town walls, in common people’s case depending on their affordance of protection, where space and water are scant, and malady and slime are abundant, furthermore proceeding Early Middle Ages’ mere hill-top stockades permeating the successive conflicts amongst the multitude of rival regional kingdoms, dukedoms and tribes emerging from the fall of the Western Roman Empire, where the internal yard is nothing more than a meager and inaccessible mirage (cf. Turner, 2005). Equivalently, unprotected outdoor life outside town walls is not favoured in Ancient Greece, since independent city-states, unregulated by a central power or unprotected from invading foreign enemies, are often afflicted by war and, consequently, successively destroyed and rebuilt (cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Turner, 2005). Early Middle Ages’ Middle East Islamic cities, and antecedent Persian Empire’s and Mesopotamic civilisations’ agglomerations shared similar fortified compounds, whose mythical Hanging Garden model stands as the utmost example: the supporting masonry’ crammed negative hollows accompanying an inclined hill from which the garden exuberantly flourishes are in fact the fortified structure securing the city on the hill-top (cf. Turner, 2005). Central Asia’s Middle Ages furnish a different garden’s affection by military circumstances. Successive invasions initiated in the thirteenth century by Genghis Kan and perpetrated by other Mongol warring rulers, amongst which Timur Tamerlane in the fourteenth century stands as prominent, do not exterminate Islamic culture in Central Asia and its garden tradition in mosques and palaces (cf. Turner, 2005). As nomads, Timur’s

130 Both the Hellenistic and Roman empire’s wealth and security and their noble families’ residential palaces and villas and private enclosed gardens located in the city’s surrounding hills possibly consisting of the unique similar exceptions during the previous millenia. 131 The short period of peace granted by Charlemagne’s empire consists the exception, allowing the dismissal of fortification in castles and gardens (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 78

entourage travels and temporarily accommodates in palaces’ and gardens’ compounds dispersed in the territory beyond Samarkand, the empire’s capital132 (cf. Turner, 2005).

Section 4.4 – The Garden as a Representation of Utopia Utopia and utopianism aggregate an immense ampleness of knowledge areas such as numerous currents of philosophy, ethics, political theory, economy, theology, mythology, literature, science, feminism studies, postcolonialism, amongst various others, prominently impacting culture while evidently far too extended for this section’s ambitionsxxxix. Summarily, it is posited as the idea and conviction that “a perfect or more perfect society or a subset of a society can be achieved in time through human efforts to change the circumstances within which that society or subset finds itself”133 (Morris and Kross, 2009: 308). With regard to this section ambit, Utopianism thought often conveys imaginary emplacement and the notion of topos for perfect societies134, thoroughly describing the structure of social institutions and its various dynamics of relationships135 and so determining habits, behaviours, rituals, and values, in which the garden is as relevant as concomitant with the utopic quest for both subsistence and happiness136. Additional influential works chiefly accentuate architecture and urbanism, in which the garden is equated as a notorious contributing factorxl. Such utopia models accentuate second nature’s functionality of the political, social, economic, legal public relationships mentioned in (xl)

132 Gardens’ remnants are inexistent, however, existing archives of visitors’ descriptions adhere to similar Islamic gardens designing as previously described, relate the gardens’ style of opulence and magnificence, and account for the gardens’ use as the cortege’s lust entertainment or as the army’s encampment site and its associated political and ceremonial character (cf. Turner, 2005). 133 Enhancing the literary facet of the works mentoined in (xxxix) while simultaneousloy hereby regarded as endorsing Morris’s and Kross’s utopia conception, Giesecke and Naomi reference political theorist Ruth Levitas argument of utopia as a literary form encompassing a specific content and a specific cognitive function, all of which variously arise from and express a “desire for a better way of life”(Levitas, as cited in Giesecke and Naomi, 2012: 6). 134 Callipolis is Plato’s imagined city of the Republic; Oceana is envisioned as Harrington’s metaphor for his contemporary England; the City of God is St. Augustine’s heavenly city doctrinally embedded with religious virtue as opposed to the earthly City of Man; Christianopolis is located in an island located in the Antarctic zone, 10º of the south pole, 20º of the equinoctial circle, and about 12º under the point of bull, seemingly an impossible location; the remote City of the Sun is located on an island in the Indian Ocean, as is New Atlantis in the Pacific Ocean, an utopic Boston is projected to the year 2000 by Bellamy. 135 Such as government, property, education, justice, war, religion, housing, the distribution of labour, currency, the distribution of working and non-working time, industrial and agricultural production, the structure of family, sexuality, leisure, health, amongst many others. 136 Illustratively, the garden prominently figures in the majority of such works; an individual chapter in Christianopolis is exclusively dedicated to the garden; New Atlantis’s inhabitants dedicate to the scientific cultivation of useful plants in orchards and gardens. Escarduça 79

amongst social institutions contextualised by urbanism and architecture, so seemingly relegating the private enclosure of the garden, its status as a work of art, and its aesthetic experience to an accessory position within such comprehensive representations of utopia, as further confirmed by the voice of Raphael Hythloday in the most emblematic utopia conception:

The streets are twenty feet broad; there lie gardens behind all their houses. These are large, but enclosed with buildings, that on all hands face the streets (...). They cultivate their gardens with great care, so that they have both , fruits, herbs, and flowers in them; and all is so well ordered and so finely kept that I never saw gardens anywhere that were both so fruitful and so beautiful as theirs. (...). And there is, indeed, nothing belonging to the whole town that is both more useful and more pleasant. So that he who founded the town seems to have taken care of nothing more than of their gardens (cf. More, 1516 [2012]: 90).

Conversely, and consistently with this section’s title, when envisioned as an aesthetic object and its representative and represented facets, further encompassing philosophical, mythological and spiritual dimensions either previously or subsequently mentioned, the garden is alternatively considered as autonomously representing utopia, whose privacy or enclosed character annuls not a utopic communal dimension and aspiration, rather enhances it. Châtel’s introductory conception of thinking utopia as “to think large and wide”, to regard the human propensity for eccentricity in the sense of open frontiers which convey and agglomerate multiple worlds into the human world, incites the argument (Châtel, 2013: 95). Introducing such argument, Candide, ou l’Optimisme endows a literary metaphor when the homonymous hero, after numerous calamities absolutely opposed to a perfect society137 inflicted while experiencing various culture contexts, urges for the cultivation of our garden (cf. Voltaire, (1759 [2017]). Candide’s garden to be cultivated is plausibly interpreted as the entireness of society, or societies, actively responding to the variety of obstacles encountered. Convergently, the communal facet of utopia is intentionally and significantly stressed by the pronominal adjective our (cf. Harrison, 2008). Furthermore, conceptual equivalences are traceable between utopia and the garden. Considering that the yearning for perfection or betterment implicates insufficiency138 of an ideal status righteously aspired, independently of which sort of perfection is in case, utopia

137 Inhumanity, cruelty, violence, insensitivity, arrogance, pride, disdain, tyranny, ruthlessness, arbitrariness, fanatism superstition, or insanity, amongts others. 138 The aspiration for a perfect or better world is assessed and appreciated when counterposed to a less-perfect or less-better world (cf. Giesecke and Naomi, 2012: 7). Escarduça 80

necessarily convokes human action, inasmuch as the garden summons its active seeding and necessary actions possibly granting its blossoming, flowering and longevity (cf. Châtel, 2013; cf. Harrison, 2008). Simultaneously, actions of seeding and care aiming the blossoming, flowering and longevity of both utopia and the garden entail uncertainty and uncontrol by cause of intrinsic and extrinsic perils; moreover, uncertainty and uncontrol are implicitly accompanied by fear and despair, inasmuch as by hope and expectation, with regard either to utopia and to the garden and, if successively attained, both utopia and the garden result of man’s tremendous efforts, not God’s (cf. Châtel, 2013; cf. Giesecke and Naomi, 2012; cf. Harrison, 2008). Additionally, the aesthetic experience of the garden is benefited when encompassing the notion of Utopianism since, “utopia is about self-representation” and, thus, each spatial and temporal culture manifests its peculiar utopic conception and idea of paradise; a manifestation which, besides literary utopias, politic philosophical programs, and intentional communities139 corresponding to utopia’s “three faces” as determined by Lyman T. Sargent, encompass cultural phenomena incited by utopianism, since independently of its literary, concrete or purely speculative form, utopia is a social ideal’s expression, within which the garden stands as a representative object (cf. Châtel, 2013: 99; Sargent, as cited in Giesecke and Naomi, 2012: 6; Giesecke and Naomi, 2012: 7). Forged within their specific spatial and temporal culture context, Enlightenment gardens of the Forest, Neo-Classical, Serpentine and Romantic styles, embedded with a political and social discourse of democratic equality140 and a metaphysic reunion of man and nature141, are posited as utopic in the sense of surmounting and dissolving barriers142, more specifically by cause of progressively improving – the term improvement as intentionally

139 Such as those mentioned in (xxxix), amongts others. 140 Notwithstanding such gardens are created and cultivated either by men of nobility or bourgeoisie, whose social and economic status is propelled by heritage, tradition and history, in the former’s case, and by the Industrial Revolution, in the latter’s case; in both cases unsurpassably encompassing numerous complexities and ambiguities by means of their social, economic and political empowered status as descrived in section 4.1 and 4.2, albeit not annulling the genuineness of the utopic ideals. 141 A reunion envisioned as accurate, factual and complete within the ambit of this section and Enlightenment garden’s ideology; however, it is to recall that any garden style whatsoever is posited as pertaining to the realm of third nature, as such impossible to reunite with the realm of first nature, since it is its uttermost opposite. Hunt’s assertion that the garden is most idiosyncratically between nature and culture is once again imperative and elucidating. 142 As noticeably represented by the garden design’s composing element of the ha-ha fence; furthermore, the sublime aesthetic overwhelming sense of devastating awe and exalted emotion guiding the design of Roantic gardens itself expands the frontiers of human experience, corresponding to going towards and beyond horizons and, as such, utopic (cf. Châtel, 2013, 100). Escarduça 81

utopic – both the artistic and ideological formality of its antecedent Baroque emblematic garden style143 (cf. Châtel, 2013: 100). In other words, Enlightened gardens are posited by their creators as the only gardens representing an aspired utopia. Contesting arguments may be advanced. The human quest for utopia, i.e. for improvement, progress and even perfection, exhales not from contentment, rather from disorder, adversity, crisis, torment, tribulation, calamity which, as such, incite the desire for and suggest the possibility for a less-worst, better, or perfect status – utopia and dystopia are “versions of the same mental operations”, “sides of the same utopian coin” (Châtel, 2013: 100; Giesecke and Naomi, 2012: 7). Therefore, resonating utopia as the temporal alteration of a society’s circumstances, the empiricist Enlightenment’s ethical, metaphysical, political, and social conceptions and its accompanying aesthetic and artistic styles of the informal Forest, Neo-Classical, Serpentine and Romantic gardens are regarded as utopic when opposed to their rational Cartesian and Baroque dystopic correspondents inasmuch as the latter, and with them Humanism and Renaissance’s garden, are regarded as less-worst, improved, more perfect, than their antecedent Middle Ages’ monastery gardens, imposing the law of faith over man’s reason, and Middle Age’s palace gardens, constrained by political, religious, military, and other circumstances: in either case, barriers are opened, surmounted and dissolved. In other words, the garden is ambivalent, ambiguous: “like all works of human artfulness, gardens are complicated”, (…), “regions of conflict as well as realms of harmony” (Giesecke and Naomi, 2012: 12). The power of a monarch or a regime, or the control of man over nature, figures either as a utopia or as a dystopia: the critical deciding factor emerges as the spatial and temporal context144.

143 Augmented by its spatial and temporal coincidence with the emergence of the Enlightened Utopianism by the hands of More and subsequent authors, eighteenth century’s garden designers self-adopt the term landscape’s improvers, inasmuch as the intellectual men of letters of the Enlightenment’s empiricism, such as Pope, self-consider to exceed the antecedent Cartesian philosophical rationalism, and commissioning landlords of the Forest, Neo-Classical, Serpentine and Romantic informal gardens regard themselves as cultural, social, political, philosophical improvers when compared to their antecedent despotic and absolutist ethical, metaphysical, political, and social regime and the aesthetic and artistic style of form and content of the Baroque ; such disdain compels the tendency to self-regard as the inaugurating garden representation of utopia and paradise, to the detriment of their predecessors (cf. Châtel, 2013: 100). 144 Albeit a profound investigation on the ample but specific field of Utopian and Dystopian Studies conforms not with this report section’s aims, an adjacent observation is regarded as relevant for the investigation of the garden: while tending to the representation of utopia, a specific garden appearance, independently of the antecedent and the proceding, may capitulate to the representation of dystopia (cf. Châtel, 2013: 101). Such observation resonates (140) and (145); it is to note that this remark comments the simultaneity of an utopic and dystopic dimension of one particular garden appearance, thus regarded as not invalidating the observation concerning the temporal decisive factor of progression towards an improved society. Utopians are historically contested and disputed by dystopians, acused of totalitarism. Escarduça 82

From a different perspective, Chântel’s conception of thinking utopia as the human propensity for eccentricity in the sense of open frontiers conveying and agglomerating multiple worlds into the human world summons nineteenth century’s Eclectic garden. The emergence of the Eclectic garden markedly entails an aesthetic and artistic originxli. However, it is hereby regarded as simultaneously complying with a sense of utopia in its enterprise to agglomerate multiple worlds within its enclosure, comprising four distinct variations145: the landscape style, the gardenesque style, the Mixed style, and the Nationalistic stylesxlii (cf. Turner, 2005). As importantly, the umbilical conjunction of utopia, or paradise, and the garden are not restricted to modern conceptions of Utopianism and correlated dynamics with regard to garden design, rather enroot in antiquity: the mythological and religious facet of the garden thickens human’s strive for utopia when evoking the immaculate, pure and divine. As Eve’s descendants, the human inherits an enduring nostalgia for the paradise which is lost after the fall, although granting humanity, and that the human is natively incited to regain once abandoning his human condition (cf. Harrison, 2008: 21). The idea of the Garden of Eden animates a perpetual yearning for the heavenly paradise that incrusts religions and mythologies since ancient times. The fantasy is that, in the paradisiac heavenly gardens, either the Islamic or the Christian or other mythological paradise gardens, the righteous elected continues his earthly bodily life and is offered all the heavenly delights while simultaneously is immune to the earthly mortality and all other human calamities (cf. Harrison, 2008: 3). Also conveying the agglomeration of a plurality of worlds, the Ancient Persian chahar bagh, an enclosed garden containing a central fountain flowing water to four canals geometrically dividing the garden in equal angles146, whose origin is unclear yet acceptedly representing creation by means of its quadripartite design and paradise by means of its objectives and functions, most relevantly references various cultures’ traditions xliii (cf. Harrison, 2008: 194; cf. Turner, 2005: 129, 130). Considering the Koran’s description of the

145 Turner’s employ of the verb select in each of the styles’ synthetic description is not innocent: its etymological Greek source eklektikos corresponds to the action of selecting or picking out (cf. Turner, 2005). However much frantically dispersing in Europe, and regardless of occasionally considered as destitute of a spiritual or artistic character, not only such four styles are considered to have produced exquisite gardens as, most significantly, nourished a continuous theoretical and sophisticated discussion which would foment the modern profession of landscape architecture, much aided by John Claudius Loudon’s substantial literary production and by the development of the press industry (cf. Turner, 2005). 146 From the nomenclature: chahar standing for four, and bagh standing for garden (cf. Turner, 2005). Escarduça 83

eternal afterlife paradise147 and the Islamic religious guidance of perfection to lie in God, the adopts the chahar bagh geometric model, i.e. the centre fountain’s symbol of unity, grace, divine source, and the quadripartite design’s symbol of the four rivers of Eden, the four elements, the four seasons, the four cardinal direction or the four quadrants of the universe, thenceforth present or traceable in every Islamic garden (cf. Harrison, 2008; cf. Turner, 2005). The infernal quotidian experience of life in densely populated medieval walled towns incites the compensating utopia and paradise of the unearthly Eden, symbolised by the cloister garden as an improvement of the tumultuous and passionate life on earth, in whose sanctuary of silent ascetic introspection and by means of dedicated prayer contemplating God’s perfection, the celestial kingdom is promised and the otherworldly afterlife is aspired (cf. Harrison, 2008: 97; cf. Turner, 2005). Summarily, in its intent and meaning, the garden’s aesthetic facet comprises the intentional representation of its correspondent spatial and temporal culture context’s ideologies and ideals if elevated to their perfection inasmuch as evoke utopic myths of the human creation and afterlife, each and all captured in the present and attempted to be mirrored by the physical form of a garden style’s specific appearance, as such creating a geographical territory intimately reclaiming and representing the human’s ancestral and fundamental quest for an aspired cultural utopia embedded with action, uncertainty, hope and nostalgia.

147 A significantly earthly garden for the righteous, who, after a life of faith, discipline, abeyance and patient postponement of all gratifications to the afterlife, is at last awarded by God in an enchanted garden opposing the desert’s adversities, to enjoy spiritual peacefulness and continuous joy, physical repose while reclining on soft jewelled couches and carpets, healthiness and immortality, the adornments of robes of silk and brocades, the coolness of the shade from exhuberant trees, the companion of chaste virgins serving an abundance of flesh of fowls and fruits, the delicacies of four streams of water, wine, milk and honey (cf. Harrison, 2008: 138-142). Escarduça 84

Part II – The Exhibition’s Artistic Conception

Chapter 1 – The Culture Analysis Enabled by the Garden

Section 1.1 – The Meaning of The Garden Regarded as the pivotal preliminary stage for the exhibition’s concept formulation, it is to resonate that the analysis of the garden effected in Part I pursues the foundational framework for the garden’s culture analysis, that regarded as Parques de Sintra exhibition’s and this project’s pivotal guidance within the frame of Culture Studies, hinges on the gardens conformity, either a garden style’s specific appearance or the garden’s family of resemblances accruing each and all of its discrete appearances, to Williams’ categories of culture. It is considered that Part I confirms such a presupposed condition148. Summarily, via its enclosure metaphorical permeability, existing between nature and culture since nature is impregnated with the utmost degree of culture, the historical gardens’ design mutable process establishes relations between space, time and culture, encapsulating the history of human culture (cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Panzaru, 2010). Additionally to the confirmation of the garden as an object of culture analysis, and intimately correlated, that which exhales from Part I’s analysis of the garden is the garden’s status as a discursive object, its processes of representation, and its faculty to convey meaning. In other words, signification. Indeed, the garden arouses a transformation of perception when inciting the sensorial experience to surpass the surface of its composing elements and “to look to the depths in which they stake their claims on life and from which they grow into the realm of presence and appearance”; “gardening is an opening of worlds — of worlds within worlds — beginning with the world

148 Firstly, as an activity of place-making, a place, the garden records and documents a culture’s organisation according to its ideal and social categories; secondly, both as an aesthetic object encompassing representation and a semiotic system of sign processes, specifically a culture semiotics’ text encompassing discourse, the garden communicates a culture’s organisation according to its ideal and social categories, as such cumulatively conforming to Williams’ documentary category of culture; thirdly, a culture organisation’s conception of Nature and relationships with nature guided by philosophy and religion, a society’s aspiration for its conception of a perfect culture’s status, and a culture’s aspiration for paradise conform to Williams ideal category of culture; fourthly, the garden discloses a culture’s organisation according to its individual and collective socio- economic institutions, modes of government, religious beliefs, social habits and ways of life, inasmuch as is equipped with technological proficiencies enabled by a culture’s scientific advancements, and is designed according to a culture’s theoretical and artistic tendencies, so conforming to Williams’ social category of culture; fifthly, the garden discloses the nature of the general organisation structuring the relationships bewteen correspondent ideal values and meanings and particular values and meanings as clarified by the social category; lastly, the garden not restores with no suppression or hierarchy a network of reciprocal affection and reflection relationships markedly traversing and exceeding temporal and spatial reference. Escarduça 85

at one’s feet” (cf. Harrison, 2008: 30). Therefore, Part I’s analysis of the garden endows that which consist of the ultimate goal of a culture analysis direction: the pinpointing of the meanings discoursed by the garden. The garden conveys notions of life, death, love, sexuality, fertility, and regeneration; seclusion, protection, intimacy, serenity, and humbleness; wildness, infinity, uncontrol, impossibility and transcendence; virtue, immaculacy and perfection; sin, rivalry, and pride; turbulence, power, control, tyranny and aggression; order, chivalry, artificiality and civilisation; heritage, memory and identity; locality and globality; class and segregation, to which are to accrued other meanings as individually interpreted. With regard to Parques de Sintra’s gardens, parks and groves, those which are the exhibition’s objects as required, it is to stress their compliance with Part I’s analysis of the garden. When coursing the specificity of Sintra’s diverse palaces and castles, and its artistic formalism as representative aesthetic objects, the chance is offered to engage with various stages of history spanning a period of seven thousand yearsxliv. Such territorially located temporal journey traverses multiple cultures’ heritage, whose diversity finds its representative objects in Sintra’s variety of garden designs correspondingly observing different aesthetic theories, which, encompassing some of the most emblematic garden styles as objects of culture analysis, enables a territorially localised representation of a parcel of human history when agglomerating such representative fragments of human culture. Albeit decidedly interesting the project’s ambit, this investigation is considered at the outset of the exhibition’s conceptual formulation as exempted from a thoroughly scrupulous investigation excavating the historical magnitude of the culture’s detailed specificities involving each and all of Parques de Sintra’s gardens, parks and groves, for a single motive, yet regarded as unsurpassable decisive: the exhibition indeed is not to directly and specifically concern Parques de Sintra’s gardens, parks, and groves while, simultaneously, does not violate Parques de Sintra’s pivotal instructions – a matter which the subsequent chapters are to clarify. While such thorough and comprehensive investigation would decidedly exceed and, in fact, does not correspond to this report’s ambit and aims, a summarised inquiry is yet regarded as convenient and necessary for the mastering of the exhibition’s thematic background. Escarduça 86

The Moorish Castle and its internal yards oscillate between the styles of the Early Middle Age’s stockades and the Late Middle Age’s castles; the National Palace of Sintra and its internal courts and yards prominently adhere to the Late Middle Age’s palace and court-garden styles, while simultaneously perpetuating its Moorish heritage; the Convent of the Holy Cross complies with the monastic’s isolated asceticism and contemplation of God’s perfection, albeit the Franciscan’s architectural model entails absolute informality when compared to monasteries' styles; the National Palace and Gardens of Queluz, only apparently Baroque, rather rococo, since a number of other stylistic influences is agglomerated; The Park and National Palace of Pena, Portugal’s epic Romanticism enterprise; and The Park and Palace of Monserrate, Sintra’s prominent ambassador for the Eclectic style. Further comments are presented in Annex D. Therefore, generically stated, it is plausible to consider that Parques de Sintra’s gardens convey, if not all, a significant similar part of the meanings previously referenced.

Section 1.2 – The Garden’s Utopic Idiosyncrasies Amongst the numerous aspects converging to and endowing the assertion that the garden is an aesthetic object and an object of culture, further apt when referenced to its specific appearances corresponding to Parques de Sintra’s gardens and parks, it is to stress that the garden is a representation of utopia, as a perfected status of society which, as antecedently alluded, encompasses dystopia. Furthermore, it is to resonate that, encompassing insufficiency, action, uncertainty, fear, and hope, the garden itself is also posited as a utopia, for the garden presupposes or partakes a utopian impulse by means of its design with a vision to what it may, or may not, become (cf. Châtel, 2013: 101). Not involuntarily, the preceding paragraph emphasises the verb to be. This report evidently ambitions not the immense enterprise of investigating and dissertating about the concept and definition of being. Nevertheless, assisted by Part I’s metaphysical considerations, considering that the garden imitates Nature, the garden is posited as being, as existing, since it is presupposed as a Neoplatonic apparent and tangible form emanating from intangible and ideal Platonic Forms of wisdom and beauty representing various societies’ culture. Simultaneously and oppositely, when opening frontiers and agglomerating the totality of worlds in its smallest parcel representing such societies perfected ideals, the garden represents that which is not, since utopia pertains to the realm of the aspiration and Escarduça 87

imagination of the unattainable. The challenging ontological definition of being is thus exposed, hovering between appearance and idea. Thus, resonating the various geographies of utopic societies imagined by utopianism’s inaugurators, most prominently the author of the term, it is to stress that such geographies, and utopia, are not. Consequently, and metaphorically – stressing the metaphor as a mere illustration within the ambit of utopia –, the garden is not. The imaginative irony of the neologism’s author is to be exalted: etymologically, ou topos is the non-existing place (cf. Giesecke and Naomi; 2012). However, in such ambivalent condition merging the illusory impression of some form of unattainable and non-existent perfection and its reality as a spatially located object of culture, gardens factually exist. Analysing space as heterogeneously constituted by places and their inter-relationships of appropriations, intersections, oppositions, hierarchisations so delineating such spaces which are discretely irreducible and not imposable to comment space as one of the contemporaneity’s cultural anxieties, Foucault particularly delves on places presenting the peculiar faculty of relating to all other places, however in fact neutralising and contradicting them, that which furthermore encompasses the invention of the inter- relationships delineating such places and supposedly reflected by them (cf. Foucault, 1998 [1984]). In other words, Foucault concentrates on places that are, and are not, i.e. utopias:

Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces (Foucault, 1998 [1984]: 239).

To the metaphorical impediment of the garden’s existence introducing this section, i.e. to the garden’s conflicting condition of consisting a real place effectively representing and accomplishing utopia in which the entirety of a culture’s remaining additional real places are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted, however dislocated from the space where the entirety of a culture’s remaining additional real places are located and delineated by active inter-relationships, different from the latter and yet endowing its location in reality, Foucault offers the conception of heterotopia (cf. Foucault, 1998 [1984]). The heterotopia may be posited as a displaced place, “something like a counter-site”: a place which is at once unreal, virtual, placeless, existent, real, located and connected to the remaining additional real places (cf. Foucault, 1998 [1984]: 239, 240). Escarduça 88

Heterotopias are systematically determined according to six principles and, distinctly relevant to this report, is Parques de Sintra gardens’ and parks’ adherence to such principlesxlv. The notion of displacement, in utopia’s and heterotopia’s case concerning the displacement of space as per Foucault, decidedly influences the exhibition’s concept formulation, when extended to other domains, as addressed in the following chapter.

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Chapter 2 – A Brief Inquiry on Photography of the Garden as Art

Section 2.1 – The Hypothetic Problematics of Photography of the Garden as Art Condemning the deviating effects induced by modernity’s mechanical and technological reproducibility and ephemerality of the work of art, which captures its own domain within artistic modes of production, and dramatically alters an art work’s, its origin or cause, its destination or function, and its experience and reception by the beholder, whose displaced value rests on its massive production and distracting exhibition enabled by modern techniques of mechanical reproduction disregarding canons such as creativity, genius, eternal value and mystery, Benjamin asserts that a work of art’s authentic and unique value lies in its traditional and historical cult functions of ritualistic contemplation and introspection (cf. Benjamin, (1969 [1936]). As per Benjamin, that which is depreciated, even exterminated, is the art work’s aura, and its paramount subordination to its cult value, based on ritual and traditionxlvi (Benjamin, 1969 [1936]). Moreover, further discussing the negative cultural, social, political impacts of art’s mass consumption, the conversion of quality into quantity and the deletion of the aura of a work of art, consisting of a menace or the annulment of the work of art’s specific artistic authenticity and damaging the value of general traditional cultural heritage, severely changes the mode of participation of the increased amount of participants and alters the public’s reaction towards art, conducing to negative cultural, social, political impacts: “The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public”, as such conferring a social function and categories of subject matters to the work of art (Benjamin, (1969 [1936]: 230). The consolidating quote “Distraction and concentration form polar opposites which may be stated as follows: A man who concentrates before a work of art is absorbed by it (…). In contrast, the distracted mass absorbs the work of art” appears as elucidative of Benjamin’s considerations about reproducibility (Benjamin, 1969 [1936]: 244). Consisting the exhibition of images mechanically reproduced, whose object, as required, is the work of art which is Parques de Sintra’s historical gardens, Benjamin’s critique, consolidated in the preceding quote, consequently unfolds in two separate questions when devising the exhibition’s conceptual formulation: firstly, a contextual question, corresponding to the exhibition’s hypothetic depreciation of the garden’s aura, annulment of Escarduça 90

its specific status of artistic authenticity, and the deterioration of the value of cultural heritage embedded in such historical gardens, by cause of distraction, i.e. the inherent alteration of the mode of Sintra historical gardens’ experience, of Sintra historical gardens’ encompassed massified participation, and of the reaction towards Sintra historical gardens as a work of art, and, consequently, of the negative cultural, social, political impacts resulting from the transference of criticism to entertainment, dissolving subject matters represented by Sintra’s historical gardens and their social function; secondly, a conceptual question, evidently corresponding to the validation of photography as art independently of the object which is to be mechanically reproduced, since the exhibition is intended to consist of a manifestation and experience of art, whose qualification as such is not affected and assumes independency from its mechanical and technological reproducibility facet. Matters of the image’s intentionality, causality, functionality, and artistry are implicitly encompassed within such different, yet complementary, questions. The resolution of the latter is envisioned as inherently simultaneously resolving the former, as follows.

Section 2.2 – From Imitation and Reproduction to Representation, From Representation to Signification Benjamin’s condemnation of massive proliferation of image reproductions in the age of technological advancements, often biased and annulling the criteria of authenticity and uniqueness to which the work of art is subordinated and contingent, so that its aura, cult value and heritage testimonial merit do not capitulate, is posited as equivalent to Plato’s proscription of all activities of mimesis, such as those of the painter’s and poet’s images, who limit to paint or to write apparent imitations of things, similarly accused of distance from the truthxlvii. Accordingly, Benjamin’s considerations concerning the contaminating cultural effects deriving from such depletion of the work of art’s aura, cult value and heritage testimonial merit are assumed as correlative to the Republic’s precept that culture artifacts and artistic practices are to conform to rigorous criteria of ethics and to the unquestionable value of universal rational and philosophical truth when observing their impact on the educational moulding of the city’s guardians, of the community’s individuals, and consequently of the community’s ethos. When historically analysing the dynamics of artistic practices, i.e. of “‘ways of doing and making’ that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making as well Escarduça 91

as in the relationships they maintain to modes of being and forms of visibility”, of production and mediation of art, that is, of “forms of visibility that disclose artistic practices, the place they occupy, what they ‘do’ or ‘make’ from the standpoint of what is common to the community”, and of genres, subjects, mediums, materials involved in artistic production and mediation, and further noting that a regime of the arts corresponds to “a specific type of connection between ways of producing works of art or developing practices, forms of visibility that disclose them, and ways of conceptualising the former and the latter”, Rancière inscribes Plato’s discourse in the ethical regime of the images, in which artistic practices are subsumed and subordinated to the broader conceptual entity of imitating images, encompassing the simulacra of painting, poetry and the stage, and whose matters concern both their origins or truth values and their ends, purposes, uses and induced effects, either in the individual and in the community, as such determining the image-making authorisation or forbiddancexlviii (cf. Rancière, 2004: 13, 20). Establishing a general category of artistic mimesis, examining poetry’s historical development, and formulating the hierarchy of poetry’s genres as the fundamental principles of a progressive pragmatic argument of intertwined and sequential stages which, when unified in a global theory, installs intellectual standards and methods enabling the definition, composition, understanding, interpretation and appreciation of valuable poetic tragedy as an artistic practice encompassing universal truth and knowledge and possibilities for the community’s ethical aggrandizement, in Poetics, Aristotle disembarrasses mimesis simultaneously from correspondence to models and from its destination, as such demarcating an area for tragedy which exalts the artistic practice itself, the making – the poiesis – of fictional imitation of actions – the mimesis or representations – no longer submitted to similarity, which corresponds to the partition, or displacement, of the poetic, or representative, regime of the arts from the ethical regime (cf. Halliwell, 1995; Pappas, 2001, Rancière, 2004: 21). Poetics positively defines tragedy as “mimesis of an action which is elevated, complete, and of magnitude; in language embellished by distinct forms in its sections; employing the mode of enactment, not narrative; and through pity and fear accomplishing the catharsis of such emotions” (Aristotle, 1449b24). Aristotle’s argument is sustained by the key-concepts of mimesis, catharsis, action, and seriousness; mimesis of action is emphasized: “(…) the poet should be more a maker of plots than of verses, insofar as he is Escarduça 92

a poet by virtue of mimesis, and his mimesis is of actions” (Aristotle, 1451b27-30). Such Poetics passage, including the term poiêtês, the Greek word both for the composer of words and the poet, is Aristotle’s incite for poets to create plots as mimesis of action and not mimesis of emotions (cf. Pappas, 2001). Coupling mimesis, the imitating, with poiesis, the making, Aristotle’s guidance dethrones art’s essence, the examination of a copy in accordance to its model and its effects, to the favor of art’s substance, the intentional making of poets poured into tragedy’s plot events inherently depictive of real human lives, which is, as such, universal (cf. Rancière, 2004). Thus, mimesis, or representation, is a specific mode of artistic production to which visibility is granted (cf. Rancière, 2004). Such visibility assumes two simultaneous facets: on one hand, an autonomous and delimitative facet, as artistic practices of fictional imitation are acknowledged as autonomous and are afforded an including specific domain within other modes of production; on the other hand, a regulatory and organisational facet, as artistic practices of fictional imitation are organised according to a hierarchical system of analytical and methodical criteria which, while distinguishing genres, subjects and mediums of artistic production, regulates normative standards of artistic quality and adequacy of each genre (cf. Rancière, 2004). Similarly to Plato’s ethical regime of the arts, Rancière relates Aristotle’s representative regime of the arts to politics, as the aforementioned autonomy, translated through the “primacy of action over characters or of narration over description, the hierarchy of genres according to the dignity of their subject matter” inscribes the imitative arts and their artists in the community’s structure (Rancière, 2004: 22). Regardless of the inherent dynamism of numerous and concurrences and disparities enmeshing its evolutionary history, of paramount relevancy inasmuch as far too extent to conform with this section ambit149, eighteenth century’s institution of aesthetics engenders once more a contrasting displacement: from the poetic, or representative, regime of the arts to the aesthetic regime of art; a contrasting displacement which, nonetheless, is posited as a common denominator to such variety of aesthetic tendencies and currents. The fundamental core of such displacement consists of the dissolution of the representative regime’s both artistic production’s delimitations of autonomy from other

149 If Rancière’s ethical regime of the images and poetic, or representative, regime of the arts respectively convoke Republic and Poetics, the investigation of the evolutionary history of aesthetics and its inherent dynamism of numerous and concurrences and disparities would require a comparative methodological analysis of a humongous vastness of aesthetic works and knowledge addressing the science of aesthetics, encompassing the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century and the twentieth century. Escarduça 93

modes of production as determined and contingent to mimesis and the hierarchical system of regulatory norms of artistic quality organizing mimetic artistic practices. In other words, “the identification of art no longer occurs via a division within ways of doing and making (…) and frees it from any specific rule, from any hierarchy of the arts, subject matter, and genres” (Rancière, 2004: 22, 23). Rather, art is identified in the singular, in accordance with a sensible mode of being specific to artistic products within each individual artistic practice is liberated to explore the capabilities of its specific medium (Rancière, 2004: 22, 23). Thus, it is considered that such dissolution endows the possibility of photography as art, under certain circumstances of production and mediation exploring the capabilities of the technological reproduced image. Accordingly, if not determined and contingent to mimesis, the dissolution of the frontier demarcating mimetic artistic practices and general practices yet compels the determination of circumstances of production and mediation affiliated to art and, regarding the exhibition’s concept formulation, to photography. With regard to this matter, it is to stress that the aesthetic regime of art is considered to still encompass representation. Indeed, resonating Bundgaard, the aesthetic object encompasses the representative and the represented object. However, the dissociation of hierarchical, regulatory and organisational correlation between the dignity of the subject matter and the dignity of modes of representation displaces the primacy from the mode of representation to the subject matter, or from the representative object to the represented object. Indeed, the aesthetic regime of the arts’ validation of the artistic practice primarily hinges on the validation of the subject matter as art, or as falling within the domain of art (cf. Rancière, 2004: 32). Moreover, such validation hinges not on the grandeur of the subject matters of great names or great events, since the latter is also displaced, and the primacy of the subject matter rests on “the symptoms of an epoch, a society, or a civilisation in the minute details of ordinary life”, explaining “the surface by subterranean layers”, and reconstructing “worlds from their vestiges” (cf. Rancière, 2004: 34). In other words, the aesthetic logic is that of “a mode of visibility that, on the one hand, revokes the representative tradition’s scales of grandeur and, on the other hand, revokes the oratorical model of speech, in favour of the interpretation of signs on the body of people, things, and civilisations.” (Rancière, 2004: 33, 34). Thus, favouring signs, the aesthetic regime of the arts is regarded as unsurpassable semiotic and, as semiotic, displacing the primacy to representation’s facet Escarduça 94

of intentionality, and to meaning. The aesthetic regime of the arts’ primacy concerns signification. Moreover, with respect to photography, noticing that art is identified in the singular, the aesthetic regime of art enables “this reproduction to be more than mechanical reproductions” (Rancière, 2004: 32). Under conditions of production and mediation of photography in which intentional meaning is conveyed, photography, mechanically produced indeed, is posited not as reproduction of an original work of art, that which would seize photography under Benjamin’s critique, rather is displaced to the domain of art, a mode of producing, not reproducing, an image as an original work of art150. This photography’s displacement from an original reproduction to the production of an original is invested with crucial importance, since it consists of the fundament for the exhibition, in fact, not to directly and specifically, or explicitly, concern Parques de Sintra’s gardens.

150 Equivalently to previous comments concerning a more comprehensive investigation on aesthetics and theory of art, an expanded investigation on the art and knowledge domain of photography is considered as unfeasible within this section ambit, albeit considered of unquestionable relevance. In face of such constraints, Rancière’s considerations are expected and regarded as sufficiently apt to ground the exhibition’s concept formulation. Escarduça 95

Chapter 3 – The Exhibition

The exhibition is incited and rivets on some sense of displacement, or translation, to encompass and unfold in plural facets, ultimately converging to the formulation of the intended artistic and conceptual approach. Firstly, a displacement of the object, as previously mentioned. Parques de Sintra’s mandatory requirement for the image’s capture to be effected within Parques de Sintra’s gardens, parks and groves resumes to such terms, thus imposing not the displaying of visual elements ascribed to the location of the images capture. In other words, artists may opt not to evince visual elements that the observer references to Parques de Sintra’s gardens151. Furthermore, the exhibition is not to figuratively address Parques de Sintra gardens’ historic- natural heritage by means of ’s or landscape’s reproduction. In other words, the exhibition is to consist of original images, oppositely to images reproducing an existing work of art. Secondly, a displacement of the subject matter. Notwithstanding that the meanings excavated in the garden previously mentioned, and specifically in Parques de Sintra’s gardens, are posited as referencing the historical culture context of each of Parques de Sintra specific gardens inasmuch as contemporaneity, such markedly historical character may impede the accomplishment of a contemporary perspective as intended by Parques de Sintra. Alternatively, incited by the notion that the garden encompasses the entirety of the worlds, the exhibition’s concept is formulated as consisting of the representation of the artists’ individual world. Adopting the historical garden as the field of work, the exhibition concerns the image’s production as a representative object of meaning according to each artist’s intention, contextualised in and addressing contemporary’s culture context. The garden’s semiotic signs are to be interpreted not as conveying existing meanings, instead artists are to appropriate the garden as if stolen ephemerally for moments, the duration of the shutter intended to become perennial in the image, as such creatively displacing existing meaning to the enacting of their personal intentional meaning. Such a creative process encompasses the deconstruction of former meanings and the creation of new meanings. Furthermore, it is suggested, however much not mandatorily, that the existing garden is intervened, manipulated through a benefactor corruption, the contemporary sign in juxtaposition to the historical sign, recurring to the creative incorporation of intentional

151 A matter unreservedly discussed with Parques de Sintra, and so accepted. Escarduça 96

extraneous signs of personal choice, natural or artificial – objects, actors, words, images inside the image, amongst others. Lastly, the image’s treatment and edition are to either remain faithful to the moment of capture or to be edited in greater or smaller extent, including, if so intended, the incorporation of new graphic signs. Such precepts are regarded to simultaneously preserve Paques de Sintra gardens’ status as works of art and to ensure that the images produced consist of original works of art according to Rancière’s aesthetic regime of art. Lastly, exploring complicities and, or, antagonisms, the cohabitation of four artists’ visions within the context of a collective exhibition is expected to enable a multifaceted production and mediation channel for expression, communication and knowledge, through which contemporary culture ideals’ and ideologies’ possibilities and fragilities may be addressed. The exhibition’s title Signification: Other Images of the Garden intentionally resorts to the four key-concepts assisting the exhibition concept’s formulation. The exhibition was hosted by MU.SA – Museu das Artes de Sintra. Annex E records the work of each individual artist, presenting the Other Images of the Garden and the artists’ descriptions of their projects, and Annex F presents the open-call’s public regulation preceding the exhibition.

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Conclusion

Independently of discrete spatial or temporal context specificities, human culture is animated by non-essentialist and non-dualistic material and immaterial transformation dynamics of mutuality and reciprocity, whose complexity and interdisciplinarity convokes multiple areas of knowledge interesting the investigation of culture which, when individually activated within the reductionism determined by their respective frontiers, similarly to the subject matter, evince ineluctable interaction, juxtaposition and assimilation, so requiring such reductionism’s confrontation by a holistic and integrative approach. So uniquely and ambiguously distinguishing the garden from most works of art and objects mediating human culture and enabling its analysis, the garden’s hybridisation of nature and culture, deliberately appropriating that which is generally referred to as nature, an object itself created and experienced by the human being as the subject, himself similarly the result of the fusion of nature and culture, discloses further combinations of complementarities or antagonisms gauging the relationships between the human and his world: theory and practice, life and death, blooming and decadence, reality and fantasy, worldly and transcendent, virtue and sin, artificial and natural, local and global, turbulence and serenity, inclusion and seclusion, past, present and future. The garden is a natural world from whose soil bloom multiple worlds by cause of the human’s action of cultivation. Consequently, the question in hands regarding the experience of the garden does not limit to the object and the subject, rather extends to the processes of representation involved, and the meanings conveyed. In other words, to signification. At the outset, Parques de Sintra’s requisite for the garden as the object for a project of an exhibition immediately evinced the interdisciplinary approach summoning multiple disciplines interested in culture analysis to mandatorily consist of the foundation of such project. Additionally, the artistic object, in this case photography, consists of an aesthetic experience involving the intentionality of both object and subject and representation. Therefore, Parques de Sintra’s exhibition project is formulated considering displacement. The representative object is displaced from the garden to the image, the work of art is displaced from the visual experience of the garden – not disregarding the garden’s remaining sensorial experience – to the visual experience of other images of the garden, and Escarduça 98

the meaning is displaced from that which is conveyed by the garden to that which is conveyed by the image. Rather generally, yet expectedly correct, it may be posited that Parques de Sintra’s mission consists of the preservation, dignification and public presentation of the material and immaterial historical heritage. When considering the initial guidance for a cultural and artistic project of photography of the garden to comprehend a contemporary character, the approach to the term contemporary embedding the conception of Signification: Other Images of the Garden is envisioned corresponding to an alternative to the activities by means of which Parques de Sintra accomplishes its mission while complying with similar criteria of preservation, dignification and public presentation of such heritage. Signification: Other Images of the Garden is regarded as responding to Parques de Sintra’s intentions and requisites. As importantly, agglomerating research and practice, it rewardingly responds to the academic journey.

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FINAL NOTES i Illustrating enclosed garden types existing in monasteries which serve functional aims inasmuch as fostered contemplation and learning, by the hands of Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose, the novice Adso describes his life with friar William telling that “Sometimes, also at the abbey, he would spend the whole day walking in the vegetable garden, examining the plants as if they were chrysoprases or emeralds”, or also “One day I found him strolling in the without any apparent aim, as if he did not have to account to God for his works.”; when describing the abbey, Adso tells “To the left of the avenue there stretched a vast area of vegetable gardens and, as I later learned, the , around the two buildings of the balneary and the infirmary and herbarium, following the curve of the walls.”; after arriving the monastery, friar William praises gardens cultivated by the herbalist monk Severinus of Sankt Wendel, referring that he had already noticed “(…) the very fine vegetable garden, where it looked to him as if not only edible plants were grown, but also medicinal ones, from what he could tell (…)” (Eco, 1984: 13-14; 14; 18; 43). ii Last decades’ empirical observation unveils the quotidian private vegetable and herb garden comprising a reduced plot or simply some vases progressively appearing in private dwellings’ backyards or porches, plausibly assumed to aim the mere providing of the daily soup’s pot, however much probably related to explicit or implicit meanings concerning the owner’s financial circumstances, biological and health approach to his dietary, or an economic-political ideological attitude towards the mass-consumption market agents. A similar assertion, however greatly inflated and, hence, much relevant to a critical culture analysis since official government socio-economic policies are actually implicated, in addition to non-governmental institutions’ and to individual citizens’ initiatives, circumstances and decisions of personal character such as those aforementioned, may be enounced concerning the phenomenon of community fruit and vegetable gardens expanding in urban centres parallel to globalisation phenomena, emphasising alternative physical spaces nurturing the globalized society’s sustainability in a multitude of dimensions spanning urban, social, economic or health related aspects. Suggested references addressing this matter correspond to Chris Firth et all, Developing “Community” in Community Gardens; Rina Ghose and Margaret Pettygrove, Urban Community Gardens as Spaces of Citizenship; Pascale Scheromm, Motivations and Practices of Gardeners in Urban Collective Gardens: The Case of Montpellier; or COST – European Cooperation in Science and Technology, Urban Gardens; amongst much literature addressing the subject matter. However relevant as a critical culture analysis and related to the essential concept of the garden as one of its appearances, the subject matter of urban vegetable and community gardens does not comply with this report’s scope and aim concerning Parques de Sintra historical gardens’ contemporary photography exhibition. iii Eden’s privileged context, where life, offerings and peace are endless, gratuitous and spontaneous, is assumed as the elated and protected gardenlike dimension where Adam and Eve would thoughtlessly experience and enjoy the variety of wonders of the good life: firstly, everlasting immortality, both their perennial biological bodies untouched by pain, disease and death and their names’ perpetuity by fame, foundational acts or enduring memorials of art and scripture; secondly, effortless abundancy, the unrestricted mélange of earthly offerings at their desires’ and necessities’ disposal exempted from austerities, travails and responsibilities; and lastly, harmonious amiability, the peaceful, placid and complacent existence with their unalarming and unthreatening surroundings (Harrison, 2008: 1-13). For how seductive as its multiform jubilation appears, such Eden is considered as fallacious, since such existence is void of the fundamental traces incrusted in human nature and the world of mortals (Harrison, 2008: 1-13). Eden’s dehumanisation is begotten by and manifests through a variety of factors resulting of such fallacy of assured privileges: human relations are inexistent, time and territory are inexpedient, human endeavours are irrelevant, fertility is redundant, adult maturity is dispensed (Harrison, 2008:1-13). In Eden, the human is merely an unburdened consumer and beneficiary, divested from the commitment to the cultivation of his spirit (Harrison, 2008: 1-13). Oppositely, a meaningful experience of life entails the planting, cultivation and protection of material beings and of human spirit, i.e. altruistic care, a signature of the worldly human condition, correlating with the gardener’s care for his garden (Harrison, 2008:1-13). Equally, an Eden existence inhibits and suspends the timely occasions in which human altruistic actions of care are effected, similarly to a garden, which comes into being in and through time (Harrison, 2008:1-13). Furthermore, the fall and expulsion from Eden is perspectived from a different angle. Eden’s de facto dehumanised existence motivates not sinful curiosity, fascination, immodesty, disdain, disobedience or rebellion, but instead involuntary negligence and naïve vulnerability before hazardous enticements (Harrison, 2008: 1-13). The fall and consequent expulsion from Eden results not from sinful temptation but instead from Escarduça 106

misinformed blindness resulting from the absence of responsibility, resiliency and character fostered by an unburdened paradisiac existence where devotion and love for other than one-self are unnecessary and uncultivated (Harrison, 2008: 1-13). While the human is precluded from Eden’s gifts after expulsion, he is radiantly compensated with a human heart elevating him to the status of cultivator and giver, rather of mere consumer and receiver (Harrison, 2008: 1-13). Such human condition, however, inescapably encompasses the burdens of tragedies, travails, aggressions and costs permeating an worldly and timely existence, additionally aggravating the human incorrigible bias to regard such indignities as the confirmation of a curse of suffering and pain when, in fact, they consist of a pre-condition for a human existence of life, growth, appearance, and form (Harrison, 2008: 1-13). Thus, endowing the true human heart, Eve’s true gift to the human is indeed the fall and expulsion, as it leads to a humanised existence in an earthly context where the cultivation of the human spirit with care and action is practised (Harrison, 2008: 14-24). Instead of unjustly accounted as a sinful and forbidden transgression, Eve’s action is to be reverenced as the careful inception of fecundity, the inaugural earthly motherhood, instantaneously exonerating the human from Eden’s blindness and yielding the treasured ability of vision to human eyes (Harrison, 2008: 14-24). Such as a gardener dedicates to his garden owing its fruits to the provisions of meaningful care and action, the mortal condition does not negate life, but instead responds to time and death as a demand for the worldly and timely experienced beauty, acquiring form through both the body, its procreation of generations, and the spirit, its generated virtues and ideas, i.e. the action and care enveloping the human condition, its potentialities, passions, desires and appearances (Harrison, 2008: 14-24). Expulsion from Eden attributes Eve as humanity’s bona fide gardener of a worldly and timely humanised body and spirit and the human spirit as the cultivation soil (cf. Harrison, 2008: 14-24). A gardener’s imperishable dedication to his garden is augmented by the ritualistic appeal to additional determinant factors, regardless of such factors’ uncontrolled independency, such as natural phenomena – a hypothesised ancient inception of religion (Harrison, 2008: 25-37). Requiring the adult parenthood and maturity of that who cultivates rather than that who consumes, such intrinsic impotence fosters the human acknowledgment of self-limitation and, thus, both of humility before the severities and of anxiety for the generosities of that which transcends the human (Harrison, 2008: 25-37). Simultaneously, a paradox incrusts human nature, perhaps unsurpassable by any measure of self-cultivation, since human’s careful passion for a humanised living world of care and action, quotidianly devaluated by Eden’s deceiving illusion, is only esteemed in case of deprivation (Harrison, 2008: 1-13). As important as cultivation is the conscious attainment of the domain where the agent of such external action operates. The garden’s soil is the gardener’s domain of cultivation inasmuch as the spirit is the human’s soil, and the engaged and careful appreciation of such underworld is a requisite for its potentialities’ consummation, either a garden’s flower or human’s life (Harrison, 2008: 25-37). Soil, in its literal or conceptual dimension, is the battleground where the impulse of life meets its resistance, surpassed through the gardener’s care and action to generate the garden of humanised existence (Harrison, 2008: 25-37). When metaphorically submerging in the historical depths of natural sciences, soil is the domain sparking primitive micro-organic forms of life who heroically gardened both their inceptual living form and their contextual material soil meeting uncontrolled hostilities (Harrison, 2008: 25-37). Such metaphor elects primitive living micro-organisms as inaugural gardeners as the scientific analogy to Eve’s facet as the inaugural human gardener (Harrison, 2008: 25-37). As a metaphor for a fundamental and universal principle opening worlds within worlds, either the immediacy of soil or the vastness of human culture, the careful action of cultivation of a garden, either its formal appearance or its human spiritual dimension, and its intrinsic altruistic disproportion between consuming and offering, is first and foremost a principle of life observing educational and cultural aims far transcending a garden’s literality (Harrison, 2008: 25-37). iv As a spiritual garden, in Plato’s Academy, the educator was the gardener who would plant the seeds of philosophy, metaphysical truth, knowledge of goodness and justice in the garden of the students’ soul and would nurture such seeds via the implementation of a comprehensive life of philosophy emphasising conversation and dialectic through the medium of love and fellowship (Harrison, 2008: 59-70). If the student’s soul would reveal as a meritorious fertile soil not afflicted by aridity, the fruits of this garden would flourish and mature into a philosopher, whose wholeness of body, mind and soul continuously devote to philosophy’s way of life (Harrison, 2008: 59-70). Within the recess of the Academy’s garden, simultaneously removed but close to Athens, the student’s soul is a garden at once separate from and open to the world (Harrison, 2008: 59- 70). In Epicurus’ The Garden School, the organic cultivation to which the mentor and his disciples dedicated and the understanding of nature’s harmonies and disharmonies grounded the Epicurean fundamental principle of Escarduça 107

the human’s body and soul inevitable mortality and the absence of divine intervention (Harrison, 2008: 71-82). Once profoundly cultivated, the human is exonerated from anxieties and an elevated state of ataraxia blossoms, a spiritual serenity of unperturbed happiness which does not annul perturbations, rather transfigures through permanent supervision, similar to that required by a garden’s tranquillity when assaulted by dangers (Harrison, 2008: 71-82). The Epicurean garden’s fruit is life’s happiness and pleasures which, oppositely to indulgence of appetites of whatever sort, flourishes from the human’s soul self-improvement continuously pervaded by philosophy (Harrison, 2008: 71-82). The soul’s cultivation in the Epicurean garden encompasses moral, spiritual and intellectual virtues of friendship, modesty, gentleness, kindness, civility, graciousness, respect, sincerity, temperance, prudence, courage, justice, engagement in enlightening conversations, intelligence, eloquence, hope, patience and gratitude (Harrison, 2008: 71-82). Both gardeners envisaged their gardens as enclosed asylums from the surroundings, i.e. from Athens’ political corruption and ethical perversity (Harrison, 2008: 59-82). However, the gardens’ fruit differenced since, oppositely to the Garden School, the Academy did not constitute and end in itself (Harrison, 2008: 71-82). Plato’s abstinence from politic engagement was not to detract his active citizenship ideological mission, that of springing future statesmen whose actions and decisions would comply with the virtues of philosophy for the polis’ communal benefit (Harrison, 2008: 59-70). Conversely, devoid of ideology albeit acknowledging reality, Epicurus regarded philosophy as the amplification of a mortal life’s potential for an ambitioned serene happiness through personal cultivation independently of citizenship, and the garden’s pleasures not as isolated and private from reality but as a response to reality, the visible and invisible world’s re-conception to encounter within the garden’s haven as opposed to the invincibility of reality’s absurdities (Harrison, 2008: 71-82). v Evincing the alliance of nature and society in the project of human happiness, a literary fictional description rendering a garden experience as the sheltering haven from rejected reality’s social schisms induced not by aloof disinterest and egoistic impassivity but instead as the unique remaining alternative refuge, thus figuring as an Epicurean response to such reality’s unrivalled fierceness even if not encompassing its factual alteration, is encountered by Harrison in Boccaccio’s Decameron. Boccaccio’s protagonists’ escape from Florence’s social collapse of plague and anarchy to a countryside garden ambitioning to restore the devastated pleasures of ideal and structured codes of ordered conviviality and socialisation grounded on wit, decorum, storytelling, fellowship, conversation and courtesy (Harrison, 2008: 83-96). Simultaneously, complying with the Epicurean retreat which does not ignore reality inasmuch as does not ambition its reform, the sojourn’s brief temporality does not isolate the protagonists from Florence sight, which is present from a distance by the garden’s vistas, and from Florence’s horror, to which the protagonists are to return in its unaltered status (Harrison, 2008: 83- 96). Thus, aiming such ends of human happiness within a retreat not detached from reality, the fictional garden where Decameron’s plot evolves is regarded as a descendant of Epicurus’ garden, and such attribute of the garden as a temporary refuge from that which lies beyond may be extrapolated to the entirety of the garden’s real appearances in time and space (Harrison, 2008: 83-96). Simultaneously, Boccaccio evinces his Epicurean ethics permeating Decameron when asserting no moral, political or religious convictions aiming for the heroic reform and salvation of Florence’s cataclysm, but instead the modest hope to offer helpful and comforting pleasure through humanised diversion, consolation and edification during the temporary asylum offered by the reading of his work (cf. Harrison, 2008). Hence, such asylum afforded by Decameron’s story may be extended to other fictional stories, therefore asserting the teleological analogy of gardens and stories (Harrison, 2008: 83-96). Moreover, equitably balancing and blending unnatural and natural artifices, to the extent that Boccaccio’s description of the Decameron’s garden is regarded as inspirational for the pleasure gardens of the Italian Renaissance and insofar as Boccaccio’s narrative art observes aesthetic principles similar to those of the Italian Renaissance’s gardens, a formal analogy between a story and a garden may be extracted and extended (Harrison, 2008: 83-96). Gardens’ design and stories’ design observe a context in which both are inserted and to which both relate, a shape afforded by their constituting elements or characters and by their structuring arrangement observing a diversified rhythmical sequence unfolding the interplay of surprising perspectives, intriguing byways, sinister undersides and changing appearances, and a transitive mutual permeability to the world beyond either the garden’s limits and the story’s words (Harrison, 2008: 83-96). More importantly, gardens and stories delight (Harrison, 2008: 83-96). Paradoxically, such segmented and temporal testimony of a reality’s transfiguration, formalised either within a garden’s enclosing boundaries or afforded by a story’s fictional narrative, is ultimately empowered to intervene in its correspondent external and unaffected reality by means of such transfiguration itself (Harrison, 2008: 83-96).

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vi Much as an impressed Aristotle inquired sound components of rhythm and melody to resemble states of the soul in Problemata, so Harrison is wondered by gardens components’ accomplishment of such resemblance or, alternatively, of such induction (Harrison, 2008: 125-134). Such gardens’ conjugation of form and life with soul and sense signals the intimate and transcending correlation of external elements or places to internal states of soul exceeding mere analogous or representative correlation (cf. Harrison, 2008). In other words, an umbilical mutuality infuses states of soul and places, since a place integrates a state of soul inasmuch as a state of soul imbues a place (Harrison, 2008: 125-134). In addition to such fusion of soul and places, both serve as secluded sheltering domiciles from an ungovernable world sited beyond their confines, and gardens include such places’ specific category of mutuality (Harrison, 2008: 125-134). Equivalently, however much both gardens and states of soul are affected by an attempted and solicit mastering design or control, both are underlyingly pervaded by a tensioning condition of vulnerability and precariousness when confronted by invading forces of destruction inevitably infiltrating from their extraneous dimension, and mutually, such places’ dismemberment entails correspondent states of soul’s evanescence (Harrison, 2008: 125-134). In the midst of such troublesome which parallels the garden and states of soul, the practice of gardening and the objectivity of the garden may be posited as a rescuing renovator of an endangered or infirmed state of soul (Harrison, 2008: 125-134). While not dismissing past and present distresses imposed to a garden, a gardener’s devoted and matured endurance and patience may prevail to rescue and renovate his formal garden, inasmuch as such garden’s cultivation formal process is the expedient through which the gardener’s formerly prostrate and vanquished state of soul is cultivated to flourish newly animated and renovated (Harrison, 2008: 125-134). vii In addition to other objectives intrinsic to their design, gardens such as Stowe and Stourhead were originally created for introspection and contemplation, harmoniously congregating meditative gaze and external object aiming self-discovery, spiritual cultivation and personal transformation (cf. Harrison, 2008). However, the tumultuous commotion presently enmeshed in such gardens’ experience conspires to the discard of such intended original experience (Harrison, 2008: 114-124). A non-negligible portion of the gardens’ visits is composed by frenzy touristic multitudes, constrainedly hurried by compacted schedules and convulsively devoted to their paraphernalia of lenses and cameras (Harrison, 2008: 114-124). The depreciation of the temporal dimension and undisturbed posture required by the gardens’ observation hinders the emanation and radiation of that which the garden contains beyond its form, that which is invisible but latent, thus suggesting a gardenless dimension within the garden itself (Harrison, 2008: 114-124). Such suspended interplay between external objects’ gaze and internal mind’s drift is extrapolated by Harrison to contemporaneity beyond the garden. Present times’ visible world is inundated by an overwhelming production of images while, simultaneously, idling quietude and propensity for meditation are culturally depressed, thus evincing a cultural sabotage reifying the static representation of images which reach only the mind’s blind surface and inhibiting the perceptual phenomenon of the invisible’s radiating appearance, afforded only by a temporal and spatial perceptual framework of the world enabling vision to gaze and to fade into the inaccessible (Harrison, 2008: 114-124). viii The historical cultural notion of spiritual repose, not to be encountered within Eden’s earthly harmony of serene and abundant delights and rewards in result of Eden’s revocation of care and careful action, contributes to disquiet action, change, innovation, energy, limits’ transgression, in turn entailing emotional tension, agony, anxiety, turmoil and peril (cf. Harrison, 2008: 149-162). Similar to Eve’s escape from Eden is Odysseus’ aloofness from Kalypso’s alluring island of abundancy and immortality in Homer’s Odyssey or the pilgrim’s aspiration for vertical ascent from Eden to heaven in Dante’s The Divine Comedy (Harrison, 2008: 149-162). Such historical human discontent with an earthly paradisiac Eden and the consequent relentless human action are amplified by the historical affiance of eternal repose to be encountered only in a non-spatial and non- temporal celestial realm, i.e. human discontent and relentlessness nevertheless revolve around a basic structure, a master plan, and are guided by a centre desire, a higher aim, culturally anchored to a religious perspective of peaceful serenity and quietude to be offered to the righteous in an afterlife’s residency of immortality beyond space and time, different and above Eden, however much undetermined (Harrison, 2008: 149-162). Conversely, modernity’s and contemporaneity’s relentlessness appear heightened by their contrasting apparent absence of a fixed axis around which human action revolves towards a higher aim (Harrison, 2008: 149-162). Modern and contemporary times append the intoxicating urgency and obsessive fascination for aimless and unreal illusion as the remedy for an earthly ostensible boredom to the point of compliance with a dehumanising deceptive reality (Harrison, 2008: 149-162). Thus, human action appears to pathologically pursue errant directions which randomly intersect and rarely converge, incited by a turbulent dynamic whose aim paradoxically fades in itself, i.e. whose aim limits to the perpetuation of its aimless dynamism (Harrison, 2008: 149-162). Enhancing its modernity, Harrison notes that, in Orlando Furioso, both literally and symbolically, Escarduça 109

Ludovico Ariosto’s knights wander the earth laterally instead of ascendingly towards the celestial sphere, avid for continuous action, distraction, challenge, commotion and prowess encountered on chivalry battles whose greater goal utterly arises from the knights’ aimless desire for motion, ironically and not coincidentally, in a post-chivalric epoch (Harrison, 2008: 149-162). In addition to such aimless desire for motion which illustrates the modern and contemporary human restlessness, Ariosto knights’ adventures are interweaved by the encounter with two different gardens, i.e. with two pausing refuges contrasting such aimless motion (Harrison, 2008: 149-162). Alcina’s garden of fantasy corresponds to a deceiving Eden to which the knights are allured by the garden’s vortex of illusional palliatives of enchantment and illusion as a self-alienating distraction from an aimless existence, thus ultimately exposing the human strive for an illusional unreality, even at the cost of an imposed dehumanising deceptive reality (Harrison, 2008: 149-162). Oppositely, Logistilla’s garden matches not such escape, as it consists of an earthly and real garden of idyll and serenity, as such far less enticing than Alcina’s, and, thus, is neglected by the knights for its boredom and emptiness, not to the favour of the higher end of spiritual cultivation elsewhere but to the perpetuating of the knights’ aimless action as the antidote for the garden’s melancholy (Harrison, 2008: 149-162). In fact, both Alcina’s fantasy and Logistilla’s Edenic gardens are entrapments sterile in stillness, repose, beauty and harmony with the cosmic order where the human ultimate desire for cultivation of a fertile humanised spirit is inexistent, since such historical notion of spiritual repose is erroneously associated with emptiness and boredom to which the modern and contemporary human is averse (Harrison, 2008: 149-162). The knights’ refusal to remain in the gardens and their return to aimless motion enhances the illustration of modern and contemporary restlessness (Harrison, 2008: 149-162). ix Similar to that of Orlando Furioso’s knights, aversion to a seeming boredom and the craving for more life installs an ever-unsettled and ever-unfulfilled modern and contemporary human existence finding escape only in the perpetuation of a pathological cycle of endless consumption and endless productivity presuming the infiniteness of available, usable and disposable resources and begotten by human masteries such as technology, economy, science, medicine or telecommunications, to which the human hectically dedicates not only avoiding boredom and pain but also satisfying desire and pleasure, while heedlessly ruining both the biosphere and the human culture gardens, assuming himself as nothing other than an unmitigated receptacle and infantile consumer exempted from responsibilities to his earthly abode (Harrison, 2008: 163-171). However, such vicious cycle indeed fails to correspond to human real necessities since it neglects that a consumerist paradise does not comply with a humanised existence of care (Harrison, 2008: 163-171). Cultivation comprising human spirit’s fertilisation with stillness, repose, beauty and harmony with the cosmic order, seemingly a state of apathic passivity, indeed does negate a proactive craving of life (Harrison, 2008: 163-171). The modern and contemporary question arousing in Orlando Furioso is not which of Alcina’s or Logistilla’s garden to elect for human action, but instead what human action to pursue once disavowing the destructive neurosis of impassionate aimless action and illusional distraction, finding parallel in the modern and contemporary condition of spiritual ruination and negligent ignorance of the encompassed consequences (Harrison, 2008: 163-171). Similar to Eden’s residents after a self-conscious elected expulsion aiming a humanised existence infused by care, the combative cultivation of a humanised mortal body and spirit is not to aggravate a perpetuity of disfiguration and destruction by non-violently contesting the noxious weeds of modern and contemporary compulsions for consumption and productivity (Harrison, 2008: 163-171). As such, the vocation of care instils the activist gardener of the human spirit to cultivate the welfare of the earthly human garden rather than to its consumption and such gardener is enlivened by fulfilment rather than by gratification (Harrison, 2008: 163- 171). x When discussing language-games, i.e. the tools of language, the ways such tools are used and the senses produced by such uses, Wittgenstein exemplifies with a multiplicity of sorts of language-games, hence disclosing their inherent multiplicity, exempts to formulate the commonalities that all language-games are required to observe and the essence of language, asserts that these phenomena are permeated by a variety of relationships while not holding common attributes, as such enabling all language-games to be arrayed under the term language (Wittgenstein, 1958: 2-31). To such example of language-games, Wittgenstein further appends those of a variety of additional games, such as board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and of a variety of numbers, such as cardinal numbers, rational numbers, real numbers (cf. Wittgenstein, 1958). If arranged under the classification of games, or of numbers, Wittgenstein argues that the entirety of games, or of numbers, mandatorily share one or more attributes, otherwise could not be organised under the label of Escarduça 110

games, or numbers, while simultaneously affirms that there is not a common attribute to all games, or to all numbers, rather numerous similarities and correspondences coinciding and intersecting within a complex network, as such effecting both the conservation and the abandonment of particular characteristic attributes when consecutively surveying individual types of games, or types of numbers, hence determining the concept of game, or of number, as the logical sum of a corresponding set of sub-concepts (cf. Wittgenstein, 1958). Moreover, an object’s essence, such as the essence of language, of game or of number, is not rigidly restricted, since an object’s particular appearance, or a determinate array of appearances, only allegedly limits the accumulation of the object’s attributes which determine its essence for a special purpose, since oppositely it extends the range of such an array of the object’s physical appearances, consequently expanding the comprehensiveness of the object’s attributes formulating its essence (cf. Wittgenstein, 1958). Thus, the essence of language, or of games and of numbers, is not rigidly restricted, as the essence’s frontiers may continuously expand inasmuch as similarities and correspondences are coherently traced amongst accrued individual physical appearances (cf. Wittgenstein, 1958). xi A theory of culture is validly determined if observing three categories: firstly, the ideal category, emphasising certain values and meanings of a particular tradition or society which, when extended to reference a timeless order of progressive growth, and regardless of their formalisation and activation within a particular spatial and temporal derivation and its contextualised culture discreteness, adhere to a referential human universal condition which other more deflated culture definitions would exclude and, when learned and apprehended via inheritance and, or by embodiment in certain culture objects and particular situations, are prevailingly accepted as radically contributory to the human’s process of evolution, to human life’s enrichment and to human society’s regulation, thus capturing a universal human condition, not of attained perfection but instead of ever- evolving progression accordingly to general ethical assumptions, despite numerous variations and conflicts; secondly: the documentary category, embodying the nature of human values, activities, thoughts and experiences of a specific culture context and, via the details of language, form and convention of artistic and intellectual works in which these are recorded and through which these are expressed, disclosing the correspondent traditional modes of living, hence bestowing a reasonably detailed completion of a culture’s record, not only effected by an object’s communicative potential to disclose its relationships to the correspondent social, politic or economic core background but also, and eventually more importantly, dependant on the knowledge of a culture context’s artistic and theoretical particular tendencies and their development, regarded not as marginal or secondary to such core background but as an autonomous parcel of it in equality with all other aspects of the organisation; thirdly, the social category, describing a culture context’s particularities of its specific way of life and ordinary forms of behaviour explicitly and implicitly expressing a culture’s particular values and meanings, operative not only in art and knowledge but also through its politic, economic and social arrangements, i.e. its organisation of production, its structure of the family, its structure of institutions governing social relationships or its members’ modes of communication, and emphasising not a comparative gradation of such particular values and meanings, rather the inquiry of certain tendencies and changes pursuing the understanding of a general social and cultural development (cf. Williams, 1998 [1961]). Furthermore, the adequacy and completeness of a theory of a culture hinges on such theory’s consolidated accumulation with no hierarchising suppression and, or, supremacy of each determining compositional categories, since, firstly, the ideal category is not to isolate its emphasised universal values and meanings activating a tradition of human progress by means of decontextualised abstraction of their embodied formalisations from the spatial and temporal derivation corresponding to the particular culture context within which they operate; secondly, the documentary category is not to inadvertently accentuate its corresponding complex of recording objects to the point of their decontextualised detachment from the ampleness of a human culture’s varied background and social, economic and political organisation and its correspondent way of life and ordinary forms of behaviour; and thirdly, the artistic and intellectual works and the politic, economic and social arrangements comprising the social category are not to be regarded as an aloof impression merely echoing a culture context’s real interests (cf. Williams, 1998 [1961]). xii Augé’s rendering of the anthropological place’s concept antecedes by contrast that of the anthropological non-place. It is to note that Augé distinctively stipulates the concepts of place and of its opposite as research objects validly serving the anthropological analysis of contemporary cultural phenomena occurring in post- modern Western societies. Such stipulation foreordains the following remarks. Firstly, however much ascribed to the anthropological analysis of contemporary cultural phenomena occurring in post-modern Western societies, the concept of place is yet presumed as acceptably adherent to the garden’s various appearances, independently of their historical occurrences in past times and remote distances, since, Escarduça 111

on one hand, Hunt comments that, albeit the place-making term’s recent coinage, its manifestation “can be traced to the earliest civilisations” as the human intervention in his immediate environment, shaping and creating surroundings for himself and for a given society of culture, regardless of its cultural differences at different times and places and, on the other hand, Augé starts his rendition of the anthropological place’s definition enhancing the human enduring for a certain type of physical space where a society’s economic, social, politic and religious organisation is demarcated, where it is located and where it manifests (cf. Augé, 1992 [1995]; Hunt, 2000: 8). Secondly, such stipulation lies in an introductory argument addressing contemporary anthropology’s scope which, while avowing that “anthropological research deals in the present”, i.e. with the “the here and now” of a research endeavour relative to a certain temporal and spatial culture context – whatever such temporal and, or spatial referent may be, both either past or present and either proximate or remote as antecedently referenced – and embraces “the question of the other (…) as its sole intellectual object” historically corresponding to cultures of alterity as opposed to the Western’s “here and now” – either present or past, either near or remote –, indeed and alternatively affirms contemporary anthropology’s as a validate discipline for the investigation of cultures of proximity – those regarded as Western super-modern mutant societies, as opposites to the canonical cultures of exotic otherness (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 8, 22, 28-37). Diagnosing supermodernity as embedded with impulses, chasms, transformations and transgressions cumulatively animated firstly, by a superabundance of contemporary time, regarded as the accelerated excess of events to a point in which a temporal progression of before, now and after is dissolved and, as a consequent of such congestion, becomes temporally non-intelligible in historical terms; secondly, by a superabundance of contemporary space, regarded as the accelerated excess of access both to remoteness and to images of remoteness, as such dissolving spatial scales through the relevant simultaneity of spatial concentration and circulation of people and information; and thirdly, by a superabundance of the contemporary individual who, in contemporary societies, assumes himself as a referential in the sense that he interprets the information delivered to him for himself, as such emphasising the individualisation of references and the necessity for individual production of meaning, therefore destabilising reference points for collective identification, inasmuch as individualities are yet explicitly affected by collective history, Augé notedly claims that the investigation of cultures of proximity by contemporary anthropology is not undermined since, on one hand, anthropology’s canon of otherness as a research method rather convokes new approaches to alterity, such as those of the individual’s social alterity and the individual’s intimate alterity – such notions are regarded as of capital relevance to this report’s ambit and goals and are to summarily recur in this report’s Part 2 – and, on the other hand, instilled by such accelerated contemporary shifting dynamics of time, space and individuality abundance, and inclusively offered by them, approaches to research must instead be adjusted, finding new research objects which add to a temporally and spatially contextualised culture’s civilisational material text, such as those of the Non-Place, and that of the Place, hereby regarded as adjusted to a contemporary cultural analysis of the garden (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 8, 22, 28-37). xiii As a place of identity and relations – two of the attributes incrusted in the core of the anthropological place –, the anthropological place is that which is occupied and moulded by a society’s collective and individual institutions which, as its inhabitants, additionally to distinguish the landscape’s prominent reference points such as plants, forests, meadows, hills, valleys, springs and rivers, and to detect the intangible traces of abysmal and celestial empowered divinities, of the fantastic spirits populating their intimate tales, and the vestiges of ancestors, organise the territory’s allocation to an array of functions such as firstly, private residency and its concentration in larger or smaller urban agglomerates comprising further spaces for public reunion and routes for transit; secondly, economic activities such as provisions’, goods’ and other commodities’ production by means of agriculture, herding, fishing or industry and their respective commercial trade; thirdly, administrative and public authority affairs; fourthly, communitarian celebrations dedicated to religious rituals, social festivities often affiliated to the agricultural or celestial calendar and quotidian entertainment; and fifthly, the continuous vigilance of the place’s frontiers and their protection against external destabilising dangers (Augé, 1995: 42-51). As importantly, the anthropological place is that where the stability of a society’s collective and individual institutions internal dynamics is preserved and guarded from intrinsic destabilising schisms by reason of the predictability and recurrence of birth and death events ensuring the generations’ continuing reproduction, of the observance of an ethos regulating such collective and individual social institutions’ conduct and habits, and of the prediction and prevention mechanisms of unexpected vicissitudes inasmuch as the mastering and resolution of their correspondently particular arising tensions (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 42-51). Regardless of the limitations affecting the systematised substantiation of a culturalist angle over a society’s spatial and temporal precise context, since a culture’s intrinsically problematic character, as disclosed by such culture’s reactions to other cultures and to the startles of history, and a culture’s social complexity, as entangled by the variety of its individual and collective social institutions and the plurality of factors respectively involved Escarduça 112

in the moulding of each and every social institution’s individuality, as such cumulatively hindering the consistency and transparency between culture, society and individual and forewarning to the “totality temptation” of the social fact, are not to be unobserved, the organisation of space according to the anthropological place’s terms yet corresponds to a principle of culture meaning’s investment and translation by means of the territory’s inscription by a society’s collective and individual institutions of its social order’s most visible and institutionalised signs – or, following Posner, sign systems, as subsequently addressed in this report –, as such simultaneously determining a common place shared by such a society’s collective and individual institutions (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 48-51). In other words, albeit the perennial anchor of a society’s culture incrusted in the intact soil of a self-contained and self-sufficient world founded in an immemorial epoch and permanently stable across the midst of times, within which every social fact requires not further understanding and beyond which nothing is understandable, on one hand invokes an illusory fantasy by reason of a culture’s ineludible variations, on the other hand, the organisation of space as a dispositive for cultural discourse instrumented by a complex of reference points translating a system of possibilities, prescriptions and interdicts whose content is at once spatial and social is an enterprise and modality of both collective and individual practice serving the installation, congregation and unification of a society’s individual and collective members, so affording a sense of belongingness by means of the expression of such members’ identity and relations, i.e. of the shared identity common to the entirety of the society’s individual and collective members, of the individual identity of a particular member in relation to other members, and of the singular identity distinguishing a member for the remaining (cf. Augé, 1992 [1995]: 44-52). Furthermore, the anthropological place is necessarily a place of history, since the conjugation of identity and relations presupposes stability and longevity and, equivalently, their inscription in space requires their inscription in and through time (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 54, 58). Firstly, the anthropological place is historically carved by ancestors and by the narratives of such place’s foundation, often punctuated by temporal episodes signalling a spatial itinerary prior to its definitive establishment, and secondly, once established, the anthropological place’s distinct locations of reunion as animated by functions and uses of economic, spiritual or political nature – hereby suggested to be expanded to social intercourse and other festivities, artistic indulgence, intellectual gratification, personal well-being, subsistence, authority’s or military ceremonials, public education – encompass their own history, or their historical space as a material temporality, since some are created, others expand, while others dim, according either to the spatial distance separating such locations of reunion measured and quantified in temporal units or to the economic, religious, political, social, or to the personal calendar assigned to their functions and uses (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 54, 58-59). It is to stress the aspect of continuity affixed to the anthropological place’s historical facet, not to be confused to places of memory which, albeit domiciling past social individual or collective institutions, or past communitarian rituals and celebrations, either disappeared or transformed, are nonetheless mere fragmented projections of such continuous historical facet, nothing more than revivals and reminders of the passage of time and the changes it encompasses at the service of retrospective and nostalgic spectators, thus stressing that the anthropological place escapes history and its inhabitants live in history, rather than make history (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 54-56). However much the continuity of time paradoxically encompasses a variety of spatial disruptions and discontinuities, its elusion from temporal contingencies summons and hinges on the monumental and imponent, often non-functional, constituent elements of the social place, such as altars and shrines to the gods and palaces and thrones to sovereigns, whose tangible expression of permanence and duration endows an illusion both of pre-existence and of endurance to each and every society’s individual and collective members, so disentangling history from the realm of abstraction (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 60). As a referential for belongingness, remembrance and continuity by reason of its immemorial foundation, perennial stability and persistent longevity, the anthropological place is interpreted by its society’s inhabiting individual and collective members as the spatial arrangement of its economic, social, politic and religious order – hereby suggested to be expanded to the mythological, military, festive, administrative or educational dimensions, not so much aiming for the understanding and knowledge of such a society’s relative cultural identity – recognized identity and established relations – but, more importantly, encompassing its cult as a domain of recognition in which the group’s each and every social institution, either individual or collective, inasmuch as all events, are interpreted and recognised according to terms which are established, while simultaneously and consequently a clear frontier is delineated against either internal or external endangering dynamics of alterity and their domain of absolute foreignness, so ensuring that the language of identity is protected and retains a meaning (cf. Augé, 1992 [1995]). The anthopological place is mapped by the three geometric forms of lines, intersection of lines, and points of intersection, to which collectively apply such culture organisation’s different institutional arrangements, geographically corresponding to firstly, the fixed and recognised itineraries, axes or routes connecting specific discrete locations of reunion which, spatially anchoring a society’s different cultural dynamics, as such Escarduça 113

fomenting and structuring inter-relationships amongst such society’s individual or collective institutions, are in turn constituted, secondly, by crossroads and open spaces, where such society’s individual or collective institutions pass, meet and gather, activated by economic dynamics – to which either subsistence or entertainment are hereby considered to be related – fostered by the concentrated location of markets, businesses, cafés, restaurants, hotels, and thirdly, by distinct centres established by certain individual or collective social institutions, either of a political or religious character – hereby suggested to be expanded to the mythological, military, festive, administrative or educational dimensions –, encompassing a monumental dimension and quartering a focal signalling point of attraction, such as a divine sanctuary or a sovereign’s palace – hereby correspondingly expanded observing a prophetical oracle, a commander’s headquarter, a popular relic, a civil administrative building, or a mentor’s podium (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 56-57, 66). Instilled by their instituted procedures either of political or religious ambit – hereby equivalently expanded to their mythological, festive, military, administrative or educational extent –, as such affixing a facet of power and control by reason of a sense of acquiesced truce, Augé further stresses the conceptual and observable institutional complexity imbuing the combination of such elemental geometric forms of itineraries, crossroads and centres since they mutually imbricate as, firstly, an itinerary may converge to numerous crossroads and centres intersecting a variety of inexplicit frontiers and limits, as such heightening the importance of the cultural and institutional behaviours and habits signaling such locations of reunion, secondly, empowered crossroads and centres consequently determine the instalment of connecting routes and, thirdly, a crossroad activated by economic dynamics may doubly become a centre by domiciling a monumental focal point of attraction (Augé, 1992 [1995]: 57-58). xiv Animated by the human urge by biophilia – “a yearning for contact with non-human life – assuming uncanny representational forms”, i.e. the contact with factual arrangements or representational displays of non-human life, either vegetal or animal, which reference the natural world at some level and whose deprivation appears to impose the human with a succumbing psychological demoralisation of spirit or neurochemical malady – and by clorophilia – which prioritises “green leafy things, vegetables, the verdant in its exuberant sprouting forms” –, Harrison emphasises the spontaneous increasing emergence of community gardens in urban geographies organised by “surrounding residents, homeless people, squatters, tenement dwellers, and others” who, after the necessary licences and authorisations, have cleared the grounds of former vacant urban lots from “beer cans, engine oil, old batteries, spark plugs, refrigerators, brake pads, mattresses, and fast-food flotsam that have come there to die (…) where addicts, pushers, and vagrants once urinated, trashed, and engaged in turf wars”, and, through the soil’s fertilization and the careful sowing and growing of a generous variety of seeds, have indeed generated a location of reunion as per Augé, since “the wonder of such a garden in their midst brought out the surrounding residents, many of them whom met each other for fist time around the flowers, herbs and vegetables”, thus distinguishing the gardens’ faculty for the embellishing demarcation of a specific area as its potential for the thriving of human conviviality and communitarian congregation (Harrison, 2008: 44). Illustrating this matter with factual examples, Scheromm enhances Montpellier community gardens’ contribution to “social relationships, their link to nature and their environmental value”, adding intrinsic “solidarity and conviviality values” aiming for the reinforcement of social bonds (Scheromm, 2015: 735). In turn, signalling two specific community gardens located in Nottingham, Firth et all notice the reinforcement of social capital, designating social capital as “the social structures, institutions and shared values making up communities” (Firth et all, 2011: 557). Furthermore, “insofar as they embody an affirmation, declare their human authorship, invite recognition, and call for a response,” community gardens “represent speech acts, not in the banal sense of making “social statements” but in the sense of militating against and triumphing over a condition of speechlessness” (Harrison, 2008: 45). Such speechlessness perspective complies with “the human need to act, to speak and to be heard”, so granting garden making as an act of politics in the most essential sense of politics and in the least ordinary or quotidian sense of the term, intrinsically incrusted in the public sphere of human action shaping the world, in its most essential term of human communal action and belongingness whose proper locus is the polis (Harrison, 2008: 46). Such political facet of community gardens is noticed by Firth et all, when affirming that “community gardens can mobilise and empower residents of a community”, and by Ghose and Pettygrove, who, referencing Schmelzkopf and Staeheli, characterize community gardens as “spaces through which citizens can challenge dominant power relations and claim rights” after observing community gardens in Milwaukee (Ghose and Pettygrove, 2014: 1092). xv Hunt stresses the challenges of complexities and ambiguities embedded in the terms represent / representation, inasmuch as its prestige as a privileged “critical term” in the humanities (Hunt, 2000: 78). Escarduça 114

To illustrate, Hunt more specifically comments the 1983 article by Svetlana Aspers inaugurating W.J.T Mithcell’s acclaimed journal Representations which, investigating a presumed avoidance of critique within the Art History field from Vélazquez’s Las Meninas, since it seemingly had only stirred discussions both commenting that the canvas depicts mere actualities of Vélazquez’s time and place and that deliver a narrative or plot for the scene depicted, defends questions of representation as concerning subject matter and meaning (Hunt, 2000: 79). Opposing the delusion that the garden’s representations are straightforward or “natural” albeit resorting to “natural things”, and so supporting the suggested extension from Bundgaard’s analysis of visual works of art to the garden, Hunt further resorts to Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses to affirm that “a picture or – as I would now have him to say – a garden is both a thing represented and a thing representing” (Hunt, 2000: 79). xvi So manifesting similar techniques and concerns between garden and painting, garden design, i.e. the determination of its natural and artificial composing elements and their spatial organisation, is dominated by criteria of colour, texture, variety, balance, composition, shading, contrast and perspective affording both expansive or microscomic vistas, inasmuch as it further concatenates the contribution of fragrant or fetid scents, the sounds of footspets, echoes of conversations, the murmur and raucuous noises of animals, wind, rain and water, the temperature tactility of the sun, water or wind, the terrain’s and vegetation textures, the suggestion of fruits’ and vegetables’ flavours and the terrain’s morfology, the kinestethic pleasure of movement or stillness, amongts a myriad of other sensorial stimuli (cf. Ross, 1998). xvii Supporting such assertion, it is to recall Harrison’s comments regarding both the formal and teleological analogies between gardens and stories as mentioned in (v). Indeed, “nothing enhances human relations and the bonds of community more than mastery of the art of narrative” (Harrison, 2008: 93). Furthermore, while it is to exalt “the relation between words and pictures” and their correspondent advantaged powers and capacities of description and depiction, demarcating words as “obviously more suited to convey complex arguments and detailed narratives”, and pictures to “more adequately communicate the look of things”, Ross yet stresses that “to delineate the world of a given garden, we must affix verbal descriptions to visual experiences” (Ross, 1998: 182). Supporting such argument, Ross mentions some particular garden styles of the XVIII century’s English tradition, referenced in detail in further chapters of this report’s Part II: firstly, the Neoclassicism of the Augustan garden style, whose emphatic iconographic programs could be “read” by visitors while strolling through the garden and are considered to enhancedly retell episodes of the Classical mythology, such as Stourhead and its allusion to the Aeneid, thus evidently narratological as Ross underlines when comparing such garden style to the XVIII century’s English literary art of Neoclassical poetry; secondly: the Romanticism of the Serpentine and Picturesque garden styles, whose irregular, effortless and varied fluidity of informal elements devalues and opposes the extensive artificial adornment of nature and its symbolising character conveyed by Classical allegorical elements, thus evidently pictorial as Ross stresses when comparing such gardens to the XVIII century’s English landscape painting, yet requiring the verbal indication, or ostentation, of that which is depicted (Ross, 1998: 182-183). xviii As a culture’ symbolic form, or a cultural sign system, the garden differs from natural sign systems – both types of sign systems, the natural and the cultural, commented by Posner as corresponding to the semiosphere –, as it is conventionally encoded, instead of naturally, i.e. the signification relations between the garden’s cluster of signifiers and signifieds is organised not by innate and biologically inherited mechanisms, instead is intentionally apprehended through a set of rules correlating and expression and an interpretation, such as conventional social interaction or explicit decisions artificially created to such effect , so facilitating and standardising the interpretation of signs and effecting shared conventions structuring signifiers and signifieds – signifiers and signifieds are equated as signs and meanings regulated by a code – which, when shared by various individuals transmitted amongst generations installing traditions, contribute to a social organisation’s culture, and enable attention to be dedicated to the specific circumstances involving a sign process influencing both a signifier’s articulation and a signified understanding (cf. Posner, 2004). A sign’s intentionality evidencing a conscious emitter – in the garden’s case, the designer of a garden style’s specific appearance as a semiotic emitter – whose sign’s practice either encompasses a conventionalised referent or an explicitly intended message distinguishes signs’ category of signals which, depending on the code intentionally regulating the relations between the garden’s signs and meanings, are in turn designated as symbols when representing by convention codes, such as the case of a long straight avenue leading up to a palace, representing power, authority, hierarchy, or as as icons, when representing by conventionalised artificial codes of similarity, stylisation, depiction or imitation, such as the case of a clump of trees, representing wealth (cf. Jørgensen, 1998; cf. Posner, 2004). To this regard, it is to note not only that a garden style’s specific apperance includes Escarduça 115

symbols and icons, since it comprises several different sign processes, but also that symbols and icons and are not mutually exclusive, as a garden component may agglomerate a mimetic or imitation facet within a larger representational sense: a fountain may imitate a natural spring inasmuch as convey larger cultural values as meanings; a labyrinth images the outside world’s complexities and confusions while constitutes a highly palpable enactment of disorientation (Hunt, 2000: 84). Simultaneously, a sign process may entail a sign which, regardless of its evident appearance and the resultant interpreted message, occurs by itself and is unconsciously sent by an absent emitter, so categorising the sign’s category of indicators, entangled by a temporal factor embedded in the relationship between the indicator and the indicated, as such distinguishing either an indirect and unclear relation, such as the case of a shift in the vegetation, representing the land’s earlier cultivation or the augury of a favourable or harsh season, a direct yet unclear relation, such as the case of stains in the vegetation, representing present or future disease, or a direct and clear relation as is the case of vestiges of tracks marked in the terrain, representing the past passing of a vehicle, a person or an animal (cf. Jørgensen, 1998; cf. Posner, 2004). xix Progressively complexifying and individually determing the types of message transmitted in each one through selection of some kinds and exclusion of other kinds, as such also referred to as channels, media concepts are distinguished as firstly, the biological media, relative to the engagement of the sensorial apparatus either in the production and reception of signs; secondly, the physical media, relative to the chemical or physical channel connecting a sign to the interpreter’s sensorial receptor apparatus and, when available, to the emitter’s production organ, being either optical, if an electro-magnetic field carrying photons is involved in visual processes, acoustic, if acoustic transmission of auditory sign processes is effected by solid, liquid or gaseous bodies connecting a sign and a receptor, osmotic, if a gaseous chemical substance is used in olfactory sign processes, culinary, when liquid or solid substances are used in gustatory sign processes, or haptic, when stimuli of tactile sign processes is transmitted through skin; thirdly, the technological media, regarding technologies altering either the physical media of connection between a sign and an interpreter or the sensorial apparatus both producing or receiving a sign; fourthly, the sociological media, relative to the social institution organising the biological, physical and technological means necessary to signs’ production, often involving the simultaneous organisation of different sign processes; fifthly, the functional media, organising sign processes according to the purpose of the transmitted messages which, in turn, coping with notions such as style, genre or discourse type, invests messages with similar structures regardless of their occurrence in biological, physical, technical or social media; and lastly, the code-based media, characterising sign processes according to the types of rules adopted by sign users to assign messages to signs (Posner, 2004: 60-64). A garden style’s specific appearance simultaneously combines the biological media, when involving visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile reception, to which adjoins the kinesthetic sense as previously mentioned; the physical media of air involved in optical, acoustic, osmotic transmission, of water involved in optical, acoustic and culinary transmission, of fruits and vegetables involved in culinary transmission, and of skin involved in haptic transmission; the technological media involved in the alteration of a garden’s composing elements such as water as the contact matter for visual and auditory sign processes; the sociological media associated to garden types as listed in Annex Axix, such as the venue of a public park, a flower garden, a zoological garden, a community garden, a cloister garden, or a sports garden, amongst other examples, to which relates their functional media; and the code-based media which results of a garden style’s characteristic rules observed in its design. xx Elucidating the means through which cultural semiotics’ theoretical groundings contribute to a scientific framework for the empirical inquiry and comparative study of cultures, Posner starts to comment the term culture not only resorting to its etymology, indicating cultivation, refinement and education, and also mentioning Johann Gottfried Herder’s seventeenth century designation of culture as “the process of self- education of the individual and of society” and quoting Edward B. Taylor’s eighteenth century conception of culture as “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and all other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society” contributing to the individual’s and society’s cultivation and self-education (Herder, J. G., as cited in Posner, 2004: 56; Taylor. E.B, as quoted in Posner 2004: 56). Notwitstanding such introductory notions of culture, Posner further invokes and advocates for an integrative conception of culture and of its research methodology such as that of contemporary anthropology which, regardless of separately examining culture according to its segmented areas of social culture, material culture and mental culture, yet envisions the whole of a culture as an integrated unity when stressing not only the intertwining conjunction of such particular areas of culture but also the ways of their creation and, furthermore, their mechanisms of transmission from one generation to the other so creating such society’s traditions, as such Escarduça 116

oppositely to other traditional disciplines which, albeit adopting culture as its subject, are restrictively and canonically centred to its occurrence in particular religious and/or political institutions and selectively constrained by specific media, such as firstly, philology and history, focusing on visually receivable, optically transmitted sign complexes contained in writing on paper, secondly, art history and architectural studies, dedicated to visually receivable, optically and haptically transmitted and spatially experienced sign complexes contained in pictures, sculptures, and buildings, thirdly, musicology, concentrated on auditorily receivable, acoustically transmitted sonic sign complexes produced with the human voice and/or musical instruments, and fourthly, subsequent and similar augmentations resulting of the advent of new technical media and their respective centred study program such as photography, film, television, video, computers (Posner, 2004: 64- 66). Since cultural semiotics is primarily interested in the investigation and clarification of cultural phenomena when addressed from such integrative perspective resorting to the presently confirmed and evidently existing relationships between culture and semiotics’ concepts of sign, message, interpreter, code, and medium, as such ultimately aiming to equip the study of culture with a non-arbitrary and integrative method of relating and analysing culture’s diverse subject areas, therefore observing a Culture Studies’ approach when bridging boundaries amongst traditional disciplines, Posner posits that a culture is semiotically organised by a plurality of sign systems implicating signs’ emitters and interpreters, messages, codes, and mediums, when commenting that firstly, a society’s social culture, on one hand anthropologically regarded as composed by individuals and collectives of individuals constituting such society’s institutions to which correspond communal rituals by affiliation to their individual or collective material and mental culture, is on the other hand semiotically structured by individuals, groups of individuals, or the society’s institutions in case themselves, each and every as users of conventional signs, either emitters or receptors, designated as members of such society due to their status as carriers of its culture consistently engaged in similar processes of signs’ production and reception regulated by collective conventional codes assisting such signs’ interpretation; secondly, material culture, on one hand anthropologically considered a society’s civilisation as composed by the totality of its artifacts, respecting everything in a society, either instantaneous and ephemeral or persistent and perennial, which results of intentional behaviour and devised to assist the accomplishment of a particular function, inasmuch as the required skills for their production and utilisation, is on the other hand semiotically envisioned as such society’s texts, distinguished amongst its entireness of artifacts as those perennial artifacts which not only result of intentional behaviour and to which a function is assigned but which, observing a comprehensive notion of text, cumulatively consist of either linear or non-linear complexes of both verbal and non-verbal signs involving multi-media communication and multi-sensory reception whose encoded messages are integrated into a complex whole; and lastly, mental culture, on one hand anthropologically formulated as a society’s mentality, manifesting through its civilisation and composed by its mentifacts, in turn corresponding to the ideas assisting a society’s reality and self-interpretation, such as notions of “person”, “animal”, “plant”, “heaven” or “hell”, and to the values grounding a culture, such as “freedom”, “equality”, “fraternity”, “sense of responsibility”, “honesty”, and “love of truth”, and by the conventions regulating their use and expression, which on the other hand semiotically equate to a society’s conventional systems of encoded correlations between its array of symbolic forms, or signifiers, and such society’s communal ideas and values, or signifieds, as such organising the society members’ behaviours and determining a society artifacts’ functions and meanings (Posner, 2004: 65-71). As such, when considering a culture to correspond to a society of individuals, institutions and rituals whose particular material civilisation of sets of artifacts and skills is matured according to its mentality of ideas, values and conventions, cultural semiotics translates such conceptions as a systematic inter-relation between sign users whose sets of texts are interpreted according to conventional codes (cf. Posner, 2004). xxi Firstly, the elementary fact that the historiography of the garden summons different garden styles, i.e. diverse stylistic trends in spatial arrangements of diverse types of the garden’s signs, induces the immediate notion of different garden experiences afforded both to the same individual interpreter and, or to differnet individual interpreters since, as per Ross, “different gardens will evoke different sorts of experiences in their visitors, and how each garden affects us depends in large part upon that garden’s characteristics”, that which Hunt equivalently asserts when commenting that the ideia of the garden is “composed of the perception of gardens in many different ways by different people and different cultures and periods” (Hunt, 2000: 15; Ross, 1998: 155). Secondly, it is to note that a specific garden location’s preexistent conditions, such as the topography’s effectiveness, microclimate’s moderation, geographic exposure, fresh water’s presence and soil’s richness, as mentioned in Annex A, and the specificity of the designer’s cultural background, tastes, memories, influencing an individual designer’s iconographical program through the selection of certain elements and composition intending to control the garden’s experience, combine to actuate different discursive intentionalities amongst Escarduça 117

diverse specific garden appearances, even if adherent to a common garden style (cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Ross, 1998). Thirdly, the discoursed values and meanings specific to each and every garden appearance, independently of the garden style to which correspond, are contingent to a myriad of historical dynamics contributing to a specific culture’s social organisation and to the specificity of each individual interpreter’s cultural background, knowledge, tastes, memories, emotions and expectations, inescapably influencing each interpreter’s interpretation process (cf. Hunt, 2000; cf. Jørgensen, 1998; cf. Ross, 1998). Fourthly, the interpreter’s cognitive functions of sensation and perception – the activation of multi-sensory apparatus and the capacity to elaborate ideas directly resultant from the receptivity of stimuli from the external world according –, of imagination and association – the creation of mental ideas of things, their recalling when no longer in their presence, and the alteration and combination of ideas of things to create images of things never experience –, and of understanding – the manipulation of ideas and their conscious identification, individualisation, association and election in order to solve problems and to formulate claims – are implicated in the sign processes and their encoded meaning’s interpretation involved in the experience of a garden style’s specific appearance as an aesthetic object (cf. Bundgaard, 2009; cf Ross, 1998). Fifthly, it is to note that “the same set of qualities (...) can presentify several, equally consistent, but different objects which are genuinely autonomous”, thus stressing that several meanings may be captured from a single garden style’s specific appearance by differnet observers when perceived as an aesthtehic object, i.e. different represented objects may be consistently and non-ambiguously perceived in the same representative object, to which is further to note that an individual observer’s sucessive experiences over time of presicely the same garden style’s specific appearance may render varying interpretations (Bundgaard, 2009: 48; cf. Ross, 1998). xxii Recollecting antecedent references to the relationships between garden-as-art and both the visual art of painting and the literary art of narrative and poetry as mentioned in (xv) and (xvi), Ross enhancedly borrows from Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Works and Worlds of Art, whose analysis of narrative art forms of literature and drama and non-narrative art forms of painting, dramatic performances or prose and verse begets the assertion that fictional worlds are projected by artistic acts and the suggestion that interpretation comprises elucidation plus extrapolation, wherein elucidation consists of the ascertainment of what an artist indicates in a work of art by means of its explicit components inasmuch as by means of merely implied suggestions, whereas extrapolation consists of the determination of what is projected beyond that which the artist indicates (Wolterstorff, N., as cited in Ross, 1998: 181, 182). When referencing the garden-as-art, Ross thus argues that the perceptible and expressive elucidation of a garden style’s specific appearance concerns not only the sensorial perception of the garden’s physical components but also the grasp of certain relationships between and amongst them, the affection by certain emotional tones and the occurrence of certain trains of thought as intentionally indicated and clearly expected by a garden designer, and its extrapolation as experiences beyond those indicated by the artist, encompassing heightened sensitivity or more care and effort and conveying messages not intended by the garden designer, in both cases impressed by the observer individuality’s contingencies as mentioned in (xx) (Ross, 1998: 184, 186). Ross so adopts the term virtual object presented by works of art, or contained in, from Susanne Langer’s Feeling and Form, who characterises the work of art as non-actual and non-existing illusory object divorced from actual reality by means of its otherness contrast with the ordinary and mundane physical and causal order, whose non-standard and extraordinary experience is detached from all practical connections and concerns, so resonating the Kantian disinterestedness accompanying the aesthetic experience, and as such begetts no deceit, albeit is postulated to explain certain effects (Langer, S., as cited in Ross, 1998: 176, 177). However, so resonating Bundgaard’s representative object and represented object as simultaneous facet of the aesthetic object and, equivalently, so resonating Bruner’s comments regarding that which is expressed in a text or a text analogue and the absolute and universal indeterminacy of that which a text might mean, Ross disagrees, claiming that the object of garden-as-art is at once two-foldedly part of the real world, within which physical, causal, practical interaction occur, and virtual worlds, within which the artwork’s experience is plausibly investigated, explored and enlarged by means of the cognition faculties of sensation, imagination and intellect (Ross, 1998: 176, 177). In other words, regardless of an artwork’s physical reality facet, it distinguishes from quotidian objects since it encompasses an encased intentional statement and requires each and every observer’s intentional interpretation, so disclosing its enlarged virtual world (cf. Ross, 1998). xxiii Cognition studies identify automatic and intuitive functions of processing and grouping visual elements by virtue of the visual significance and saliency of certain qualitative properties, such as individual resemblance of colour, morphology or orientation, or as compositional proximity, similarity, symmetry, non-genericity or continuity, which, occurring precedently to the recognition of forms, expedite a sign system receiver’s perception of visual matter, so encoding possible perceptual correlations between visual matter and the Escarduça 118

semantics of conceptual representations which, albeit not ensuring a pre-established correspondence between a representative object and a represented object, assist the organisation of visual matter by a sign emitter – in this case, a garden’s designer – according to his intentionality (cf. Bundgaard, 2009). Concurrently, albeit dependant of each and every interpreter’s election individually appending a discrete meaning to the composing elements of a garden style’s specific appearance, a cultural semiotics’ examination animated by conventional traditions and conventionalised codes yet affords an incipient array of several possible contents intentionally ascribed to the garden’s signs: land form and texture relates to resistance, strength, stability, solidity, roughness, wildness, affability, purity, smoothness, elegance, intellectuality, wealth; water expresses instability, immediacy, emotion, contemplation, infinity, eternity; vegetation expresses vitality, prudence, melancholy, grief, subservience, humbleness; vertical and horizontal structures express order, dominance, authority, hierarchy, influence, enclosure, exclusion, hospitality; furniture and adornments, express wealth, organisation, contemplation, narratives and atmospheres; effects express curiosity, expectation, surprise, puzzlement, invitation, mysteriousness, infinity, connection (cf. Jørgensen, 1998). Conjointly, the garden’s composing elements are intentionally combined by design to instill concentration, expectation, idleness, endeavour, delightfulness, repulsion, repetition, novelty, variety, illusion, reality, movement, stillness, intimacy, surroundedness, immersion, emergence, immensity, security, danger, freedom, stagnation, renovation (cf. Ross, 1998). Furthermore, resorting to the intentional imitation of emblematic images, inscriptions and mottoes in sculpture, monuments and architectural ensembles, in points of interest as indicated by furniture and in striking vistas, the intentional iconographical program of the garden is much assisted by the emblem book’s early XVIII century tradition fostering an association of word and image according to the emblems’ culturally conventionalised artificial codes of emblems, whose sources lie in mythology, religion and literature, addressing matters such as virtues and vices, temperaments, humours and emotions, astronomy and celestial bodies, the world’s geography, the year’s monthly calendar and the four seasons, the four elements, the four winds, the four types of poems, the four parts of the day, the four ages of man, thus (cf. Ross, 1998). Emblematic content is particularly assigned to trees and flowers: ivy is to constraint, oak to long life, to lust, laurel to victory, cedar to mercy, the violet to humility, the marigold to charity, the hyacinth to hope, the sunflower to contemplation, the tulip to beauty, the lily to chastity, the narcissus to stupidity (cf. Ross, 1998). xxiv An analysis of a general culture organisation is expectedly substantial, extensive and accurate when effected in relation to its local and contemporary culture context, since it adheres to objects of culture theory inseparably solved and only accessible in the factual and real experience of such culture temporal and spatial context – that which is distinguished as the lived culture; oppositely, when conducted in relation to either a temporally past or spatially extraneous referential, the analysis of such culture organisation relies in the recovery of its correspondent objects of culture theory – that which is distinguished as the recorded culture, from art to quotidian – which, unsurpassably detached of such particular culture context, are acquired as its precipitate substances inevitably dismissing certain elements from such culture context’s ideal and social selected values, thoughts, behaviours, attitudes, informed both formally and informally, and from its patterns of interests, activities, relationships and communications configuring the organisation of a correspondent way of life, hence clothing such analysis with some degree of incompleteness and abstraction (cf. Williams, 1998 [1961]). Regardless of such binding limitations, the culture of a certain period, i.e. “the particular living result of all the elements in the general organisation”, is alternatively and complementarily liberated and redeemed, possibly attained by a further common element, corresponding neither trivially nor marginally but rather centrally to a certain sense of the factual and particular living experience of a culture’s formation, a characteristic community of experience, an impression scarcely requiring formulation or description other than the dual notion of a culture’s structure of feelings, i.e. a most definite idea of a culture yet operating in the most intangible mode, differently attained by the numerous composing individuals of a culture’s organisation albeit commonly embraced and entrenched as its communicative pennant, to which the arts of a period under analysis, whose argumentation modes include characteristic approaches and tones often expressed unconsciously, are of major importance as such culture formation’s enduring and prevailing communicative record, howbeit the communicative significance’s impotence from a culture’s generational structure of feelings to ensure that a succeeding generation, within a culture’s organic dynamics and changing organisation yet enhancing the vital role of a former culture’s documentary category as the tracing mechanism after its testifying formal and informal agents’ evanescence, is to respond to such dynamism by mere inheritance, alternatively creating its own contextualised and differenced structure of feelings, which in many aspects continues some inherited elements but in many aspects simultaneously connects such inheritance to invented elements – that which is distinguished as the culture of the selective tradition, gradually composing a surviving tradition, plausibly compared to Posner’s comment concerning a culture’s adopted cultural semiotic texts that “every culture Escarduça 119

selects from the set of these texts a small subset which its members consider important for their cultural identity” when quoting Jurij M. Lotman’s “The selection of a certain number of texts from the mass of […] messages can be considered as indicating the emergence of a culture as a special form of self-organisation of society”, thus exalting that history, as the consecutive record of periods absorbed into a selective tradition, is ampler and more complex than the sum of separate histories or the sum of lived cultures (Posner, 2004: 73; Jurij M. Lotman, as quoted in Posner 2004: 73; Williams, 1998 [1961]: 53-54). xxv Shapiro refers Nietzsche’s literary and philosophical novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in whose introductory episode the prophet from Ancient Persia, whose tribe suffered from nomads’ pillaging thus fomenting an acute ethical philosophy contrasting the cultural notion of good and evil, truthfulness and falseness, order and chaos, incites an audience in accordance to his philosophical system to repudiate both the immediatism and frivolity of earthly complacencies and the infatuation and distortions of extra-earthly delusions, and to cultivate the immanent physical site of human known and embodied existence with care and passion, thus transforming the human-earth in a new garden (cf. Shapiro, 2013). Thus Spoke Zarathustra further renders more specificities of the garden’s occurrence within Nietzsche’s human-earth, more specifically by means of the episode of Zarathustra’s convalescing emergence from a comatose condition during which, by means of recurrence, the prophet intensively experiences the horrendous agonies implicated by the oppressing return to a decadent, necrophiliac and nihilistic human-earth existence earlier envisioned and described (cf. Shapiro, 2013). Such scene describes Zarathustra’s silent convalescence while immersed and protected by a vivid garden experience afforded by the lavish variety of fruits, plants, flowers, herbs and animals collected by an eagle and garnering his bed, to which, while indulged by the fragrances and flavours of an apple, follows Zarathustra dialogue with the eagle and a snake, who incentive Zarathustra to return to earth, announced to him as a luxurious garden of vegetation, animal life, birdsong, attractive fragrances and tempting food, and to sing while avowing eternity (Shapiro, 2013: 71-74). xxvi Harrison illustrates such human facets by means of the particularities of the homeless garden, a garden appearance if regarded from an ample perspective extrapolating the traditional notion of garden which, nonetheless and most relevantly, confirms similar human phenomena when related to conventional gardens. The harshness of the homeless habitat, whose conditioned existence compels survival as the paramount concern, does not overthrow the strenuous care with which, often daily, the destitute inhabitants of the street daily assemble “toys, stuffed animals, flags, found objects, milk cartons, recycled trash, piles of leaves, at times a simple row of flowers” to create a temporary garden of their own, which paradoxically does not attend survival priorities (Harrison, 2008: 41). Furthermore, a collection of photographs from reveals the distinctiveness of styles compiled by the diversity of such manifestations (cf. Harrison, 2008: 41-43). It is speculated that such transitory gardens of the homeless arise from the human urge for creative self-expression, for reality’s beautifying transfiguration with adornment and illusion and for a spiritualised experience of reality (Harrison, 2008: 41-43). Homeless gardens disclose further human fundamental traces. Albeit not ensuring shelter and protection, the introduction of a compositional form within a former amorphous environment creates confinement and delimitation and structures the human relation to such environment, as such granting a sort of human orientation in space exceeding spatiality, allowing the mind to enter a state of repose and the retainment of the spiritual, mental and physical energies which would otherwise dissipate and dissolve (Harrison, 2008: 41-43). By means of colours and the presence of water, petals and leaves, homeless gardens’ bundle of materials is composed often conveying the attempt to evoke the natural world, even if only symbolically in bizarre forms, thus suggesting that homeless gardens’ creators are presumably unconscious impelled by the human biophilia, i.e. the human want for contact with non-human life which, not seldom, prevents or unravels an emotional condition of despondency (Harrison, 2008: 43-44). xxvii However much not relative to the garden’s specificity but to a local, regional, national and trans-national scale, this note is regarded as relevant within this chapter’s ambit for its illustration of an evolving stage within the relationship between the human and nature encapsulated by the recent notion of fourth nature, that of a (re)wild earth (cf. Carver, 2013). As awareness of the human varied dependencies from nature consolidate, an alteration of the paradigm towards nature within the ampler scope of Landscape Architecture is fostered, emphasising strategies of ecological restoration involving the reduction or even annulment of human agency aiming to potentiate the primacy of natural processes enabling wilderness’s re-creation and the re-establishment of balance between the human agency and nature (cf. Carver, 2013). Escarduça 120

Grounded on the acknowledgement that human survival – that which consists of the notion of second nature – depends of functional natural ecosystems, new trends and paradigms emerge within the field of Landscape Architecture, expanding the former scope of conservation of landscape and ecosystems within the limits of relatively smalll and specific areas distributed in discrete locations across local, regional, national or trans- national areas, such as national parks and natural reserves, and the protection of such habitat’s soils, fauna, flora, water courses and atmosphere from the hazardous over-exploitation and destruction of urban expansion, industry, forestry, agriculture or minerals’ extraction (cf. Carver, 2013). Such confined and isolated refuges of nature are thus regarded as inefficient when considering their presumed sustainability service to the human encircling territories, possibly originating the system’s decline, since such network of parks and reserves is fragmented, inhibits large scale physical natural processes and restricts interactions with the encircling territories’ population (cf. Carver, 2013). Hence, the notion of connectivity organised according to a determinate order amongst the habitat’s various parcels arises as the priority for an ecosystem’s resilient functionality, in which core areas of nature’s conservation and protection are connected by natural corridors, fomenting landscape to return to its natural status of ecological processes absent of human intervention at a territorial large scale, often national and trans-national, and enabling the permeability to the encircling progressive scale of urbanised areas encircling (cf. Carver, 2013). As such, such connected ecosystems are regarded as providers of sustainable goods and services, specifically, the provision of raw materials and food provisions and the regulation and support for natural processes’ functionality, while simultaneously offer the recreational and cultural services of wild nature’s experience and appreciation (cf. Carver, 2013). xxviii In Ancient Egypt, the myth of Earth’s creation resonates Nile’s flooding cycle, embraced as life’s donor and token of god’s love, its accompanying land replantation and repopulation, and the belief of heaven’s emplacement on earth: the myth narrates the emergence of the primal mound from a primordial ocean, a stalk’s bloom and the landing of a falcon, representing Horus, Osiris’ and Isis’ son; oppositely to laws of nature, the world is governed by a family of empowered divinities representing either abstract ideas, natural features or powers of nature: Atum as the father of all gods, Amun as the king of gods, Ptah as the universe’s creator, Nun as the god of primordial waters, Re as mankind’s father and, as Amun-Re, identified with the sun god, Maat as the goddess of truth and justice, Osiris as the donor of civilisation, ruler of the dead and ressurection and god of fertility, whose family extended from the father of the gods to the “Living Horus”, Egypt’s reigning pharaoh (cf. Turner, 2005). Intending to prompt emotional and religious wonder to the splendour of the universe, to explain the nature of the world and man’s position in it, to enhance the paramount importance of the pharaoh’s assignment who, traversing society, nature and religion, is to ensure order, truth, justice and the cyclical flood which grants abundance, temples and their gardens are designed as realms of peace, justice and truth, as a model of creation where heaven, earth and the underworld unite, and regarded as a gate for gods and kings to move between the here-and-now and the hereafter (cf. Turner, 2005). Translating the relation between Egyptian’s tradition and mythology and astronomy and geography marks, temples and their gardens locate in Nile’s east or west banks, the sides over which the sun rises and sets, respectively if honouring living state gods or gods in the afterlife; in either case in significant locations at the edge of the floodplain as symbol for the boundary between life and death, such as cliffs, mountains, older constructions, springs, a god’s birthplace, a specific alignment with the stars, and in eyesight relation to other temples, hence forming a network of sacred compounds united by avenues margined by trees, ornamental gardens, sphinxes and statues, their long-axis privileged the east-west direction so that the sun rises between the columns of symbolic gates, so creating the hieroglyph for horizon, and sets at the point where a sanctuary is positioned in a sacred mound, is dimensioned in multiples of the god- king’s forearm, hand and fingers, and comprises enclosing walls whose undulating horizontal plan symbolises the primordial ocean, a sacred embankment symbolising the emergence of land from water, a T-shape path or river as a ceremonial path from the mound to water whose direction accompanies the sun’s daily path from east to west, T-shape sacred pools or lakes as symbols of the eternal ocean, sacred groves of sycamore fig trees and tamarisk trees, autochthonous respectively to the water margins and to the desert margins, and the temple’s ceiling represents the sky, the columns represent plants, the floor’s cyclical flood by the Nile represents the primordial waters from which land emerged, the temple door’s keeper is the “door opener of heaven”, walls and roof contains apertures so that sunlight illuminates significant features, and a small valley temple and a T- shape dock besides the river housing the barge which is to transport the pharaoh’s body from the living east- side temple to the afterlife west-side temple (cf. Turner, 2005). Eloquent examples of Egyptian sacred temples are the Temple of Metuhotep at Dêr el-Bahari, dating from 2065 BC, the Temple of Queen Hatshepsut, dating from 1450 BC and regarded as the first masterpiece of western landscape architecture, uniting man’s intervention and existence orography, the Temple of Amun in the precint of Karnak, nowadays Luxor, dating from 1350 BC, latterly transformed in the Domain of Amun in Escarduça 121

1100 BC with the accretion of other temples in Nile’s both banks, the Temple of Temple of Rameses II The Great, one of Egypt’s greatest builders dating from 1200 BC, or Temple of Rameses III at Medinet Habu, dating from 1150 BC (cf. Turner, 2005). In turn, nowithstanding mutual belligerence amongst Archaic Greek city-states, religious beliefs and the cult of an extensive pantheon of gods, deities, semi-deities and mythological creatures, is generic, who, whilst embodying earthly beings such as plants, animals and anthropomorphic forms, supplant man’s power and capacities as representations and explanations of the Nature’s conceptions and forces: amongst divine gods abiding in Mount Olympus and factually structured by family ties, other primordial deities such as the titans and the Olympians, other subterranean, sea, sky, rustic, agricultural, health deities, semi-deities such as the gigantes, giants, nymphs, deified mortals, heroes and kings, supernatural personified concepts, and a myriad of other deities and semi-deities, it is to stress the assemble of divine gods and their representation of Nature: Zeus is the gods family’s father, the king of gods, ruler of Mount Olympus, god of the sky, weather, thunder, lightning, law, order, and justice, Hera is the queen of the gods and goddess of marriage, women, childbirth, heirs, kings and empires, Athena is the goddess of reason, wisdom, intelligence, learning, skill, handicraft, peace, warfare and strategy, Hestia is the virgin goddess of the home, fireplace and chastity, Artemis is the virgin goddes of hunting, wilderness, animals and young girls, Hermes is the god of boundaries, travel, communication, trade, language, thieves and writing, Dionysus is the god of feasts, festivals, revelry, wine, fruitfulness, madness, chaos, drunkenness, vegetation, ecstasy and the theater, Demeter is the goddess of earth, grain, agriculture, harvest, growth and nourishment, Aphrodite is the goddess of love, beauty, desire and pleasure, Hades is the god of wealth and king of the underworld and the dead, Hephaestus is the god of fire, metalworking and crafts, Poseidon is the god of the sea, rivers, floods, droughts and earthquakes, Apollo is the god of arts, knowledge, music, poetry, archery, bravery and manly beauty, prophecy, restoration and disease, Ares is the god of war and violence (cf. Turner, 2005). Adopting the Egyptian’s concept for religious outdoor sanctuaries associated to divinities, the Greek civilisation accentuates places whose orography symbolises the anatomy of Gaia, the Mother Earth goddess, where rock promontories, hills, hills’ plateaus, groves, caves and water springs coexist as sacred sites for a presiding deity’s worship rituals, ceremonies and animal sacrifices, since gods, such as humans, appreciate gifts (cf. Turner, 2005). Caves carry mythological meaning related to the creation of life by the union of Gaia and Uranus, the sky god, and also to Zeus’ birth, to the Nymphs residency, as such appropriate for reflection about creation and for offerings favouring new-born children, and also as an access to the underworld ruled by Hades and as a burial’s site symbolising man’s return to Mother Earth involving offerings for departed spirits, whereas water springs are valued as water, springing in its purest form, is healthy and miraculous (cf. Turner, 2005). Sanctuaries are adorned by ornamental trees, signaled by encircling boulders so becoming walled compounds within which an outdoor altar for cult offerings is located, so that smoke may drift to the realm of gods, and where statues are installed, temples are erected for statues’ sheltering, and treasuries are constructed for offerings’ housing (cf. Turner, 2005). Unsurpassably relevant Ancient Greek sanctuaries are the caves, springs and particular arrangements of hills transformed in Apollo’s and Pan’s shrines below Athens’ cliffs with the placement of altars, statues and temples, the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, extraordinarily located at a singular ample location within the abrupt steepness of Mount Parnassos, whose altar endows perspectives of sacred landscapes, and the walled compound Altis, Zeus’ sacred grove beneath Olympia’s wooded hills, including the Temples of Zeus and Hera, the Prytaneum with its perpetual fire and fountain, and the inner Sanctuary of Pelops, a with trees and statues (cf. Turner, 2005). xxix Whether considered a work of moral philosophy or of political philosophy within the enduring controversial debate amongst its interpreters, including which political stance it delineates, the Republic stands as a fundamental work in Plato’s overall oeuvre (cf. Ferrari, 2000). To such oeuvre’s formulation, and implicitly to Republic’s, it is accepted amongst Plato’s experts that frustration and critique to general bad practices of tyrannical governance, factionalism and successive episodes of alliance and treachery amongst Greek city- states of Athens, Sparta and Thebes such as the imposition of the Spartan oligarchic regime of “The Thirty” in Athens, Persian and Macedonian invasions, that is, Plato’s political, social, economic contemporary context, have decisively contributed (cf. Ferrari, 2000). Plato’s specific social aristocratic and privileged background, granting him the benefits of an intellectual education and critical spirit and his everyday involvement in such activities, amongst which Socrates’ execution is considered to have been deeply affective, and the possibility to travel across several of the Mediterranean shores, investigating different civilisational realities and experiencing various episodes, amongst which his enforced exile at the hands of the Sicilian Dionysian tyrant dynasty stands as prominent, is equally important to such oeuvre’s formulation, and to Republic’s (cf. Ferrari, 2000). Escarduça 122

Firmly driven by a conceptual sense of common good, attainable only through reason, virtue, order and justice observing universal concepts of metaphysical and ethical wisdom, in Republic, addressing a vast spectrum of matters in his peculiar literary style of dialectic dialogue aiming to reach the true knowledge of universals by means of the dissected and analysed discussion of particulars, Plato advocates for both the ideal community and the ideal communitarian individual which directly concern a community’s governance (cf. Ferrari, 2000). Amongst Republic’s ten Books, artistic practices are addressed in Books 2, 3 and 10 with reference to such Plato’s perspective of the ideal community and individual. Books 2 and 3 refer chiefly to the influence of artistic practices in the city guardian’s education. City guardians are privileged and selected intellectuals who are to conduct the just city’s governing, therefore directly implying and assigning a fundamental role for their philosophical education under ethical standards. Book 10 addresses the practice of imitation as an artistic practice translated in diverse forms and genres, questions its metaphysical value and addresses its effect in the community’s values and behaviours. xxx Plotinus resorts to the case of two blocks of stone: oppositely to a crude block of stone unmodelled by art, i.e. a natural object from which the universal Idea or Form of Beauty is absent, the block of stone minutely handcrafted by the artist such as a statue of a god or a man beforehand intends not to consist of the imitative portrait of the Form or Idea of stone for, if it would, such block of stone’s crudeness would be pleasant, and further, consists not of the mere reproduction of a god or a man; instead, the artistic object is the form holder of beauty improving the incompleteness of Nature’s raw matter by virtue of bestowing the Forms or Ideas from which Nature itself derives and, as such, is a creation infused with the immaterial Beauty of the Intellect, that which in turn is held by the artist before being introduced in matter not by the artist’s equipment of eyes and hands but by the artist’s participation in his art (cf. Plotinus, [2018]: 403). In other words, by virtue of his artistic expression thrusted by Intellectual Beauty and his ability to impose to raw matter’s incompleteness a transformation into a new form, the artist is the creator of forms of Beauty, a beauty lying not in the imitation of a physical object, rather manifesting a Form’s archetype in soul and mind, i.e. in the higher principles of Soul and Intellect, as the universal Beauty introduced in natural matter by the artist is his struggle and strive to vehiculate, through his artistic expression, valuable spiritual insight of the Intellect and, ultimately, of the One. Thus, similarly to music, which derives not from an unmusical source but from an higher principle of Music and the Forms of Rhythm and Harmony, so art “must itself be beautiful in a far higher and purer degree since it is the seat and the source of that beauty, indwelling in the art, which must naturally be more complete than any comeliness of the external.” (cf. Plotinus [2018]: 403). As a derived part of transcendent, entire as an entirety, omnipresent Beauty, Plotinus however asserts that the beauty in the work of art is minor and weaker than its concentrated Form, for the latter is not transferred, rather derives from the centre and diffuses in the artist and, subsequently, in the work of art existing in the realm of the concrete and the physical, where all is part rising from part and is nothing more than part, thus precluding any exhaustive and satiating representation of its correspondent universal Form (cf. Plotinus [2018]: 405-407). Nonetheless, the work of art is bestowed as an object of contemplation of the higher in the lower, since it is only in the subsidiary beauty of the work of art that universal Beauty may be represented, in the sense that only from itself it is represented by means of a particular parcel of it, and, furthermore, such representation entails no frustrated unsatisfaction, rather grants the satisfaction of the greater and authentic wisdom which, far supplanting the accumulation and coordination into a unity of the sensorial realm of scientific theorems and propositions, assists the Intellect’s quest and contemplation of the higher Principles, since the artist’s work is guided by an embodied unitary primal wisdom presiding the making of all works, both natural or crafted, itself the self-arising Intellectual Principle of Wisdom emanating into detail as evinced by the wisdom art exhibits (cf. Plotinus [2018]: 405-407). Thus, albeit less concentrated, each distinct representation either presented directly as natural things or, more importantly, as transformed by the human and, in this case, the artist, is a derivative form of being announcing, manifesting and pursuing a correspondent universal Principle (cf. Plotinus [2018]: 408). xxxi Islamic garden design aims to illustrate absolute beauty yielding maximum pleasure which lies in the representation of God’s absolute perfection and divine truth, thus excluding human references and imagery from artistic expression due to their subjacent agnostic value (cf. Turner, 2005). The profusion of regular and symmetric geometry as a symbol for the aspired divine perfection is inherited from Persia’s observance of order, thus commanding for Islamic courts’ horizontal plan to evolve from four-sided irregular shapes to a perfect square (cf. Turner, 2005). The Islamic observance of geometric order is transmitted by the Ancient Persians. Within its geographic expansion between the sixth and the fourth centuries BC, the First Persian Empire assimilates Mesopotamian’s culture, such as the religious heritage of Zarathustra, a prophet whose tribe suffers from nomads’ pillaging centuries before, thus fomenting an acute contrasting cultural notion of good Escarduça 123

and evil, order and chaos, whose sense decisively moulds ancient (cf. Turner, 2005). Within Ancient Persian palace compounds’ protecting walls, a garden’s space between buildings is scrupulously geometric delineated by stone watercourses and regularity is exalted through judicious placement of fruit trees and flowers (cf. Turner, 2005). Such model of the Persian garden is further addressed in section 4.4 concerning utopia when referecing the chahar bagh garden. Prophet Muhammad’s residence in Medina, a partly unroofed enclosure where the Prophet would face the mud- brick enclosing wall which faced Mecca while consummating his introspective prayers performing ritualistic body movements that are everywhere observable in Muslim’s praying cult ceremonies since then and presently, consists of the first Islamic worship venue after the Prophet’s death in the seventh century and the begetting model for mosques dedicated to religious cult, thus evincing the mistaken assumption of mosques as indoor premises (cf. Turner, 2005). During the eighth and ninth centuries, early mosques’ pavement is gravel and thereafter either paved or, as in Cordoba’s case, planted with trees in the tenth century (cf. Turner, 2005). Meaningful colonnades are erected next to the court’s wall facing Mecca whereas trivial colonnades are installed next to remaining enclosing walls, and the supported partial roof offers a shaded area for the sanctuary in the meaningful wall (cf. Turner, 2005). As mosques’ design evolved spanning centuries, outdoor courts multiplied, and progressively separated spatially from large central indoor areas resembling Roman peristyle courts (cf. Turner, 2005). In the fifteenth century, indoor areas adopted a dome shaped monumental ceiling following the Turkish triumph in Constantinople by influence of Haga Sofia church (cf. Turner, 2005). An entrance court welcomed the ablution ceremonial ritual by means of a richly adorned fountain which also served the city’s water requisites and internal enclosed courts paved by exquisite tiles adopted a Roman inspired peripheral roofed peristyle and an unroofed central area which often accommodated ponds or was occasionally planted (cf. Turner, 2005). xxxii The humanists’ stress on a consolidation of form and substance which is not to be dissolved, i.e. a conventionalised, intelligible and constant frame of formal references intimately associated and on which hinges the clear conveyance of Humanism ideas and modes of thought, so inciting the Humanist pursuit for a certain conception of eloquence and its uses as a commonly agreed intellectual method grounded and animated by the Humanist interpretation of classic rhetoric, whose influential pervasiveness of form and substance, operated via modes of argument from example or authority, the emphasis on verisimilitude, on variety and on vividness, the insistence on representing general types or conveying universal lessons by means of the concrete, the visual, the emotionally convincing, oppositely to hollow pomposity, obstinate fallaciousness, egocentric ostentation, extravagant artificiality, originality deficiency or the subordination of substance to form, is rather distinguished from sophistry and asserted as emerging only of the harmonious union of wisdom and style orienting man not to vice and triviality but to virtuous, beneficial and rewarding ends, thus in fact not consisting of a mere rhetorical or literary movement (cf. Gray, 1963). Humanists thus consist of a tradition of philosophers, poets, orators and other practices’ professionals, a varied group self-inclining and self-defining as non-specialists men of life and of letters whose adherents, while encompassing a rhetorical tradition involving certain kinds of writing, types of educational activities and a tendency for certain ideas yet evincing internal variations of individual intellectual perspectives, are in fact most importantly interested in eloquence and whose core interest is the realm of studia humanitatis, combining ample learning, extensive experience, virtuous character and persuasive ability, requiring the return to classic sources exemplifying human ideals, to be practiced by means of the classical masterpieces’ studies in its different individual subject-matters and purposes, nonetheless a consolidated unity, whose relevance to human experience and whose faculty to prompt the man’s education and achievement requires not demonstration and test other than that afforded by classicism, and the practice of the liberal arts generally comprising grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history and moral philosophy, involving the cultivation of classical styles and models, which equally affect will and intellect (Kristeller, as cited in Gray, 1963: 499; cf. Gray, 1963). Albeit advocating that knowledge is to serve man’s life according to virtue much as medieval scholasticism’s, the scholastic philosophical method’s specialisation in logic and “theoretical” matters, its ideal for the purpose of knowledge as self-favouring speculation, and its aesthetic tendency exclusively elaborated by technical concerns, are repudiated as an abstract intellectuality relevant not and serving not human life and unable to communicate and instill important truths, since the Humanist function of education and knowledge is not to demonstrate the truth of tacitly presupposed doctrines, rather to mould man, most effectively, even solely, by means of the art of eloquence, so oriented by rhetoric rather than logic, by ethics rather than metaphysics, by education rather than epistemology, by the subject-matters of ancient classical literature, which demonstrate that eloquence and knowledge are necessarily intimate, rather than natural philosophy, so arousing man’s will as informed by reason and endowing a precept with acceptance, life, immediacy, effect and application, so illuminating the darkness of Middle Ages which, albeit recognisably not orphan of men of talent and noble Escarduça 124

acts, lacks eloquence’s light (cf. Gray, 1963). As illustrated by Petrarch’s words that “the object of the will is to be good; the object of the intellect is truth”, the central point contrasting scholasticism and Humanism is “the merely intellectual” on one hand and the “actively persuasive” on the other hand, since the humanist not only endows man with the understanding of virtue but further arouses the will to practice it, as the uomo universale is the master of various arts and governor of men by means of the intellectual and practical realms of human experience conglomerated within his eloquence (Petrarch, as cited in Gray, 1963: 501; cf. Gray, 1963). Imitation of classical models enclosing the essential material of useful knowledge and right action enabling man to visualize and benefit from heroes, institutions and ideas so assumed as the vital authority so stands as the basis for a general education and integrated culture; as models of eloquence grounded on the oratory rhetoric word of the past bestowing glory both to the subject and the author, since the letters are regarded as the best, even the exclusive, vehicle of immortality for man, achievements and ideas, Humanism is so inspired by the conviction that knowledge is the laudable instrument at the service of the practical reality of human affairs and worldly existence, that learning is to be useful for human life, that education is to instruct both will and intellect, and eloquent persuasion as the truth’s unique effective discloser, within a stylistic unity of structure, form, substance, content, argument aiming instruction, delight and valuable ends in whose absence arts are to be lost, society is to be noxiously organised, justice is to succumb and evil is to prevail (cf. Gray, 1963). xxxiii Once progressing from the late fourtheenth century’s incubation and the fifteenth century’s expansion and consolidtaion, Renaissance’s internal variations of individual intellectual perspectives as referred by Gray are regarded to maturate in sixteenth century’s artistic tendency of individual Mannerism, as the variety of nuances infiltrating and metamorphising Early Renaissance’s rational principle of order and sobriety by cause of the Humanists’ impetus for an intellectual and artistic personal signature, so expressing, affirming, in fact claiming, human individual reasoning for the Humanist conglomerate of Nature’s individual intellectual understanings and artistic representations. The term proceeds from “working in the manner of greater masters”, so observing Renaissance’s classical ideal standards of harmony and perfection, while gradually eschewing stagnation and, accompanying the intellectual and artistic evolving tendencies aided by discoveries in geometry, optics, perspective, hydraulics and engineering, infiltrating dynamism, openness, surprise, novelty and invention, progressively incorporating suggesting elements of movement, drama, enchantment and energy contrasting regularity in artistic expression and, to this report’s interest, in garden design: “The garden is a mannered departure from classical perfection” (Turner, 2005: 240-247). xxxiv In Odyssey’s book VI, while ambitioning the aid from Alcinous, the Phaenician King, in the outskirts of Scheria the Phaenician burgh, a vagabond and incognito Odysseus encounters the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa along the shores of a river nearby a forest as engendered by Pallas Athena the goddess, and Nausicaa the princess gives guidance to Odysseus concerning the best suited path towards the city, through a poplars’ sumptuous sacred grove watered by a bubbling spring and encircled by meadows, located as close to the city walls as a man’s shout, and dedicated to Pallas Athena, where Alcinous grows his blooming vineyard; in book VIII, the aftermath of Phaeacian sporting games at Alcinous’s palace in which various gods participate leads Aphrodite to retreat to her Cypriot sanctified grove and scented altar; in book XVII, while preparing his returning arrival to home after ten years of wandering and strategically camouflaged as a vagabond in order to avoid being recognised while grasping his home enemies actions before revealing himself to his wife Penelope and to his palatial opponents for the final revelation and challenge, a camouflaged Odysseus is accompanied by Eumaeus, his chief swine shepherd, who is ignorant of standing before his master, heading to Ithaca to beg a meal, as advised by Telemachus his son who remains ignorant of his father’s long waited return, and reaching the city’s surrounding fields, encounters a fountain made by Ithacus, Neritus, and Polyctor, whose clear and fresh water, springing from a rock high above, is drew by citizens for their living, where an altar above the fountain serves for sacrifices and offerings from travellers dedicated to the nymphs and, encircling the fountain, a grove of poplars is planted which drinks from the fountain (cf. Homer, [1981]). xxxv In France, the Serpentine style is disregarded to the benefit of the Augustan style, privileging abundant irregularity in the display of small buildings, woods, water works and paths (cf. Turner, 2005). Sympathetic of a more natural and Enlightened concept of society and government as defended by the philosophers, Louis XVI reforms Le gardens at Versailles as a gift for his wife during the decade of 1780; formerly baroque, the gardens are transformed into an informal design of various dispersed elements, such as a naturalised lake and water streams, a small hill and a reef, a , walk paths and woods, the Belvedere, a small ornamented with sculpture alluding to the four seasons and hunting and gardening Escarduça 125

scenes, a small circular Temple of Love decorated according to Classicism, and a hameau, a group of small rustic, bucolic and idyllic cottages whose surroundings are embellished by small flower and vegetable gardens and an orchard (cf. Turner, 2005). is one of the earliest French irregular gardens, designed by its proprietor Marquis de Girardin conveying the philosophes’ ideas and mirroring his own writings on garden designing as expressed in Essay on Landscape or, on the Means of Improving and Embellishing the Country Round our Habitations; Ermenonville reflects Girardin’s opinions concerning the combination of beauty and civic utility, as a natural and unforced scenic arrangement cultivates the restoration for a true taste for natural beauty while simultaneously favours agricultural and livestock productivity and, more importantly, ensures more humane and salubrious living to those cultivating the fields, whose labour, in turn, is necessary to those whose function is to defend society or to provide instruction and knowledge; an island within Ermenonville becomes Rousseau’s buried grave, henceforth a pilgrimage destination; the French Revolution impeded the expansion of French irregular gardens as aristocratic families lost their estates (cf. Turner, 2005). The inaugural German Romantic garden is ordered at Wörlitz between 1765 and 1817 by Prince Franz von Anhalt-Dessau, an admirer of England’s Stowe, Claremont and Stourhead, who solves Wörlitz’s flat morphology opposing England’s undulated orology to the garden effect’s advantage as water dominates the design, fostering boat trips in lakes and canals populated by islands, and long walks betwixt Classical and Romantic constructions representing simplicity and calmness, such as a Palladian villa, an Elysium, a , a Temple of Venus, a Gothic House, a Classical Bridge and a symbolic Isle of Poplars commemorating Rousseau’s tomb at Ermenonville; ’s gardens are surrounded by a landscape garden in subsequent decades; Goethe, who is attracted by English gardens and by Wörlitz, assists in 1777 the Duke of Saxe-Weimar in the design of the llm Park in Weimar, which balances Romanticism and Classicism as a Brownian composition of woodland, grassland and River Ilm’s gently curving course, minimum Classical allegories and inexistence of rococo allusions, enabling the impression of natural order and unity balancing disorder, henceforth popularising the Romantic gardens in Germany (cf. Turner, 2005). Partly opposing Versailles’ massive grandeur and despotism, Paris blossoms the prolific decorative graciosity of the rococo style in the early eighteenth century, privileging lascivious social gatherings rather than the display of power and which is to incite an initial reaction towards Baroque gardens in German kingdoms in the mid-eighteenth century enhancing the rococo (cf. Turner, 2005). German gardens are subsequently modernised under the influence of English Romanticism’s landscape gardens in the eighteenth century’s second half and its Augustan style combining the use of classical and romantic elements (cf. Turner, 2005). Between 1745 and 1785, opposing his father’s tyrannical authority he considered symbolised by the baroque gardens designed by a Le Nôtre pupil at Charlottenburg Palace, Frederick II, The Great, himself an enthusiast of the French arts, commissioned , a rococo house and gardens planned as a rural retreat apart from the courts’ exuberance and luxuriance, comprising the house’s eccentricity of the garden’s prime axis, an unusual curved and glazed balcony adjacent to the house instead of an embroidered parterre, garden ornaments such as busts of Roman Emperors and an Egyptian obelisk, a Neptune Grotto, a rococo Tea Pavilion and a Mount of Ruins; the Ermitage at Bayreuth, made after 1735 for Frederick II sister’s retreat, rests on a hill-top in a rococo style containing a collection of classical structures and a theatre in the form of a Roman ruin; in 1753, the formal garden at Schwetzingen Palace assumed a less axial and more compartimentalised layout decorated with rococo statuary (cf. Turner, 2005). xxxvi Mesopotamia’s Assyrian palaces comprise several internal outdoor courts of varying dimensions and shapes serving as entrance areas and the king’s family private recreation areas, the latter being ornamented with ponds and plants, further envisioning relaxing surrounding landscape contemplation and sensorial pleasure, more specifically the entitled type of the luscious hanging gardens previously mentioned in (11), alluding to the famous palace gardens of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon whose exact location either in Babylon or in Nineveh is a topic for discussion amongst scholars, and which latterly enchant the Macedonian Greeks during Alexander The Great’s Hellenistic Empire, from whose supporting masonry’ crammed negative hollows accompanying an inclined hill flourishes a dense richness of trees, flowers and vegetables amidst wooden channels of flowing water elevated from rivers by rotating ingenious devices, pathways and stairways where to safely and romantically wander, pavilions on which to rest, to admire the views’ vastness and to freshen from the breeze’s coolness, as such appearing to be suspended from the city’s pinnacle (cf. Turner, 2005). By the end of the first millennia BC, as Mesopotamian cities’ flowering alters the activity of hunting from the people’s necessity to the privileges’ recreation, enclosed reserve parks of irregular orography, water streams and varied tree, plant and animal species are destined for the kings’ hunting and unusual plants’ cultivation and observation, as illustrated in carved reliefs and ancient texts testifying for the kings’ heroic deeds and their private hunting and animal parks, commented by Turner as modern national reserves and zoological and botanical parks’ ancestors in face of the kings’ devoted interest to matters of the natural world, Escarduça 126

notwithstanding hunting parks’ non-scientific function (cf. Turner, 2005). Supremely represented by the Akkadian literary relic Epic of Gilgamesh, ancient literature may be invoked to the collecting of ancient West Asia gardens’ traces: additionally to a sacred cedar forest forbidden to mortals and guarded by a mythological creature, the Epic of Gilgamesh recounts Gilgamesh’s wonderment when finding a beautiful garden after exiting the Mashu mountains’ tunnel darkness (cf. George, [1999]). Sandars’ version, debated amongst some scholars for its prose form not to render equivalent elevation to the original tablets’ poetry form, describes this passage as “(…) all round him stood bushes bearing gems. Seeing it he went down at once, for there was fruit of carnelian with the vine hanging from it, beautiful to look at; lapis lazuli leaves hung thick with fruit, sweet to see. For thorns and thistles there were haematite and rare stones, agate, and pearls from out of the sea.” (cf. Sandars, [1960]). Similarly to Mesopotamian palace gardens, Persian palace gardens serve as outdoor areas for contemplation, eating and other social activities, where opulence marks the decoration and the function of the garden as a site for sumptuous and luscious entertainment and for mitigation from the weather temperature ensured by bathing pavilions and fountains whose water flow, even in the desert, is provided by a system of underground and irrigation canals (cf. Turner, 2005). Oppositely, as mentioned in chapter 1’s introductory paragraphs, archaeology reveals small houses’ internal yards destined for plants’ cultivation and animals’ keeping. xxxvii In Odyssey’s book VI, when describing his father Alcinous’ palace to Odysseus, Nausicaa directs Odysseus to pass the palace’s gates, traverse the outer court and walk across the palace’s inner court to find her mother; in book VII, when heading for a palatial reception and before reaching Alcinous’s palace gates, Odysseus finds a splendid orchard of luxuriant and succulent fruit trees outside the palace’s courtyard enclosed by a strong peripheral fence; in book XXIV, when finally encountering Laertes his father in his palace, Odysseus praises Laertes’ gardening skills when verifying the well-kept palace garden and its fruit trees where figs, olives, pears grow, his and his vegetables (cf. Homer, [1981]). In the first episode, while standing at the door outside Medea’s residency, as the children’s tutor subsequently mentions at verse 49, the children’s nurse laments to herself her suspicions concerning the tragic fate Medea is planning to her children Euripides (431BC [2016]). Outdoor enclosed privacy is suggested as firstly, the nurse’s lamenting and the dialogue between the nurse and the tutor resemble not the sort of confession to occur in public space; secondly, at verse 49, the children tutor “enters” accompanied by Medea’s children, imbuing a sense of physical enclosure within such entering action, and thirdly, at verse 90, the nurse clearly orders the children to go indoors. In such circumstances, an entrance outdoor court in Medea’s residency may be inferred, hence indicating its palatial character which is confirmed at verse 100 Euripides (431BC [2016]). The dialogue between Medea and Jason is also clearly passed outside, as in verse 949 Medea calls for a servant to come from indoor rooms, and suggestively in a private enclosure due to the nature of the dialogue; the existence of such outdoor court is far from consisting the plot’s central focus and no outside court’s descriptive details are offered by the plot Euripides (431BC [2016]). This reference serves only as a textual archaeological reference to the existence of outside enclosed rooms within Classic Greek domestic and palatial residencies. xxxviii On one hand, the prince’s court is glorified by a court of veneration vassals who self-cultivate Humanism’s artful and graceful values, not entirely and genuinely aiming individual refinement and artistic and intellectual virtuous elevation devoted to community’s aggrandisement responding to Middle Age’s obscurity of reason propagated by the concentration and seclusion of knowledge within monasteries’ impenetrable walls and inaccessible to the commoner and the noble lord’s tyrant rule of political, economic, territorial and military order, but paradoxically, oppositely to Humanism’s ethics and values of civic virtue, rather covertly, falsely, surreptitiously, and pretentiously, only polishing the required abilities of calculated composure and obedient reverence to pursue the ruler prince’s sympathies and favours (cf. Harrison, 2008: 102-104) On the other hand, the Renaissance Academy’s cultivation of Platonism in Villa Pareggi is emphatically self-sufficient, cocooned within the garden’s walls and ambitioning not the city’s public domain, i.e. its intents are alien to the civic dimension of future statesmen’s ethical carving and the business of the city’s government is abdicated, so in fact neglecting Plato’s political concerns as the garden of Academus’s primordial essence that the Republic’s books 2 and 3 clearly establish: if the monastic cloister garden aspires the divine, the Renaissance’s garden of the fifteenth century’s second half revolves around the human ruler, and Platonism is “at once a distraction, a consolation, and a form of spiritual intoxication” (cf. Harrison, 2008: 105-106). xxxix Amongst numerous others, examples of relevant works are Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics and Laws, James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana, Marx’s and Engels’s The Communist Manifest; St Augustine’s On the City of God Against the Pagans, Johann Valentin Andreae’s Christianopolis: An Ideal State of the 17th Century, Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, Charles Escarduça 127

Fourier’s Le Nouveau Monde Amoureux, Friederich Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Gottfried Leibniz’s Republica Christiana, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia, Men Like Gods and The Shape of Things to Come, inasmuch as the twentieth century further expanded the field with the dystopianism by the hands and words of Evgenyi Zamyatin’s We, Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point and Brave New World and George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty- Four; furthermore, the field of anthropology may be summoned with regard to the numerous factually established communities and colonies following utopic ideals, notwithstanding numerous and different utopic tendencies, such as Family of Love, Queenwood or Bournville, in England, the Bohemia Manor, Mount Lebanon, New Harmony or Bon Homme, in the U.S.A, New Lanark, in Scotland, St. Ann, in Canada, Ralahine, in Ireland, Herrnhut Commune, in Australia (Morris and Kross, 2009: 308). More recently, the field includes feminism works, such as Suzy McKee Charnas’s Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines, Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Zoe Fairbairns’s Benefits and Suzette Elgin’s Native Tongue (Morris and Kross, 2009: 308). Châtel further references the recent works of William J. Mitchell and Anne Cauquelin, the former coining the term e- topia, and both addressing the electronic cyberspace, which unfolds a plurality of spaces from a computer operating system’s window within contemporary world’s virtuality (cf. Châtel, 2013). xl Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow and Bruno Taut’s Die Stadtkrone [The City Crown] consist of two examples. Some of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow references to the garden consist of: “how the most admirable sanitary conditions may be ensured; how beautiful homes and gardens may be seen on every hand” (18); “Six magnificent boulevards—each 120 feet wide—traverse the city from centre to circumference, dividing it into six equal parts or wards. In the centre is a circular space containing about five and a half acres, laid out as a beautiful and well-watered garden; and, surrounding this garden, each standing in its own ample grounds, are the larger public buildings” (22); “a sum of £1,400 (...) would provide 7 families in Garden City with a comfortable six-roomed cottage each, and with a nice little garden (53-54); parks and gardens, orchards and woods, are being planted in the midst of the busy life of the people, so that they may be enjoyed in the fullest measure (cf. Howard, 1902 [2014]:18, 22, 53-54, 141). Contextualising and comparing the activist program comprising writings and drawings of the early tweentieth century influential german architect Bruno Taut and his architectural constructed work, Altenmüller cites Taut’s description of the layout of his imagined the urban garden city and utopic community annulling national and social differences: “In the residential quarters, streets mainly run from north to south, to provide the front of the houses on both east and west sides with sunlight as well as windless streets and gardens. The houses are entirely conceived in the character of a garden city in low single rows with deep gardens for every house, such as that of figures 13 and 14, so that the residential area itself is a horticultural zone making allotment gardens unnecessary. (…) This garden city type of development allows for 300,000 inhabitants, or 150 souls per acre, with the possibility of expansion up to 500,000 inhabitants. [Although] green areas, playgrounds and park strips are intermingled in between residential and industrial areas to separate them, no further details are indicated.” (Taut, as cited in Altenmüller, 2013: 136, 137). Altenmüller further comments the communal buildings for the spiritual and intellectual life of Taut’s utopic city model to “include parks and gardens, an aquarium and plant houses for leisure and distraction” (Altenmüller, 2013: 137). xli The chasm operated by early nineteenth century’s discussions on art and aesthetics affects garden design theory and styles with similar dilemmas, evincing numerous ramifications in opposition to the previous concordant progressions (cf. Turner, 2005). Simultaneously observing the Neoplatonic axiom and the Empiricist vision that art is to imitate nature in the most “natural” manner, official artists of the Academies are accused by independent nonconformist artists of superficial complacency with the “world of nature”, hence omitting and disregarding the “nature of the world” (cf. Turner, 2005). Encountering such cleavage, garden designers of the eightheethn century are thus confronted with the disqualification of their design as art if their designs are to imitate “natural” nature (cf. Turner, 2005). Often as when encountering no obvious progression, elucidatory unravelment may arise from a retrospective critique of past artistic styles which, in England, while continental Europe is tormented by Napoleon Bonaparte, fosters The Great Debate, whose moniker is “the picturesque controversy” (cf. Turner, 2005). Headed by garden designers and theorists Sir Uvedale Price, Richard Payne Knight and Humphry Repton during the period spanning from 1793 to 1815, guided by Vitruvius’ design objectives of firmitas, utilitas and venustas, aesthetic theories and the relationship existing amidst gardens’ composing elements, the Debate owes its moniker to its focus on the relevance of landscape painting to the discussion of landscape design; the picturesque term in The Great Debate’s moniker does not assume a capital since initial capitals are adopted by Knight, Price and Repton for terms related to specific Escarduça 128

aesthetic concepts, such as Beautiful, Sublime or Picturesque; the latter inspired by Burke and the intermediate notion containing both Beautiful and Sublime elements, whereas picturesque refers to similarity to a picture (cf. Turner, 2005). The innovative combination of parcels exhaling from past garden styles eventually concerts a compromise, corresponding to a natural designed composition as illustrated by Italian great landscape painting, considering local specificities of climate, materials and design traditions, observing a grand transition from the realm of art to the realm of nature in which the realm of art corresponds to the garden’s foreground, near the house, where exotic plants exist, however much not elsewhere (cf. Turner, 2005). xlii The landscape style selects ideas from the past in a structured sequence, combining former design ideas to create a garden whose notable magnificence allies its versatile functionality, aiming at a graded transition from art to nature (cf. Turner, 2005). A sequence of specific areas from garden to park is structured by an orthogonal terrace in a Beautiful foreground, next to the house, ornamented with beds of colourful flowers and plants, a Serpentine or Picturesque park in the middle ground and an irregular mountainous or coastal wild background arousing the Sublime’s intensity, hence affording the enjoyments of polite society in the terrace’s realm of art, farming and foresting in the middle ground and the aesthetic pleasures offered by the natural background (cf. Turner, 2005). Nineteenth century’s landscape style is related to eighteenth century’s landscape gardens, albeit consisting of distinct conceptions: landscape gardens encapsulate eighteenth century’s various phases of Augustan, Serpentine and Picturesque gardens, whereas nineteenth century’s landscape style combines and integrates such phases, formerly discrete (cf. Turner, 2005). The landscape design assumes popularity in England and Germany, where various existing Baroque, Serpentine and Picturesque gardens are transformed, thus determining the middle ground’s character; in England, the Brownian design of previously mentioned Serpentine parks at Blenheim and Harewood are adopted, whereas formerly referred Nymphenburg’s Baroque style and Charllotenburg’s Augustan and rococo style are transformed in Germany (cf. Turner, 2005). Selecting plants from favourite regions of the world to be arranged displaying their individuality, a continuous esteem for Picturesque style gardens’ irregularity and the pursue for gardens to be works of art recognisably distinct from unadorned nature prompts the combination of natural arrangements as illustrated by landscape painting and collections of non-native exotic species of flowers and plants displayed in carefully designed beds, originating the term gardenesque to illustrate a gardener’s skill or a specimen’s individual character to the best effect (cf. Turner, 2005). The gardenesque style furthermore serves the majority of aristocratic proprietors’ unwillingness to encircle their mansion with an entirely irregular garden, culminating in the conversion of numerous woodlands into natural compositions of exotic species during nineteenth century’s second half, influencing botanic gardens in England and elsewhere (cf. Turner, 2005). Selecting design styles from other countries to be displayed as if in a museum, nineteenth century industrials’ wealth and soaring interest for distant regions of the world and remote epochs, owing much more to travellers’ reports of wonder and artifacts concerning distant lands and cultures than to factual visits to such places, combine with a design tendency encouraging the collection of a plenteous contrasting miscellaneous of gardens’ styles within the same garden to thrust the mixed garden style, whose historical and geographic multiculturalism character fosters the imagination and scientific knowledge, nurtures wonderment and the taste for landscape painting and adventurous travelling (cf. Turner, 2005). Conceptually augmenting gardenesque style’s taste for collecting plants which, for itself, implies the construction of glazed pavillions, exquisite and exuberant gardens display parcels of Chinese, Japanese, Swiss, Indian, American or Italian Gardens, either compartmented and connected by architectural constructions such as stairways, bridges or tunnels, or amalgamated in elaborate bedding arrangements where exotic flowers and plants accentuate the mixture, to be admired by the collection’s owner from the terrace next to the house, which continues its use for social and private recreation (cf. Turner, 2005). England’s Alton Towers, ordered by the eccentric fifteenth Earl of Shrewsbury, and Biddulph Grange, a wealth manufacturer’s garden, stand as Mixed style’s finest examples, rapidly propagating to other parts of Europe, such as Germany’s Linderhof, owned by King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Branitz, Prince Pückler-Muskau’s small estate, and to North America’s Longwood Gardens, a wealth industrial garden (cf. Turner, 2005). Notwithstanding that its arrangement’s variety is regarded as graceful, smooth and freedom expressive, the Mixed style’s eclecticism is not immune to criticism, due to its offensive promiscuity to art’s dignity and grandeur (cf. Turner, 2005). The advent of nationalism in nineteenth century’s last decades affects the arts and instigates the urge for the restoration of nations’ respective artistic traditions. Hence, discretely selecting ideas from nations’ glorious historical eras where gardens have occurred, the nationalist garden style arises as the purge for the mixing of styles, assuming varying forms, depending on each nation’s traditional style regarded as the most representative of such national identity (cf. Turner, 2005). Following the war with Prussia and evoking French Renaissance’s genius, France restores Le Nôtre’s design; a recently unified Germany, where the romantic love for nature and for forests is a long tradition, affirms its pride in its history by praising Goethe’s Romantic garden design; Escarduça 129

artistic distaste for the Victorian eclecticism allies to patriotic sentiments in England, where garden layouts typical of Shakespeare’s Old England are reverenced much by influence of the anti-dogmatic artistic current stirred by the Pre-Raphaelite painters and John Ruskin (cf. Turner, 2005). xliii Firstly, c. 4000BC ceramic archaeological artifacts representing the world divided in four quarters are presumed as Buddhist mandalas symbolising harmony and integration (Turner, 2005: 130). Secondly, the book of Genesis refers to the four rivers of Eden flowing into the paradisiac garden of endless gratuity of delights and serenity according to four directions (cf. Harrison, 2008: 194; cf. Turner, 2005: 130). Thirdly, Alexander the Great reports’ from Cyrus the Great’s tomb at Pasargadae, in the Middle East province of Fars from which Persia takes its name, located in nowadays’ Iran, describes the palace garden’s lust and ampleness of the Assyrian king from the sixth century BC as a geometrical plan traversed by stone watercourses defining the space between main buildings, containing irrigated groves of fruit trees and flowers’ beds of lilies and roses, welcoming faust eating and luxuriant social activities in garden pavilions from where the garden is enjoyed while catching the breeze and protected from the sun – in summary, an earthly reproduction of Eden’s abundance and amenities: an improbable paradisiac oasis in a vast desert (cf. Giesecke and Naomi, 2012; cf. Turner, 2005: 130). Two centuries later, Cyrus the Younger’s palace and pleasure garden in Sardis, at the western end of the Ancient Persian Empire in modern Turkey, is visited by the Greek Lysander, to whom the Assyrian king comments the nomenclature of his garden as pairidaeza, and who reports his wonder with the garden’s both beauty and order to Socrates, who in turn disseminates the term in Greek culture (cf. Turner, 2005:130). Fifthly, the Greek culture in turn adopts the term pairidaeza to express a heavenly state of supreme bliss (cf. Turner, 2005: 121). Existing vestiges reveal that, from the fourth to the eighth centuries AD, following the Byzantine Empire and preceding the Islamic occupation, the Persian palace garden design chahar bagh quadripartite tradition is preserved by Persian tribes such as the Parthians and the Sasanians, oppositely to influence from previous Greek and Roman occupations, inasmuch as its paradisiac function of opulent entertainment and placid relaxation (cf. Turner, 2005: 131). xliv Aditionally to the memory of the Roman civilisation by means of the Hills’ designation as Mons lunae – The Mountain of the Moon – and its dedication to the cult of the sun and the moon, such legacy finds its formal manifestations firstly, in the evocation of the Moorish territorial dominion and cultural presence by the eight century’s Moorish Castle, a military nodal point of relevant strategic importance for the Moorish culture inasmuch as to Christians following the twelveth century’s conquest, who in turn continued acknowledging and exploring such military strategic relevance (cf. Martins, 2016). Archaeological campaigns reveal the surrounding’s settlement of sucessive populations, by means of the vestiges of Neolithic sedentary communities’ dwellings and yards in the north face of Sintra Hills, and bone and ivory artifacts dating from the Bronze Age and the Iron Age (cf. Martins, 2016). The eight century’s Moorish initial fortified enclosure shelters tenth to twelveth centuries’ Moorish communities within the enclosure, as testified by vestiges of dwellings foundations evincing a rural modest condition, a communitarian baking oven, cereals’ and vegetables’ storage silos created by excavation of the existing rock formations, other domestic activities’ related structures, and numerous fragments of ceramic artifacts destined for domestic quotidian life; such vestiges are visible in the entirety of the enclosure’s internal area (cf. Martins, 2016). The fortified wall includes a stronghold tower for the accomodation of the local Moorish authority, erected in one of the hightest summits (cf. Martins, 2016). Following the Christian conquest in the eleventh century, a second ampler fortified wall is erected for strategic defense and as a military power symbol, within which enclosure Christian peasant communities install; archaeology campaigns endow various thirtheenth century’s Christian traces: a vaulted cistern and drainage gallery ensuring water availabity in case of siege, a Romanesque chapel, a Christina necropolis whose dating is afforded by the discovery of coins dated from the Portuguese first dynasty, and two compartiments adjacent to the wall presumed to serve as horse stables and domestic cattle keeping (cf. Martins, 2016). Such communities dissolve in the fifteenth century when fortified shelter and protection is no longer required, thus condemning the castle to abandonment and ruin until the nineteenh century, to be restaured for aesthetic and artistic purposes as subsequently commented (cf. Martins, 2016); secondly, in the National Palace of Sintra, erected in the twelveth century over a former Moorish governor’s fortified residence following the Christian conquest in the location at the date designated as the Olive’s Ground, welcomes the royal temporary residency within its walled enclosure for the following centuries as a stategic politic and military nodal point by reason of its proximity to Lisbon where powers are centralised, of the area’s agricultural fertility, and of the ample hunting grounds and temperate climate, thenceforth object of several stages of extension, renovation and transformations construction works, more intensively in the late thirteenth century, incluindg the erection of a chapel, in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century with the accretion of the king’s private quarters in the hightest point of the palace, the palace’s notable Gothic facade and institutional rooms – the Swans Hall – Escarduça 130

, destined for banquets, receptions and other ceremonies, inasmuch as to the royal family’s and the court’s entertainment, as such assigning more ampleness and enhancing the Palace’s stately character, organised organised around a Central Patio according to a criterion of increasing privacy and intimacy via a sequence of several antechambers, the kitchen and the palace’s hallmark, two conical large chimneys, and in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with the adition of embeleshing and decorative architectural Manueline style elements, a new royal residential wing and a tower (cf. Carita, 1987; cf. Ferro 2015); thirdly, in the Convent of the Holy Cross of Sintra Hills, or the Franciscan Convent of the Capuchos, founded by a state’s councillior in middle sixteenth century to be granted to the Franciscan Friars and abandoned in the nineteenth century after the supression of religious orders by the hands of the liberalist regime; fourthly, in the National Palace and Gardens of Queluz, encompassing significant historical relevance, steming from the seventeenth century’s while a disloyal noble’s summer recreational countryside estate, confiscated by the crown in the seventeenth century’s independency restoration process, enlarged and improved to assume the genuine grandeur of a royal palace in the eighteenth century as the royal family permanent residency, abandoned in the early nineteenth century by cause of the Napoleon invasion, resumed some decades later as an exhile retreat by some royal members and as the residency of the liberalist prince, whose premature death condemns the palace and gardens to progressive decline during the remanescent nineteenth century until being nationalised by the republic regime following the regicide, in the early twentieth century; fifthly, in the Park and National Palace of Pena, dating from the nineteenth century’s first half and enhancedly inspired the eccletic sublimation of the German romanticism’s palaces and castles, when the sixteenth century’s Manueline monastery of Our Lady of Pena, consisting of a cloister, a chapel, a sacristy, a bell tower, other secondary service rooms and an upper floor comprising fourteen modest cells for the monks’ accomodation, formerly assigned to the religious Order of St. Jerome and unnocupied in the nineteenth century following the supression of religious orders by the hands of the liberalist regime, is considerabley repaired in terms of its markedly ruinous condition, architecturally revamped in terms of the rooms’ ampleness and improved in terms of comfort and decoration, so destined for the royal family’s private accomodation and living, to which follows the construction of a new wing, composed by even larger and more impressively decorated rooms for offical ceremonies and the court’s entertainment and a volumous monumental tower accomodating a new remarkable kitchen and other secondary service rooms, both wings in turn enfolded by a third architectural structure visually resembling a fantasised version of an imaginary castle comprising battlements, watchtowers, an entrance tunnel and a drawbridge, markedly decorated with symbolism of fable and mystical tales, whose atmoshpere of the fantastic and oneyric is enhanced by the mistiness often encircling the palace’s summit location in one of the hightest peaks of Sintra Hills; and lastly, in the Park and Palace of Monserrate, the project of a wealthy English industrialist who, in the nineteenth century’s second half, renovates and enlarges the ruins of a former country-house, merging its neo-Gothic trace with distinct medieval and oriental influences and evoking the atmosphere of the Middle East folclore tales. xlv Firstly, heterotopias exist and manifest in all cultures and societies and, assuming different formulations from one to the other, impede a universal formulation of heterotopia, yet not the possible enunciation of two primary categories appropriate to all cultures and societies: heterotopias of crisis, consisting of privileged, sacred or forbidden places destined for individuals whose condition consists of a crisis in relation to a culture’s standards and norms, whatever such condition may be, and is to manifest in displaced places, and heterotopias of deviation, similar to heterotopias of crisis yet concerning an individual’s behaviour (cf. Foucault, 1998 [1984]). A garden of seclusion and isolation from society, such as Middle Ages monasteries’ cloister gardens and Sintra’s Convent of the Holy Cross, is considered to conform to such principle of heterotopia. Secondly, a particular heterotopia’s mode of operation conforms to the temporal culture context in which it manifests, i.e. heterotopias are synchronic with its culture context (cf. Foucault, 1998 [1984]). As a heterotopia, the garden is assigned with functions and objectives prioritising either firmitas, utilitas or venustas, so determining numerous garden types, i.e. different manifestations of a particular type of the garden’s heterotopia. The palace’s garden is destined for private private relaxation, recreation and pleasure, yet either of a family peaceful inwardness, intimacy and privacy, such as the palace court-garden, or to a royal court members’ private exuberant entertainment and celebrations, such as the palace’s estate park. Sintra’s National Palace and the National Palace and Gardens of Queluz illustrate such distinction. Thirdly, heterotopias juxtapose several places which are themselves incompatible, that which relates to heterotopias’ fourth principle: “the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside time” (cf. Foucault, 1998 [1984]: 242, 243). To this matter, it is to mention the Persian representation of paradise and the chahar bagh, whose design model’s influences in numerous gardens are visible, as previously commented, and, with respect to the idea of accumulation, the Eclectic style garden design is oriented by such intention, as illustrated by The Escarduça 131

Park and Palace of Monserrate. Fifthly, heterotopias are both inclusive and exclusive, accessible and inaccessible, consisting either of non-public spaces, whose access is thus subjected to criteria of admittance, that which results in discriminated exclusion, or of public spaces, penetrable and accessible to people, whose access arouses the illusion of entering the non-existent utopic space and, thus, originating a different form of exclusion. (cf. Foucault, 1998 [1984]). Lastly, heterotopias perform a function in relation to remaining places, oscillating between the creation of an augmented illusion when representing a culture’s remaining additional real places in an idealised manner and the compensation of when creating a place displaced from the imperfections of a culture’s remaining additional real places. (cf. Foucault, 1998 [1984]). xlvi Amongst other art forms, such as film, which Benjamin opposes to a stage actor’s live performance, photography is envisaged by Benjamin as an original image’s mechanical reproduction, be such image either of an existing painting, a sculpture, a cathedral, a portrait or a city street, in any case exhibited in magazines, signposts, galleries or museums (Benjamin, 1969 [1936]). By means of either the original art work’s mere plurality of copies and the displacing from the time and space in which it is incrusted due to its massive exhibition or of the original art work’s conditioning or influencing manipulation enabled by mechanical and technological techniques and processes not accessible to the human natural experience, reproduction menaces and even annuls the art work’s original authenticity, dethatching it from the uniqueness of its existence and its authority as a testimony for history’s heritage (Benjamin, 1969 [1936]). However, the work of art is to be inseparable from the presence of the true and original version, which must be unique and subdue not to mechanical or technological reproducibility dynamics (cf. Benjamin, (1969 [1936]). Authenticity lies on the presence of the original which must be alien to reproducibility, as reproduction always devalues the quality of the original’s essence, endangers its testimony of history, therefore harming and undermining the original’s authority (cf. Benjamin, (1969 [1936]). The aura of a work of art consists of the historical essence of the original work, testifying both for the spatial and temporal context in which it was created, and to whose domain of tradition it is attached, and for the physical effects which succeeding epochs gradually introduce, which exalt the dimension of heritage (cf. Benjamin, (1969 [1936]). Universally equal techniques of reproduction and their associated transience decay, surpass and annihilate the artwork’s selected and specific authenticity and permanence (cf. Benjamin, (1969 [1936]). The existence of the authentic work of art has its basis and depends in ritual, the location of its original use based on its cult value, often distant from the masses’ sight, dependent only on its qualitative existence awareness, which would grant the work of art its autonomy, and apart from massive exhibition and reproduction through mechanical and technological quantitative reproducibility (cf. Benjamin, (1969 [1936]). xlvii Both the painter and the poet constitute themselves as “imitators of imagens of goodness and the other things they create, without having any grasp of the truth”, creating images yet having “no knowledge of what is but only of what appears to be”, and are equated as “when a storyteller give us the wrong impression of the nature of gods and heroes. It’s like an artist producing pictures which don’t look like the things he was trying to draw” (Plato, [2003]: 377c, 600e, 601b). The painter is that who “(…) is not only capable of making any sort of furniture. He can also create all the things that grow out of the earth. He produces all living creatures – including himself – and on top of that he produces heaven and earth, the gods, everything in heaven and everything under the earth in Hades” (Plato, [2003]: 596c). Such painter’s competency is rejected by Plato on the basis of its doubled inconsistency with the natural and archetypal essence of things, which lie in their conceptual and universal ideas. Recurring only to painted pictures, as a mere reflecting mirror of existing things, the painter is that who paints all things, “(…) the sun and heavenly bodies, (…) the earth, (…) yourself, other living creatures, furniture, plants, and all the things (…)”, not as they are, as does the carpenter who specializes in imitating the true nature of a thing, but as they appear to be. (Plato, [2003]: 596d). In fact, the painter’s object is not a thing as it is, in accordance to its true form, rather is transformed by means of visual illusions of various sorts (cf. Plato, [2003]). Plato’s sentence of rejection to which the painter is condemned is augmented when enforced to poets and writers of tragedy, amongst which Homer is the predominant offender. Poets create appearances of matters of public life, such as those of craftsmanship, the founding and government of communities or matters of war and military command, a community’s guidance and education, private life, such as those personality virtuous or vicious characteristics, personal pleasures or pains of sorrow, joyfulness, cowardice or courage, and of the divine, which are, on their own, the raw material of the poet’s agency and the false or distorted fantastic scenarios for what appears to be (cf. Plato, [2003]). Furthermore, reinforcing the artist’s double distance from the truth, all artists, starting with Homer, using the imitating language of metre, rhythm and harmony of their bewitching words to adorn their literary works, however much excellently written when embodied by their characters in accordance to their personal perspective, invent and imitate untrue images far removed from the Escarduça 132

truth, yet ignoring the real knowledge of what is, of the truth or of the real life, as they would prefer action to imitation if they were to possess such knowledge, they would “try would try to leave many fine actions as memorials to himself, and be much more interested in having poetry written in honour of him than in writing poetry in honour of others” (Plato, [2003]: 599b). xlviii Rancière’s Aesthetics and Politics: The Distribution of the Sensible does not exclusively fit within the domain of aesthetics and theory of art. Through its correlation with politics, hereby generally considered as the process within which those occupying positions of governance decide the affairs of the cities and apply their decisions to members of a community, it offers various conceptions which are considered of relevancy for this reports section. Rancière correlates aesthetics and politics through elaborating a political analysis contextualised by the aesthetic experience. Indeed, according to Rancière’s Foreword, “This section is concerned with aesthetic acts as configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity.” (Rancière, 2004: 9). As per Rancière, the term aesthetics “denotes neither art theory in general nor a theory that would consign art to its effects on sensibility. Aesthetics refers to a specific regime for identifying and reflecting on the arts: a mode of articulation between ways of doing and making, their corresponding forms of visibility, and possible ways of thinking about their relationships.” (Rancière, 2004: 10). Such concept of aesthetics is pivotally associated with the concept of the aesthetic experience which, elsewhere as per Rancière’s words, cumulates the sensorial experience and its resulting understandings’ formulation, that is, “the faculty of sense, the capacity to both perceive a given and make sense of it”, in such a manner that they neutralize the division between the sensorial and the rational in order to generate a supplement, that is, “the count of a supplement to the parts that cannot be described as a part itself”. (Rancière, 2009: 1, 3). It may be considered that Rancière’s broad sense of aesthetics encompasses domains beyond the strict realm of art, and refers to the articulation existing between modes of action, production, perception and thought, whatever the specificity of domain within which this articulation is analysed. Accordingly, politics may be analysed within an aesthetic experience. The aesthetics of politics may be retained in Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible: “the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. (…) establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. This apportionment of parts and positions is based on a distribution of spaces, times, and forms of activity that determines the very manner in which something in common lends itself to participation and in what way various individuals have a part in this distribution. (…). Having a particular ‘occupation’ thereby determines the ability or inability to take charge of what is common to the community; it defines what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language, etc.” (Rancière, 2004: 12-13). Furthermore, and equivalently, Rancière specifically defines the distribution of the sensible as “the implicit law governing the sensible order that parcels out places and forms of participation in a common world by first establishing the modes of perception within which these are inscribed. The distribution of the sensible thus produces a system of self-evident facts of perception based on the set horizons and modalities of what is visible and audible as well as what can be said, thought, made, or done. Strictly speaking, ‘distribution’ therefore refers both to forms of inclusion and to forms of exclusion.” (Rancière, 2004: 85). Correspondingly, Rancière elsewhere refers to the politics of aesthetics as “the way in which the aesthetic experience – as a refiguration of the forms of visibility and intelligibility of artistic practice and reception – intervenes in the distribution of the sensible” (Rancière, 2009: 5).