Landscape after Landscape: Before the Genre and Beyond the View

This paper is contextualised by the ideological implications surrounding the notion of landscape, including the relationship between its genre in painting and the development of European capitalism. It proposes the idea of the landscape fragment derived from the background scenery of early Italian painting, which stands in counterpoint to assumptions about the genre. These early landscape spaces are pertinent because they are not considered ‘landscape’ as such and are not constructed by entrenched Cartesian dualisms. I argue it is possible to re-evaluate restrictive assumptions about perspective and landscape, in order to raise questions of translatability and difference so as to replace the dominating norms habitually associated with these terms.