Topia: Landscape before Linear Perspective

Veronica della Dora

School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol

Landscape is commonly deemed to be a western European Renaissance invention linked to the theorization
of linear perspective as a distinctively modern way of looking at the world. Prompted by a resurging interest
in premodern geographies, this article takes a step back and interrogates nonlinear perceptions and graphic
representations of the environment in Roman antiquity (the so-called topia) and their development in the
Byzantine world. Since the times of Alexander von Humboldt, these representations have been generally
dismissed as artificial and disregardful of perspective. I propose a rereading of this perceived lack of technique,
or disinterest in nature as a different way of seeing and making sense of the world, emphasizing the visual
energheia and memorability of singular elements (or places) over their modern linear integration. Tracing the
complex etymological and visual history of topia sheds light not only on ways of seeing and geographical
traditions understudied in our discipline but also on a further aspect of landscape: that of a container of symbolic
memory places. Key Words: chorography, landscape, late antiquity, perspective, topia.

Comunmente se presume que el paisaje es una invencion occidental del Renacimiento europeo, ligada a la
teorizacion de la perspectiva lineal como un medio distintivamente moderno de mirar el mundo. Motivado por
un resurgimiento del interes en las geografas premodernas, este artculo da un paso hacia atras para cuestionar
las percepciones no lineales y las representaciones graficas del entorno en la antiguedad romana (la as llamada
topia) y su desarrollo en el mundo bizantino. Desde los tiempos de Alejandro de Humboldt estas representaciones
generalmente se han desechado como artificiales y desentendidas de la perspectiva. Propongo una relectura
de esta percibida falta de tecnica, o desinteres en la naturaleza como una diferente manera de ver y de
darle sentido al mundo, haciendo enfasis sobre la energheia visual y la memorabilidad de elementos singulares (o
lugares) sobre su integracion lineal moderna. Al trazar la compleja historia etimologica y visual de topi se aclaran
no solo las maneras de ver y las tradiciones geograficas poco estudiadas en nuestra disciplina, sino tambien otro
aspecto del paisaje: el de un contenedor de lugares simbolicos de la memoria. Palabras clave: corografa, paisaje,
antiguedad tarda, perspectiva, topia.

L
andscape is a complex, polysemic term that has
been traditionally employed by human geogra-
phers to define the appearance of an area, the
assemblage of objects used to produce that appearance,
and the area itself (Johnston et al. 2000, 429). In En-
glish, the term applies equally to physical locations and
to graphic and textual images; in other words, both to
the land and to the way we perceive and represent the
land; both to a thing and to a way of seeing. The
emergence of this way of seeing is commonly deemed a
Renaissance invention tied to the theorization of lin-
ear perspective. Perspective comes from the Latin verb
perspicere, to see through, or clearly. It thus implies
distancing, and distancing in turn enables conceptual
mastering of the environment. As such, linear perspec-
tive has often been considered a characteristic of, if
not a metaphor for, modernity (Elkins 1994; Cosgrove
1985, 2003a; Farinelli 2007, 78; see also Jackson 1964,
49).
Inspired by the work of art historian Erwin Panofski,
Denis Cosgrove ([1984] 1998) and other geographers
after him linked the emergence of linear perspective
and the landscape idea to the conceptualization
of Euclidean space as an objective phenomenon
preexisting its contents (e.g., Pickles 2004; Farinelli
2007). Belief in absolute space, Cosgrove argued, was
foundational to confidence in the pictorial claims
of linear perspective to truthfully represent material

Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 103(3) 2013, pp. 688709 C 2013 by Association of American Geographers
Initial submission, August 2009; revised submissions, January and April 2010; final acceptance, April 2010
Published by Taylor & Francis, LLC.
 Topia: Landscape before Linear Perspective
spaces and to the acceptance of territoriality as a nor-
malizing way of ordering and classifying phenomena
(2004, 58). The development of linear perspective
was paralleled by the rediscovery of Ptolemys
cartographic science in early fifteenth-century Italy.
Cosgrove and others stressed how Ptolemaic cartogra-
phy facilitated the emergence of a new mapping culture
that placed added emphasis and value on geometry and
measurement. These geographers also showed how this
contributed to the development of linear perspective
and landscape as a scenic pictorial phenomenon
(Cosgrove 2003b; Pickles 2004, 104). Linear perspec-
tive, they argued, could be read as a copy of Ptolemys
mathematical projection of the spherical globe on a
bidimensional gridded surface: The latter worked verti-
cally, whereas the former worked horizontally (see also
Farinelli 2007).
Cosgroves work has had a wide impact on concep-
tions of landscape in geography and across the human-
ities (e.g., Tilley 1994; Hirsch and OHanlon 1995; see
also Atkinson 2010). Yet, as other geographers have
shown and as Cosgrove (2004, 2006) himself eventu-
ally came to recognize, there are other (non-Euclidean)
ways of conceptualizing and representing the environ-
ment that predate the Renaissance and continued to ex-
ist alongside linear perspective (e.g., Olwig 1996, 2002).
In establishing a spatial hierarchy whose Renaissance
interpretation came to characterize most of the history
of modern geography, Ptolemy differentiated between
the quantitative tradition of geography and qualitative
(nonlinear) chorography. Geography dealt with the
production of images of the Earths surface, in which
the Earth was reduced to a set of geometrical points cal-
culated through celestial coordinates and was therefore
connected to cosmography. Chorography engaged with
the form of localized regions and their details. The for-
mer required mathematical skills; the latter was the do-
main of the artist (see Cosgrove 2001, 10205; see also
van Passen 1957; Bagrow 1966, 77110; Dilke 1987b,
177200; Martin 2005). A third category, topography,
was concerned with individual places. As Lukermann
(1961, 196) noted, topography was defined by Ptolemy
within a chorographic context: chorography, by de-
scribing a feature in terms of its contacting or environ-
ing features, is describing the feature by giving it place.
To describe the place of a thing is to mark it off by
identifying the things that bound it. Topographical de-
scription is simply the distribution of anything, or to put
it more simply, the location of a thing, i.e. its place. It
was in this tradition (and not in linear perspective) that
689
Sauer rooted the study of landscape as an areal ensem-
ble of material features. For the American geographer,
the cultural landscape is the geographic area in the fi-
nal meaning (chore). Its forms are all the works by men
that characterize the landscape (Sauer 1925, 46).
Over the past few years, geographers and other schol-
ars have shown increasing interest in the exploration
of nonlinear alternatives to Renaissance landscape, in-
cluding the concepts of topos and chora (Mangani 2005;
Simon forthcoming). While contemporary scholarship
in art history has problematized the very notion of
Renaissance linear perspective as a rational and uni-
tarian way of seeing (Elkins 1994), geographers have
sought to reassert the centrality of place and other
nonmathematical geographical epistemologies rooted
in topos and chora over the spatial science initiated by
the previous generation (Curry 2005). More recently,
geographers have also been increasingly attracted to
spatial concepts able to transcend the rigid dichotomies
of modernity and therefore able to narrate more ade-
quately current dynamics of social change or to fit new
theoretical trends better. In a recent article, Finnish ge-
ographers Kymalainen and Lehtinen (2010), for exam-
ple, discussed modern reformulations of chora as place
in-between, and therefore as an appropriate concept
to address phenomena that challenge traditional terri-
torial and local readings, such as globalization. Olwig
(2008) has similarly engaged with the concept, stressing
its performative character and thus its potential impli-
cations for current concerns with nonrepresentational
geographies, landscape, and performance.
The concept of topia, unlike landscape, topos, and
chora, has not yet received attention in Anglophone
geography. Topia (literally, small places) here are
intended both as graphic representations of the envi-
ronment in late antiquity and, more broadly, as the ma-
terial and rhetorical units of the chora (Mangani 2005).
Drawing mainly on Derrida and Kristevas interpreta-
tions, Kymalainen and Lehtinen (2010) engaged with
chora as an abstract Platonic concept, as a spatial con-
tainer, or as a shaping principle, rather than on its
contents (see also Sallis 1999, 11416). Olwig (2008),
by contrast, juxtaposed the ineffable nature of chora to
choros as a performed space coming about not through
idealist representation, but through human behavior
and political discourse. By focusing on topia, this article
aims to move the discussion from the nature of chora
and choros to the way in which chorography worked.
Italian map historian Giorgio Mangani (2006) and
art historian Francesca Fiorani (2005) have eloquently
690
shown how topia survived in Western artistic and geo-
graphical traditions throughout the Renaissance. My fo-
cus is more modest. I am interested in the genealogy and
early history of the concept, rather than in its late incar-
nations. I therefore focus on the Roman and Byzantine
periods, the latter of which is not treated in Mangani
and Fioranis accounts. I explore the origins and devel-
opment of topia through examples drawing from Roman
landscape paintings, early Byzantine mosaics, Medieval
Byzantine textual descriptions, and sacred icons. Al-
though distant in time and often in space, these rep-
resentations sprang from the same Alexandrian choro-
graphic pictorial and literary tradition (Maguire 1974).
They follow similar nonlinear logics based on memory,
rather than on mathematical calculation. Tracing the
visual history of topia through this range of case stud-
ies shows both continuities and variations within this
premodern tradition of perceiving and representing the
world.
The article also contributes to the study of a gener-
ally neglected period in traditional historiographies of
our discipline (see Jones 2004; Ryan 2004; Lilley 2011)
and the Byzantine tradition, which has been conspicu-
ously overlooked by geographers. Indeed, although the
past decade has witnessed important work on Western
Medieval geographies in our discipline (Boholm 1997;
Harvey 2000, 2002, 2003; Lilley 2004a, 2004b, 2009,
forthcoming; Elden 2009), the Byzantine East has gone
largely ignored.
Finally, I seek to problematize landscape histories
that take the Renaissance and linear perspective as
their points of departure at the expenses of earlier tra-
ditions. This article thus responds to Lilleys (2011)
recent call to move away from a historiography of ge-
ography (and geographical concepts) that emphasizes
paradigmatic breaks, revolutions, and rediscover-
ies over geographies of transmission and continuities
within and across different geographical traditions (see
also Gautier Dalche 2007). As Mayhew (2011) noted,
There is a recurrent trend in writing about geography
to have recourse to stories about the origins of geography
as grounding arguments about its nature. Such a trend
often leads to essentialist historiographies opposing
classical to modern geography (see Martin 2005)
and often obliterating its complex multiple pedigrees
and developments.
Relying on such disciplinary historiographies, most
landscape histories do acknowledge that before the
fifteenth century Europeans looked at and represented
the world differently, but almost never explain how
della Dora
and why (except when using such views to define the
modern; e.g., Cosgrove 1985). Similarly, in challenging
traditional linear assumptions about landscape
and Cartesian dichotomies, contemporary postphe-
nomenological studies have turned either to modern
art and to the recent past, or to their own perceptions
(Wylie 2002, 2007; Merriman 2006). Pre-Renaissance
visual traditions have been either ignored, or merely
dismissed as lacking technique, or as being not quite
landscape, at least in the modern sense (Casey 2002).
Such dismissal has deep roots. In his compelling dis-
cussion on the history of landscape, von Humboldt
snobbed Roman landscape painting, as it portrayed
visions of an ordered, domesticated nature far removed
from the Romantic wilderness of the sublime sceneries
he was after:
If we may judge from the many specimens preserved to us
in the excavations of Herculaneum, Pompeii and Stabia,
these pictures of nature were frequently nothing more than
birds eye views of the country similar to maps and more
like a delineation of sea port towns villas and artificially
arranged gardens than the representation of free nature.
That which may have been regarded as the habitably com-
fortable element in a landscape seems to have alone at-
tracted the Greeks and Romans and not that which we
term the wild and romantic. Their imitations might be
so far accurate as frequent disregard of perspective and
a taste for artificial and conventional arrangement. (von
Humboldt [1858] 1997, 85)
In Representing Place, Casey (2002) referred to the
same paintings in similar terms, as nothing like the
broad vistas, the commodious scenes that we consider
to be sine qua non of landscape painting. At the most,
the American philosopher argues, these representations
included schematic landscape vistas usually serving as
backgrounds to mythical scenes. In these works of the
first century BCE, landscape vignettes (as we might call
such fragmentary views) either accompany the main
action . . . or float unattached and suspended in a fea-
tureless back void that is bounded by contrivances such
as depicted columns that serve to frame the void itself
(3). Rees (1973) likewise described late antique and me-
dieval painting as landscape-less, which is flat, orna-
mental, stylizedsymbolic, rather than naturalistic
(150). In her historical survey of pictorializing nature,
landscape architect Gina Crandell (1993) paid further
attention to premodern traditions (the Greco-Roman
and western Medieval). Yet, building a periodization
that culminates in seventeenth-century European land-
scape painting, she tended to focus on paradigmatic
 Topia: Landscape before Linear Perspective
shifts (e.g., ancient scenic painting as opposed to Me-
dieval enclosure) rather than on continuities within
these traditions (although she acknowledged that there
were continuities; 4950).
Most of such accounts draw on art historic evo-
lutionary narratives, which take western Renaissance
painting as the climax and norm and rest on stylistic
criteria as well as on a strict division between high
and low art.1 Drawing on more recent developments
in art history, in the following pages I propose a reread-
ing of what has been commonly perceived as lack of
technique, or disinterest in nature as a different way
of seeing and making sense of the world, one empha-
sizing the visual energheia and memorability of singular
elements (or places) over their theatrical integration.
In so doing, I hope to contribute to a historical decolo-
nization of the concept of landscape (Mitchell 1994).
The next section traces the complex etymology of
topia, a word used to designate landscape paintings dec-
orating Roman villas, as well as the vegetal sculptures
obtained through special ropes (also called topia) em-
bellishing memory gardens. I subsequently analyze the
rhetoric underpinning these compositions and, follow-
ing Mangani (2006), link them to a longer Roman
mnemonic and contemplative tradition that survived
into the late Middle Ages and Renaissance via Byzan-
tium. In the following two sections I discuss the con-
tinuities and discontinuities of the topia tradition in
Byzantine art and its meditative function, which was
itself an expression of wider theological debates and
understandings of nature. I conclude with some gen-
eral considerations and reflections on what topia and
non-Euclidean geographies can offer to contemporary
debates in human geography.
Topion, Topeon, Topon: Landscape
Painting and Gardeners Ropes
All that is said by any of us can only be imitation and
representation. For if we consider the likenesses which
painters make of bodies divine and heavenly, and the
different degrees of gratification with which the eye of
the spectator receives from them, we shall see that we
are satisfied with the artist who is able in any degree to
imitate the earth and its mountains, and the rivers, and the
woods, and the universe, and the things that are and move
therein, and further, without knowing anything precise
about such matters; we do not examine or analyze the
painting; all that is required is a sort of indistinct and
deceptive mode of shadowing them forth. (Plato [360BCE]
1892, 528)
691
Ancient Greeks delighted in the contemplation of
nature. They built their sanctuaries in the most evoca-
tive locations in harmony with the surrounding envi-
ronment and used wide vistas as natural backdrops for
the dramas performed in their amphitheatres (Scully
1979). They chanted nature (Williams 1989). And, of
course, they painted nature, too, although landscape
painting was a primarily Hellenistic and Roman, rather
than Classical Greek, pursuit (Pearsall and Salter 1973,
3; Crandell 1993). Most of the surviving examples of
(usually bucolic) landscape paintings come from Pom-
peii, Herculaneum, and Rome, whereas the cradle of
this tradition is to be found in Alexandria, the main
intellectual center in the Mediterranean from the third
century BCE to the first century CE (Robb 1973, 4748;
Jacob 1999).
Alexandrian landscape painting was in its origins a
pastoral tradition, the product of an urban culture, with
some influence from the parks and gardens of the ori-
ent (Pearsall and Salter 1973, 12). It was marked by
the characteristic combination of natural and human
elements: rocky hills in the background, trees and bits
of monumental architecture (an arch or colonnade, or
stele associated to a tree) in the foreground. Nature was
domesticated and systematized through perspective,
which was often elaborately developed, although not
systematically and in the mathematical Brunelleschian
sense. These representations presented their beholders
only with an approximation of illusion toward which
they had to establish their own point of view. Hellenis-
tic artistic imagination remained after all attached to
individual objects; it was not a unified but a discontin-
uous worldview in which space was perceived as an in-
terval between plastered bodies and representational
planes, rather than an organizing principle embracing or
working through them (see Crandell 1993, 39; Panofsky
1997, 41; Figure 1).
Hellenistic landscape painting developed alongside
the art of gardening. It became popular in Rome dur-
ing the second century BCE and reached Pompeii in
the mid-first century CE. By that time Romans had
grown fond of landscaping and decorative arts (Cot-
tini 2004, 2). A popular fashion was to decorate the
walls of villas with pillars and columns framing land-
scape vistas, as if to reveal the open country be-
yond the wall (Pearsall and Salter 1973, 14; Fig-
ure 2). Architectural writer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio
(70 BCE15 CE), the author of the treatise destined
to become the most influential architectural text in
the Renaissance, gave a detailed description of these
frescoes:
692 della Dora

Figure 1. Fresco of an idyllic landscape from the villa of Agrippa at Boscotrecase. It features a votive column on a rocky crag with trees and
mountains and architectural structures in the background (National Archaeological Museum, Naples). (Color figure available online.)
 Topia: Landscape before Linear Perspective
Figure 2. Landscape with maritime
villa, Castellammare di Stabiae, Varano
Hill, Villa San Marco, first century CE.
Source: http://arthistory.about.com/od/
from exhibitions/ig/win0607 specexgal/
w0607gal 07.htm). (Color figure avail-
able online.)
Then they started to imitate also the forms of buildings, the
three-dimensional columns and frontons, to depict scenic
backdrops in open spaces, such as exedrae, thanks to the
largeness of their walls . . . and to decorate galleries (ambu-
lationes), because of their extended length, with varieties
of landscape decorations (topiorum), finding subjects in the
characteristics of particular places; for they paint harbours,
headlands, shores, rivers, springs, straits, temples, groves,
hills, cattle, shepherds. Some of them use megalographia
instead of statues, portraits of divinities, or serial narra-
tions of mythical accounts, of the Trojan battles, or the
peregrinations of Ulysses from landscape to landscape (per
topia), and all the other decorative elements that have
been created by nature. (Vitruvius De Architectura VII,
5, 2)
Pliny the Elder (2379 CE) gave a similar, though
more critical, account of the new fashion, which he
deemed to be a rich middle-class trend inferior to mon-
umental art:
Painting walls with pictures of country houses and por-
ticoes and landscape gardens, groves, woods, hills, fish-
ponds, canals, rivers, coasts, and whatever anybody could
desire, together with the various sketches of people going
for a stroll or sailing in a boat or on land going to country
houses on asses or in carriages and also people fishing or
fowling hunting or even gathering the vintage. (cited in
Pearsall and Salter 1973, 13)
The word Vitruvius and Pliny used to designate these
landscape scenes is topia (in the plural, the singular is
not documented), a curious Latin neologism forged on a
Greek root, thus bearing witness to the imported (Hel-
693
lenistic) origins of the pictorial genre. The etymology
of topia, however, is complex and even more enigmatic
than that of landscape. The origin of the term is ob-
scure and has been the object of much debate among
philologists, Classicists, and garden historians over the
past century (Lafaye 1912; Grimal 2000; Cottini 2004).
Their positions can be summarized in two schools of
thought. The first links topia to the Greek word o o
(topion), a diminutive of the noun o o (topos, place)
documented in the Hellenistic period (since the fourth
century BCE). In this case, the landscape paintings on
the walls of Roman villas would be little places, or
places in miniature, analogous to early Renaissance
paesetti (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988, 22; see also De
Sols 1992, 70). They would be painted by professional
topographii (landscape painters). The first documented
topographos is a certain Demetrius (of Greek origin),
who arrived in Rome in the second half of the sec-
ond century BCE (Cottini 2004, 4). The art of to-
pographia can be likewise rooted back to the Greek
verb o o e (topographeo, to describe places)
and to an ancient chorographic tradition best exem-
plified by the work of Strabo, to which I briefly return
in the next section (Koelsch 2004; Olwig 2008; Simon
forthcoming).
The second interpretation of topia takes its point
of departure from Ciceros use of the words topiarius
(gardener) and topiaria (ornamental gardening) in 54
BCE (Letters to Brother Quintus III, 1) and similarly
mentioned by later authors, including Pliny the El-
der (Naturalis Historia XVI, 140). Here topia are the
vegetal sculptures used to embellish gardens and, thus,
694 della Dora
by extension, also signify artificial gardens (Cas-
tiglioni and Mariotti 1990). In this case, topia is derived
from the ancient Greek word o io (topeon), indi- simply consisted in somehow detaching the painted
cating since the fifth century BCE a cord (like those
used on ships) and, more specifically, from its diminu-
tive oo (topon), a small rope used with oil mills dimensional painting built with the materials of nature
(Liddell and Scott 1977). In the Hellenistic period
o (topa) designated more generically ropes used
in agriculture, including the ropes employed by artistic
gardeners for guiding and shaping plants into various
forms (of humans, objects, and animals). After the Ro-
man conquest of Greece, many of these same gardeners
would have migrated to Rome in search of new patrons,
importing their art and horticultural techniques to the
Italian peninsulahence the origin of ars topiaria and
topia (Bowe 2004, 4).
The Hellenistic art of gardening spread in Rome,
alongside landscape painting, after the collapse of the
Republic and the advent of the Roman Empire in 27
BCE. It then endured throughout late antiquity and
the Middle Ages in the Byzantine Empire (Littlewood
1992; Dolezal and Mavroudi 2002). The birth and de-
velopment of the two genresgardening and paint-
ing topiawere strictly interconnected, although, due
to the strong agrarian roots of its citizens, they always
played a much more prominent role in the Roman Em-
pire than they had in Greece (Littlewood 1992; Cran-
dell 1993, 49). Throughout their career, the generals of
the expanding Empire remained attached to the gentle
rural landscapes of the Lazio region, even when political
life forced them in the capital. Many of them therefore
acquired suburban villas in the countryside near Rome,
in which they found peaceful retreats from urban life.
These villas incorporated long covered walks with walls
suitable for decoration, encouraging the serial paintings
described by Vitruvius and Pliny (Figure 3).
They also included ornamental gardens inspired from
those of Asia and often featuring nonnative plants in-
troduced in the course of military campaigns (Bowe
2004, 37). As Grimal (2000) noted, however, the great
novelty of these gardens was that plants and the land
were asked to adapt themselves to plastic research
(17). Topiarii were no longer content to dispose trees
according to symmetrical patterns but had grown keen
to shape them in the most extravagant forms. Ars
topiaria thus referred both to the art of molding plants
and to the art of landscaping, which had been in
turn influenced by the aesthetics of Hellenistic land-
scape painting and architecture. Recent philological re-
search relates the root o (top-)to the concept of
beauty, further reinforcing the aesthetic aspect that un-
derpinned both practices (Cottini 2004, 13). According
to Grimal (2000), the innovation of Roman gardeners
landscape and bringing it to the open space . . . [for]
the Roman landscape garden is essentially a three-
(18; see also Tongiorgi Tomasi 2004, 104).
By the third century, the word topia was commonly
understood by Romans as meaning both landscape
paintings and artificial gardens (Castiglioni and Mar-
iotti 1990). Today the term survives (through deriva-
tives) in different languages in both its meanings. In
modern Greek, oo (topo) is the word for landscape;
it primarily indicates: 1. an open space (ypathrios),
usually natural, whose special qualities make it object of
aesthetic enjoyment for humans; 2. a pictorial represen-
tation of such space (o , choros), often framed by
people (Mpampiniotes 2006). In Italian and other ro-
mance languages, arte topiaria (topiary art) is gardeners
art of giving trees and shrubs foliage well-determined
shapes, especially geometrical, for ornamental purposes
(Devoto and Oli 1971).
Topia as Loci Memoriae
For Mangani (2006, 80) there is absolutely no contra-
diction between the two definitions of topia and their
respective etymologies: Ropes allow branches to take
specific forms, and these, in turn, operate as simulacra
evoking other images. Both artificial gardens and cov-
ered walks (painted with various scenes), the Italian
scholar convincingly argued, are rooted in a longer clas-
sical Greek tradition of meditative gardens as spaces for
learning. Stoic philosophers and Plato himself used to
teach while walking through gardens and loggiati (colon-
nades) decorated with images that served as loci memo-
riae, or visual devices for the memorization of concepts
(Diogenes Laertius 1901, 123, 181).
The ancients deemed memory as the foundation of
knowledge and believed it to be intrinsically connected
to the sense of sight (Fentress and Wickham 1992, 10).
For Plato and Aristotle, recollection rested on seeing
internal pictures imprinted on memory and was stimu-
lated best by visual means (Carruthers 1990, 17). Ro-
man rhetoricians devised complex spatial models for
helping memorization. In the 80s BCE, for example, stu-
dents were encouraged to train their memories through
a mental model in which objects, or differently dec-
orated rooms contained in a spacious building famil-
iar to them, were to be memorized and associated to
 Topia: Landscape before Linear Perspective
Figure 3. Colonnade at the Getty Villa in Malibu, California, a modern re-creation of a Roman villa (photograph by the author). (Color
figure available online.)
different parts of a speech (Mann 1993, 156). Spaces
for training memory, however, were also physical and
they developed alongside artificial gardens. Cicero him-
self was said to own a special circular room decorated
with niches containing statues of deities to which the
orator similarly associated parts of speeches he needed
to memorize. Recollection was activated through a spa-
tial exercise in which the embodied gaze of the viewer
traveled through a sequence of loci memoriae as he stood
at the center of the room (Yates 1966). Quintilian
(35100 CE), credited as one of the main developers of
ars memoriae, called vibrant description energheia or evi-
dentia, the vivid word picture that brings a scene imme-
diately to the eyes (Pearsall and Salter 1973, 48). For
the Roman orator, words were important as the mental
image was conveyed from speaker to listener. Effective
energheia was the result of a controlled and conscious
695
process of visualization (Webb 2009, 95). As with the
viewer wandering through the visual space of the topia
painted in the colonnade, the listener had to place him-
self in the situation described and become spectator.
These word-pictures or mental images were likely to
remain imprinted in memory thanks to their vividness
and were thus analogous to the painted topia:
What Greeks call phantasies (we shall call them visiones,
if you will) are the means by which images of absent things
are represented to the mind in such a way that we seem
to see them with our eyes and to be in their presence.
Whoever has mastery of them will have a powerful effect
on the emotions. Some people say that this type of man
who can imagine in himself things, words and deeds well
and in accordance with truth is good at imagining. (eu-
phantasiotos) (Institutio oratoria, 6.2.2930, cited in Webb
2009, 95)
696
Figure 4. Fresco from villa at Pompeii illustrating the use of architectural tressliwork in the Roman garden (National Archaeological Museum,
Naples). (Color figure available online.)
According to Mangani (2006), in Hellenistic and
Roman culture there is no distinction between the
rhetorical structure of a space and its visual percep-
tion: topiarii are both the gardeners who build a
garden . . . made of real physical elements (such as trees,
plants, statues and flowers) and those who paint the
topia, which is the constitutive elements, the curiosi-
ties, the singularities of a landscape (59). Whether
frescoed scenes or vegetal sculptures obtained through
special ropes, topia served basically the same function
as the statues in Ciceros room and the word-pictures
in Quintilian speeches, with the only difference that
the viewer here was called to memorization through
physical, rather than merely visual (or mental) ambula-
tion (see Mangani 2009). Roman gardens were indeed
articulated in terraces or through pavilions connected
by walks, or ambulationes (Grimal 2000, 2223; Bowe
2004, 13; Figure 4. This compartmentalized structure
exalted singularities over totality; individual elements
over their harmonious integration; regionalization over
holism. It called for a mobile, peripatetic rather than
static appreciation of the natural environment and its
locithe same dictated by the sequential arrangement
of painted topia decorating colonnades (hence their
vignette-like appearance spotted by Casey [2002]).
Memory was thus an embodied practice depending on
mental and corporeal attitudes but also one heavily
grounded in and interacting with landscapes matter,
colors, forms, and with their specificitiesin other
words, with what Nora (1996) called topographical
memory places (8; della Dora 2008). Topias lack of
compositional unity traditionally lamented by art his-
torians (Pearsall and Salter 1973, 15) can thus be
explained from a phenomenological perspective: Priv-
ileging singular elements over their holistic integra-
tion facilitated memorization. Likewise, continuous
prospect pictures signposted by loci (birds, statues, bas-
reliefs, etc.) set the viewer at ground level and encour-
aged memorization through the sequential movement
of a stroll (Figure 5).
della Dora
Topia were graphic and material representations of
different topics, this being another meaning of the
ancient Greek word o o (topos), besides that of
place. The serial perception of the painted scenes
(or vegetal sculptures) found a parallel in the read-
ing of epic poems (e.g., Homers Odyssey) and espe-
cially geographical books taking the reader per topia
(Vitruvius De Architectura VII, 5.2)from one place-
event to the next. Most notably, for Strabo the goal
of geography was not measuring the Earth but ex-
plaining the inhabited world through the systematic
comparison of its regions. Drawing on the ancient tra-
dition of periploi, or costal descriptions, as a model, the
geographer systematically organized topographic and
ethnographic observations as a sequence of choro-
graphic segments (analogous to the Roman painted
topia), fitting a universal geographyplace is space
structured by time (Koelsch 2004, 508509). Trained
as a historian rather than as an astronomer, Strabo was
not interested in creating a mathematical copy of the
inhabited world, but rather a chorographikos pinax in-
cluding only those things that are worthwhile from
a social, political, or philosophical point of view; in
other words, with a map full of peculiarities that are
mnemes axia, or worth being remembered (van Passen
1957, 14, 17). The task of the geographer, according
to Strabo, was indeed idiographic, which is to select
the idiomata tes choras (the characteristic peculiari-
ties, remarkable features of a region) and formulate an
exposition of local differences, ektithemi diaforas topon
scheseis pros allela (cited in van Passen 1957, 17).2
Topiography (the art of gardening) and topography
(decorative wall painting) then were not different from
chorography, defined by Ptolemy (1948) as the de-
scription of the individual parts [of the Earth], as if one
were to draw merely an ear or an eye [as opposed to
geography, whose purpose is to gain a view of the whole
and could thus be compared to whole head] (164).
Indeed, as Ptolemy noted in his Geographike Yphegesis,
chorography has the need of topography, and no one
 Topia: Landscape before Linear Perspective 697

Figure 5. Detail from fresco of a garden from the House of Golden Bracelet, Pompeii. Vegetation is interspersed with sculptural elements
acting as loci: Gilded busts on pedestals support low-relief panels of reclining figures, a carved fountain, and masks suspended from the crossbar
of a pergola. Source: Bowe (2004, 10). (Color figure available online.)

can be a chorographer unless he is also skilled in draw-
ing (cited in Lukermann 1961, 194). In this sense,
the subjects of topiography, topography, and chorogra-
phy were well defined and easy to imprint in memory,
be they vegetal sculptures, painted scenes framed by
columns, or discrete regions delimited by geographi-
cal boundaries (which Strabo associated to geometrical
figures and other memorable forms; see van Passen
1957, 13). Just as on Strabos chorographikos pinax, the
sea, the mountain ranges and rivers enable us to distin-
guish lands and peoples, favorable positions for cities
and the many other forms and details with which our
map is filled (Strabo, cited in van Passen 1957, 6), so
did people, animals, and geographical objects consti-
tute memorable loci within the painted topia described
by Vitruvius.
The privileged spaces for chorographic and topo-
graphic displays were also similar. Celebratory itinerary
maps of the Roman Empire structured as journeys
through topia were prominently displayed in public por-
ticos, in the same way landscape and mythical scenes
decorated villas colonnades (Dilke 1987c). In these
spaces, it is unlikely that monumental maps could have
been grasped in their entirety: As with their landscape
counterparts, they would have required an ambulatory
engagement taking the observer on a visual and
imaginative journey per topia: mountain ranges, islands,
peninsulas, allegories of cities, mutationes (changing
posts), and so on (della Dora 2010; Figure 6).
Both Roman decorative painting and chorography
indeed rested on the identification of topiaof sin-
gularities, things, or characteristics that made places
memorable (these could be, e.g., their shape but also
a battle or a legend that had made them famous),
rather than places themselvesin other words, ele-
ments charged with visual energheia (Mangani 2006,
59). As such, chorography and topography were both
intrinsically qualitative, pictorial arts (as opposed to ge-
ography, described by Ptolemy, as I mentioned earlier,
as a quantitative science of locations; see Olwig 2008,
1847; Simon forthcoming).3 They were both expres-
sions of a peculiar way of seeing and making sense
of the world. Thus, when Tiberius (32 BCE46 CE)
contemplated Capri from the height of his imperial
palaces gardens he did not perceive landscape as a
harmonious single entity, bounded by the maximum
698
Figure 6. Detail from reproduction of the Peutinger Table with allegory of Rome. Source: Wikimedia. (Color figure available online.)
horizon possible, as a von Humboldt would have, but
rather as a prospectus of topia, a system of singularities
which would have had the same effect . . . even in paint
(Farinelli 2003, 41; Mangani 2006, 59). Describing his
villa at Laurentianum to a friend, Pliny the Younger
(61112 CE) talked about landscape as a sequence of
distinct real-life topia framed by windows and folding
doors: from snapshots of marine and mountain views
to views of fig and mulberry trees planted in the garden
(Epistula XXIII). Likewise, Virgil presented the readers
of his Georgics (29 BCE) with textual topia made of
mythological excursuses and bucolic vignettes captured,
like the Pompeii landscape frescoes, from both ground
level and from elevated vantage points (rich outlooks;
II.156), but independently, without sense of coherence.
As with Tiberius and Plinys, Virgils eye is unsteady;
it wavers from the object; other things, one of them
rhetorical ostentation, are more important than the re-
ality of the landscape (Pearsall and Salter 1973, 23).4
Roman gardens were not only spaces for memoriza-
tion; they were also spaces for memorialization. A fur-
ther meaning of the Hellenistic diminutive o o
(topion) is that of sacred place and, more specifi-
della Dora
cally, of o (mnemeon), or tomb (a word that
is in turn related to [mneme], or memory;
Demetrakou 1958). The landscapes of ancient Greece
and Rome were punctuated by chapels, tombs, and
sanctuariesmaterial witnesses of divine presences and
human absences (Mavian 1992). In the Stoic tradition,
topia (intended as landscapes peculiar elements) rep-
resented the only way to reach the perception of the
truth of nature (Cottini 2004, 4). The image of a tomb,
often a column topped by a funerary urn or a bas-relief,
does not evoke melancholy or sadness: the dead are
there, along with other genii of the land. They continue
to live the secret life of Nature, waiting for the spring
and for the offerings of the passers-bys (Grimal 2000,
19; Figure 1).
But painted topia could be even more real than the
landscape in which they were embedded. They could
evoke ancient memories and utter secret stories. Thus,
second-century Greek novelist Longus is said to have
come across an image representing a story of love while
hunting in a grove on the island of Lesvos and to have
found it far more amiable than the grove itself (Daphne
and Chloe I, 1). Likewise, during a tour around the city
 Topia: Landscape before Linear Perspective
of Sidon to see its memorial offerings, Achilles Tatius
encountered a votive painting whose scene, the rape of
Europa, was set on land and sea alike (Tatius 1917,
3). The vivid descriptions of these images serve as incip-
its for the fictional narratives of both authors. As with
Longus and Tatiuss votive paintings, in the Roman gar-
den marble columns and bas-reliefs, terracotta masks,
statues, and portraits of divinities and deceased inter-
mingle with the vegetation and animals as uncanny loci
memoriae. They are in turn represented on the walls of
ambulationes, so as to stress the liminality of these spaces
situated between the closed space of the villa and the
open space of the garden, as well as between life and
death (Figure 5).
Topia as Symbols
After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, in
the late fifth and sixth century the Latin word topia is
no longer testified. In the Byzantine Empire its Greek
cognate oo (topon) is used as a substitute for the
generic o o (topos, place). In the following centuries
it acquired the more specific meaning of farm estate,
or field. Although still designating a well-defined en-
tity (in this case a portion of land delimited by bound-
aries), topon here bears a connotation closer to the
Germanic word land than to the aesthetically pleas-
ing and visually striking Roman topia (Du Cange 1688;
Sophocles 1900; Olwig 1996, 2002; Triantaphyllides
1998). This does not mean, however, the end of such
pictorial tradition, but rather its continuation through
other media. At this time a flourishing Byzantine tra-
dition of topic floor mosaics spread across the eastern
Mediterranean (the region of origin of topiarii, now part
of the Byzantine Empire). Found primarily in churches
and sometimes even reproduced on textiles (Maguire
1987, 22128), these representations portray natural
elements or bucolic scenes in a fragmentary, encyclope-
dic fashion, as discrete topics vividly depicted within
geometrical frames, or circular medallions formed by
vine sprouts (a reference to Johns verse I am the vine
and you are the branches, 15.5)in other words, sep-
arated (chorismenoi) from one another (Figure 7). Their
thematic variety and compositional organization reflect
Strabos chorographic model of the world as a global
inventory (van Passen 1957; Koelsch 2004).
This genre supplanted the sheer geometrical forms of
earlier floor mosaics and reached a peak of frequency,
complexity, and detail only during and after the reign
of Justinian (527565 CE). According to Maguire, the
reason was that by this time representations of nature
699
were no longer commonly associated with paganism
(as they had been at times of friction in the previous
two centuries), and were therefore deemed appropriate
for incorporation in Christian basilicas (Maguire 1983,
145). The new trend could also be linked to the reval-
uation of nature (and its imagery) as a manifestation
of divine power and mercy and thus a way for humans
to reach God Himself (Wallace-Hadrill 1968, 12021).
Such anagogical (or symbolic) understanding was ap-
plied to the church building, which was literally in-
terpreted as a summary of the cosmos ( -o o
[kath-olikon]):
The symbolism was made even more explicit when early in
the seventh century Maximus the Confessor, further de-
veloping the same line of thought, equated the nave of the
church with the physical world and the sanctuary with the
spiritual. The concept justified and, indeed, encouraged
a purely factual and scientific representation of nature
subjects within the building; and the floorunsuitable
for sacred images in any casebecame an obvious carrier
for such representations. (Kitzinger 1973, 371; see also
Maguire 1983, 14953)
The mosaic in the north transept of the basilica of
Dometius in Nikopolis, Epirus region, Greece (550 CE;
Figure 8), for example, presents the viewer with an
Edenic representation of trees, with two large birds at
their base and other small birds on top. The scene is en-
closed by a series of concentric square frames featuring
marine motives (waves, sea creatures, fishermen, etc.).
An inscription indicates that what the beholder is look-
ing at is the famous and boundless ocean containing
in its midst the earth bearing round about in the skilful
images of art everything that breathes and creepsin a
few words, nothing less than a view of the entire Earth
(deemed to be an island since the times of Homer).
Kitzinger (1951, 98) noted the resemblance of the cen-
tral composition of this cosmographic pavement to the
wall decoration of the period of Augustus at Prima Porta
with its vistas of orchards enlivened by birds in the fore-
ground and in the air above. Topia of this type were used
as wall decorations as late as the Constantinian period.
Although the Nikopolis representation appears more
abstract and unrealistic, Kitzinger (1951) noted, this
is not an emasculated descendant of an illusionist type
of landscape which had lost its three-dimensionality in
the course of endless repetition during the centuries of
late antiquity, but an attempt to create something like a
Hellenistic landscape by means of a clever combination
of conventional, and in themselves abstract, ornamen-
tal motifs (98)in other words, a topion. From the
700
Figure 7. Floor mosaic from the church of St. Christopher in Qasr Hiram, Syria, sixth century CE. Source: Wikimedia. (Color figure available
online.)
walls of patrician villas, topia had simply moved to the
floors of churches. The logics underpinning their com-
positional rhetoric nevertheless remained the same.
As with their painted predecessors, these horizon-
tal topia were expressions of perceptions of nature and
of the environment as nonlinear systems of singular-
ities to be imprinted in memory thanks to their vi-
sual energheia. In the Nikopolis mosaic energheia worked
through synecdoche, or symbols (a memorable hand-
ful of trees, birds, and fish, standing for the cosmos, the
beautiful totality of Creation). In the famous Madaba
mosaic in Jordan, an index map of the same century
preserved on the floor of the Basilica of Saint George,
energheia worked at a chorographic scale. Faithful en-
tering the church walked over lively colored hills and
della Dora
valleys, villages and towns in Palestine and the Nile
Delta, accompanied by pictorial vignettes and histori-
cal explanations (Figure 9). The physical setting of the
map, a Byzantine basilica, was seen as a cosmological
symbol that simultaneously incarnated and sanctified
the world (Delano-Smith and Scafi 2005, 12140).
The interior of the basilica was divided into four parts
symbolizing the four cardinal directions; it summarized
the order of creation, of which the holy lands portrayed
in the mosaic were part. Centered on Jerusalem and ori-
ented to the East, the direction of terrestrial paradise
and the altar, the map presented the faithful with a
unique view.
As they approached the altar from the nave, church-
goers would see the various locations on the map in
 Topia: Landscape before Linear Perspective
Figure 8. Floor mosaic from the basilica
of Dometius in Nikopolis, Epirus, 550
CE. Source: Wikimedia. (Color figure
available online.)
generally the same position in relation to themselves as
they actually were (Gold 1958, 5253; see also Dilke
1987a, 26162). As they stood at the opening of the
transept screen in the church, faithful had laid out be-
fore them a panorama mosaic of the land of the Bible
they would behold from a birds-eye view perspective.
The colored loci memoriae portrayed at their feet were
not simply places but place-events the faithful would
reconnect to the Bible: a view of Jerusalem with its
Constantinian holy landmarks, the Dead Sea traversed
by two large boats, Selo, where the Ark once was,
the Desert of Zin where the serpent of brass saved
the children of Israel, Ephron where the Lord went,
and so on. Pious beholders contemplating these vi-
gnettes from above would be able to better visualize
and therefore memorize the Scriptures. Their dimen-
sions did not reflect actual size, but their Biblical im-
portance and thus their importance to be imprinted in
memory.
The compositional rhetoric of the Madaba map
somehow reflects the above-mentioned Roman and
701
late-antique perceptions of the physical landscape as a
prospectus of topia. As she traveled through the Holy
Land, fourth-century Spanish pilgrim Egeria, for exam-
ple, was constantly after elevated vantage points from
which she could gain such prospectus (like Tiberius and
Virgil but also like the viewers of the Madaba floor):
[On the top of Mount Nebo] the presbyters and holy
monks who were familiar with the place asked us, Would
you like to see the places which are described in the Books
of Moses? If you go out of the church door to the actual
summit, the place which has the view, and spend a little
time looking at it, we will tell you which places you can
see. . . . From the church door itself we saw where the Jor-
dan runs into the Dead Sea, and the place was down below
where we were standing. Then, facing us, we saw Livias
on our side of the Jordan, and Jericho on the far side,
since the height in front of the church door, where we
were standing, jutted out over the valley. (Egeria, 12.45,
Wilkinson 2006)
As with the faithful gazing down at the Madaba floor,
the pious young woman uses the landscape under her
702
Figure 9. Floor mosaic from the church of St. George in Madaba, Jordan, sixth century CE. Source: Wikimedia. (Color figure available
online.)
feet as a map and a powerful didactic device. Her mobile
eye navigates the landscape moving per topia, jumping
from locus to locus. With each of these Egeria associates
a Biblical event, which in turn helps her better inscribe
the Scriptures in her memory and helps her sisters who
remained home better picture [in their mind] what
happened in these places when [they] read the Books of
holy Moses (Egeria, 5.8, Wilkinson 2006).
Seeing the World with the Eyes of God
Landscape continued to be perceived as a prospectus
of topia by Byzantines. Geometress poetic description
of the view from a fortified tower in Constantinople in
the tenth century offers an interesting eastern Medieval
counterpart to Egerias descriptions:
But this tower has been raised to the greatest height; it
stands alone, and guards the city. But more, it delights
every sight and the city. It is a place of wonders, in the
midst of the air, a kind of hollow of the breezes, a house of
Aeolos. And contemplating the beauty, all beauty of the
della Dora
world from above, it is a world adornment for the eyes.
From the earth are seen flowers, trees, meadows, foliage,
springs, coppices, pastures, and streams; the vine heavy
with innumerable fruits, many producing wine, and many
a fruit bearing tree. And there is in some places even a
beautiful mixture, for the vine is raised up on towering
trees, branches together with beautiful tendrils, fruit to-
gether with grapes, and more, and beds of leaves, and stoas
and roofs. (cited in Maguire 1993, 22)
Geometres offered an elaborate poetic encomium
of the tower, which he defined as a oo (kosmos,
adornment) from which the eye can contemplate the
beauty of the cosmos. Yet, when it comes to illustrating
the view of the surrounding landscape to the reader,
his lyrical description changes tone and assumes a list-
ing quality, as the poet enthusiastically enumerates the
memorable objects that are to be seen. The internal
eye of the listener-beholder is not pushed to the hori-
zon but drawn to details, to the striking topographic
peculiarities underneath, as in the Nikopolis mosaic.
Flowers and pastures, fruit-bearing trees and meadows,
 Topia: Landscape before Linear Perspective
Figure 10. Icon of the Nativity, Greece, fifteenth century. Here
different topoi events are portrayed simultaneously: the angels ren-
dering glory on the top of the composition, under the star; the three
magi venerating on the right; the oxen and donkey heating Christ
infant in the cave, and the Mother of God giving birth at the center;
the newborn Christ on the bottom left; and pensive Joseph on the
bottom right. The sizes and colors of the different figures and scenes
exalt their narrative importance and help the observer better mem-
orize the events. (The Sergiyev Museum, Moscow.) (Color figure
available online.)
streams, and roofs are all set on the same visual plane.
They are not ranked according to distance or sizein
other words, they are not ordered by perspective (e.g.,
as in Petrarchs famous account of his ascent of Mount
Ventoux, or in von Humboldts descriptions of his views
from Chimborazo)but rather, according to their strik-
ing qualities. They provide the listener-beholder with
a paratactic, simultaneous view akin to that of Byzan-
tine holy icons, in which the size of the figures is de-
termined by importance and not, as in compositions
ruled by linear perspective, by receding view. Figures
in the background are often larger than those in the
foreground and different sides of the same object are
represented on the same plane (Lossky and Ouspenski
1982; Cavarnos 2001; Figure 10).5
703
Antonova (2010) recently explained such spatial ar-
rangement as the expression of Gods view: divine
vision is simultaneous and thus view-pointless, i.e.,
things are not seen from a certain point of view but, po-
tentially, from all possible viewpoints at once (103),
as opposed to the linear Apollonian gaze having a sin-
gle point of view (Cosgrove 2001). And, after Eco,
Antonova (2010) reminded us, Medievals saw the
world with the eyes of God (103). Whether in paint, in
words, or in its physical sense, landscape was perceived
by Byzantines as an ensemble of symbols that spoke of a
transcendent reality and, at the same time, were part of
it (as works of the Creator). After the sixth century, nat-
ural backgrounds to biblical events on icons and frescoes
grew more and more stylized: thereafter mountains are
either terraced massifs or series of coulisses, and rivers
are controlled by personifications or angels . . . but not
by gravity. Conventional rocks and trees serve as fram-
ing devices, while serried ranks of improbable plants
decorate rather than characterize a panorama (Kazh-
dan 1991, 1174). Such stylized landscape elements had
a double function, at once practical and symbolic.
In cycles of the life of Christ, the rocky element, for ex-
ample, served as a powerful iconographic link between
one scene and the other. Symbolically, it also revealed
or prefigured higher truths. In the icon of the Nativity
the infant Christ is born in a cave, indicating the Earth
itself taking the glory of divinity through Incarnation.
In the Theophany scene, the banks of the river Jor-
dan feature in a cave-like shape. The baptismal water
of the river topped by the Holy Spirit echoes the first
Creations imaging of the Spirit moving upon the face
of the waters (Gen. 1.2) and thus signifies the restora-
tion of Paradise. In the icon of the Crucifixion, a small
cave under the cross on Golgotha shelters the skull of
Adam whose bones are still part of the dust of the earth
from which they were formed, yet whose Fall is now be-
ing redeemed. Finally, on the icon of the Resurrection
Christ is shown in a vast cave deep within the Earth,
triumphantly rescuing Adam and Eve from the dark pit
of Hell (Foltz 2001, 138).
From a phenomenological point of view, rocks, how-
ever, play an active role in the nonlinear way in which
the icon invites the beholder into the reality of his
transfigured humanityin other words, into a reality
seen with the eyes of God:
Slabs of stone stacked in ascending pinnacles and sepa-
rated from each other by deep crevasses . . . bend slowly
away from the spectator in the foreground until at the top
of the painting they curve back once again toward the
704
viewer as the rock reaches ever higher. The effect of this
illusion is to concentrate the light at the icons centre
out toward the viewer standing before it. The surround-
ing mountains function as the concave surface of a large
reflecting mirror. This is what desert travellers do, by anal-
ogy, in using a curved lens to focus sunlight on dry grass to
ignite fire. In such a way, the spectator himself is virtually
set aflame by consuming the divine light brought into
the focus of the icon. (Lane 1998, 126)
The effect is further magnified in the space of the
church. The curved surfaces of cupolas and chapels
work together with images to literally wrap the
faithful and redirect his attention to the central figures.
Unlike in modern western art, here the eye refuses
the large panorama and concentrates on detail, on
memorable topics (Rees 1973, 30). Yet, detail is only
a vehicle to turn the attention of the beholder from the
scene being depicted to its inner meaning of spiritual
reality. Such treatment of landscape is connected to
ekphrasis, or the art of vivid rhetorical description de-
scribed by Quintillian and cultivated by the Byzantines
(Gregory 2006, 486; Webb 2009). Like sacred icons
and topia, ekphraseis were not necessarily realistic. Even
though they referred to actual places, such as Geome-
tress fortified tower or (more often) pleasure gardens
and hunting parks (Maguire 2000, 2002), they did
not make present the actual picture, but the spiritual
reality behind it. Descriptions of real and imagined
loci amoeni served as tools for inner elevation, as useful
fictions for self-edification (James and Webb 1991).
Whether painted in color or in words, images drew
their persuasive power, their energheia, from their mem-
orability. For Gregory the Great (590604 CE), im-
ages induced remembrance. As with Roman topia,
the function of the Gospel and its images was in this
sense to serve as memoria: They were meant to bring
back the memory of a past moment of sacred history,
and also catch a glimpse of what promised to come
(Antonova 2010, 86). Then, as the Second Council of
Nicaea (787 CE) established, the more frequently [im-
ages] are seen in representational art, the more are those
who see them drawn to remember and long for those to
serve as models (cited in Antonova 2010, 86). Through
sacred o (eikones, images) memoria thus worked (tablet) is the same as that used for Ptolemaic maps.
on two levelsone directed to the past and the other to
the futurea conception growing out of the notion of
a timeless eternity, in turn derived from the paradox of
the Words Incarnation, a historic event of the past
and an event which never passes (Antonova 2010,
134). Like the Roman ambulatio with its topia, the sa-
della Dora
cred space of the icon was a hybrid, liminal space, but
also one for inner transformation.
Far from being the result of artists little effort to
preserve accuracy of scale, shape, or perspective due to
their ignorance of nature, as Rees (1973, 151) claimed
for Medieval representations, the spatial composition
of Byzantine images rather rested on the consciousness
that memory does not work through a Euclidean space,
nor does it work according to the rules of linear per-
spective. Linear perspective is based on the notion
that we live in a Euclidean three-dimensional space,
of which vision gives us instances and to which in-
stances pictorial perspective gives a permanent visual
form. Yet, as nineteenth-century religious philosopher
and art historian Pavel Florensky claimed, it also ex-
cludes all psycho-physiological processes such as mem-
ory (Antonova 2010, 32). In representations ruled by
linear perspective, objects are drawn smaller as their dis-
tance from the observer increases, and visual axes con-
verge in a vanishing point in (or beyond) the canvas,
creating the illusion of depth and deceiving haptic ex-
perience. The viewer is set in a fixed position and sight
is dissociated from the other senses. With Byzantine
iconography, by contrast, no matter where he stands or
whether he moves or not, the beholder becomes the
vanishing point of the compositionhence art histo-
rians characterization of this technique as inverse per-
spective (see Ouspensky 1982). The eye is not drawn
through the pictures frame into the natural world de-
picted therein; it rather concentrates on the image itself,
hence increasing its ability to be imprinted in memory.
For Byzantines, vision was haptic as well optic. For
John of Damascus (676749 CE), for example, the eye
did not only see holy images, but touched and
kissed them. Drawing on the ancient extramission
theory of vision proposed by Plato, Galen, Ptolemy, and
others, Patriarch Photius (810893 CE) maintained
that the eye emitted optical rays, which touched the
gazed object and bounced back to the eye, transport-
ing the essence of the thing seen to the mind, and
then to memory (Nelson 2006, 150). In this way, ob-
jects and images were effectively imprinted on what
Photius called tablets of the soul, tois tes psyches pinaxin
(Homily XVII, 5). It is worth noting that the word pinax
Memorizing things is akin to mappingboth imply the
projection of a three-dimensional body on a flat surface,
its dissection in parts, and selection of most significant
or memorable traits.
Experienced through the Byzantine eye, landscape is
therefore no longer simply a way of seeing but also a
 Topia: Landscape before Linear Perspective
way of being. The beholder becomes essential to the
icon, and is in turn transformed by it. The essence of
the exercise is to establish a communion between the
event or persons represented in the icon and those who
stand before it (Baggley 1988, 13637). The surface
of the icon acts as a threshold, a point of convergence
between the immanent and the transcendent in which
symbolic landscape features both speak of a transfigured
reality and function as a means for transfigurationbut,
as Timothy Gregory (2006) claimed, this is something
that is not attractive to western sensitivities (at least
since the Renaissance) (486).
Conclusions
As with any history, histories of geography and land-
scape are by necessity selective. Focusing primarily on
modernity, they have generally taken their point of de-
parture from the Renaissance and its rediscovery of the
Classical past. In particular, the translation of Ptolemys
Geography into Latin in 1409 has been regarded as the
point of passage from a place-based to a recognizably
modern, geometrical model of the Earth. Likewise, lin-
ear perspective (which was theorized only few years
later) has been regarded as the main turning point in the
representation of place (Nuti 1999, 90108). The latter
has been conceptualized as the copy of the former. Both
rested on Euclidean geometries: Renaissance artists,
many of whom were themselves also cartographers and
scientists, essentially changed Ptolemys top-down pro-
jection from the vertical to the horizontal in order to
create a three-dimensional perspectival illusion (Ol-
wig 2008, 1848; Farinelli 2007, 78). In highlighting
epistemological ruptures, geographers have inevitably
downplayed continuities in their histories of geograph-
ical thought. Perceptions and visual representations of
the environment from the period between the writing
of Ptolemys Geography and its discovery in the West
have been largely ignored in geographical debates.
As Olwig recently noted, however, the discipline has
subaltern, non-modern chorographic strands that run
counter to the Renaissance representation of geogra-
phy as cosmography (2008, 1843). As I have shown,
this chorographic tradition is rooted in pre-Ptolemaic
perceptions of the world and landscape as depositories
of memory places. Topia endured as units of mnemonic
systems from antiquity throughout the Byzantine mid-
dle ages through poems, maps, mosaics, sacred paint-
ings, and geographical descriptions alike (which were
in turn reflections of the way landscape was per-
ceived and built; Mangani 2009). As Mangani (2006)
705
has shown, these systems survived through the western
Middle Ages well into the Renaissance. In the West,
miniature landscape views started to appear within ini-
tial letters in fifteenth-century Books of Hours as de-
vices for facilitating the memorization of Psalms and
prayers (Mangani 2006, 138). Sixteenth-century map
cycles, such as Ignazio Dantis Galleria in the Vatican
and his Guardaroba in Palazzo Vecchio, similarly pre-
sented their viewers with birds-eye views of memorable
place-events and other mirabilia (from famous battles of
antiquity to exotic animals and other curios), likewise
easing the learning of history and geography through
their visual memorization (Fiorani 2005). These loci
made absences present in the same way masks and sim-
ulacra did in Roman gardens, sacred icons in Byzantine
basilicas, and vivid words in ekphraseis. Rather than
an analytical practice, Mangani (2006) argued, geogra-
phy was originally an encyclopedic system for informa-
tion storage and memorization and endured as such at
least until the late seventeenth centurywell beyond
Ptolemaic mappings and the theorization of linear per-
spective. The power of geography lay in its imaginative
force, in its ability to bring pictures and places before
ones eye and imprint them in ones mind.
Tracing the complex etymological and visual history
of topia might not only shed light on nonlinear per-
ceptions of the environment in understudied historical
periods but also help us revaluate a further aspect of
landscape (in the broader sense): that of a persuasive
rhetorical system and a container of symbolic mem-
ory places. Lowenthal (2007) nicely framed the tension
inherent in landscape as something we live in and
look at. As opposed to Renaissance landscape, topia
do not rest on Euclidean geometries and therefore im-
ply a different way of looking at the world. Although
intrinsically visual and representational, landscape as
an ensemble of topia calls for a precognitive and perfor-
mative approach, whereby the viewer is released from
its static position and ordering viewing structures. As
Crandell (1993) wrote, this way of seeing [poses] an
alternative to the familiar perspectival view that for us
has been dominant since the Renaissance. Indeed, [it
challenges] the very notion that viewing the landscape
across space, as when looking at the prospect offered by
a scenic outlook, can be at all gratifying (49).
Insofar as they acted as mnemonic devices, topia were
not pictorial representations in the modern perspecti-
val sense of paesaggio but synecdoches and symbols that
were not totally distinguished from their referents and
were activated through performance. In this sense, topia
challenge false dichotomies such as representing the
706
world versus being in the world, which have been
at the center of much debate in contemporary cultural
geography (Ingold 2000, 189218; Olwig 2005; Thrift
2007, 12450). In so doing, they can bring a contribu-
tion to a more nuanced understanding of representation
and nonrepresentation. Long before entering human
geographers vocabulary, the term nonrepresentational
was used by theater historians to define the Shakespear-
ian stage of the Globe (a theater equipped with devices
used to stimulate actors memory), and which they
opposed to modern staging with its linear-perspective-
based representations (Mazer 1981).6 Rather than as a
detached theatrical scenery, we can similarly imagine
landscape as a vast memory theateras a prospectus
of topia or as a liminal space that works in between
past and present; between presences and absences;
through precognitive mechanisms of memorization
rather than rational speculation; through embodied
visual participation rather than Cartesian distancing;
and perhaps more significantly, through the poetic
appreciation of the Earths beauty in its topical variety.
Looking back at topia and landscape before linear
perspective can thus make us reflect on the role of the
cultural geographernot least as a storyteller:
Scientists strive to stand far above their material, for a
view from nowhere, with the hope that they will thereby
be able to plunge well below the surfaces of reality. By
contrast, cultural geographers-cum-storytellers stand only
a little above their material and move only a little below
the surfaces of reality in the hope of not losing sight of
such surfaces, where nearly all human joys and sorrows
unfold. (Tuan 1989, 240)
Acknowledgments
Research for this article has been made possible
thanks to a Dumbarton Oaks residential fellowship and
a University of Bristol research fellowship. I would like
to acknowledge both institutions. I would also like
to thank Fr. Amphilochios Docheiarites and Chrys-
soula Kaltsa for their assistance on philological matters,
Marco Antonsich for his helpful comments on an early
draft of this article, Audrey Kobayashi for her thor-
ough guidance in the revision process, and finally three
anonymous referees, from whose invaluable suggestions
this article has greatly benefited.
Notes
1. Consider, for example, the following passage by Clarke:
In the West, landscape painting has had a short and fitful
history. In the greatest ages of European art, the age of the
della Dora
Parthenon and the age of Chartres Cathedral, landscape
did not and could not exist; to Giotto and Michelangelo
it was an impertinence. It is only in the seventeenth cen-
tury that great artists take up landscape painting for its
own sake, and try to systematize its rules. Only in the
nineteenth century does it become the dominant art, and
create a new aesthetics of its own (quoted in Casey 2002,
5). This evolutionary narrative finds parallels in tradi-
tional histories of cartography, which have, nevertheless,
been challenged (e.g., Edney 1993; Jacob 1996).
2. A contemporary example of chorography can be found
in Salliss travelogue (2006), which is inspired by and
organized precisely according to this principle.
3. No one but a man skilled in drawing would do chorogra-
phy, Ptolemy argued (cited in Simon forthcoming, 7).
4. Roman villas were often built in elevated spots or on raised
terraces, providing views over the surrounding countryside
(Bowe 2004, 27).
5. The typical example is the Last Supper in which Christ,
the figure most distant from the viewer, but also the most
important in the group, is portrayed bigger than all the
other the figures; likewise, Peter and John, who are sitting
next to him and occupy a central role in the narrative, are
larger than the apostles in the foreground.
6. I would like to thank an anonymous referee for suggesting
this insight.
References
Antonova, C. 2010. Space, time, and presence in the icon: Seeing
the world with the eyes of God. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Atkinson, D. 2010. Classical traditions and cultural geogra-
phies. In Visual and historical geographies: Essays in honour
of Denis E. Cosgrove, ed. V. della Dora, S. Digby, and B.
Basdas, 920. London: Royal Geographical Society.
Baggley, J. 1988. Doors of perception: Icons and their spiri-
tual significance. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminar
Press.
Bagrow, L. 1966. History of cartography. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Boholm, A. 1997. Reinvented stories: Medieval Rome as
memorial landscape. Ecumene 4:24772.
Bowe, P. 2004. Gardens of the Roman world. Los Angeles: The
J. Paul Getty Museum.
Carruthers, M. 1990. The book of memory. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Casey, E. 2002. Representing place: Landscape painting and
maps. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Castiglioni, L., and S. Mariotti. 1990. Vocabolario della lin-
gua latina: Latino-italiano, italiano-latino [Dictionary of
Latin language: LatinItalian, ItalianLatin]. Torino,
Italy: Loescher.
Cavarnos, C. 2001. Guide to Byzantine iconography. Boston:
Holy Transfiguration Monastery.
Cosgrove, D. [1984] 1998. Social formation and symbolic land-
scape. Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble Books.
. 1985. Prospect, perspective and the evolution of
the landscape idea. Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 10:4562.
. 2001. Apollos eye: A genealogy of the Earth in the
western imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Press.
 Topia: Landscape before Linear Perspective
. 2003a. Landscape and the European sense of sight-
eyeing nature. In Handbook of cultural geography, ed. K.
Anderson, M. Domosh, N. Thrift, and S. Pile, 24968.
London: Sage.
. 2003b. Ptolemy and Vitruvius: Spatial representa-
tion in the sixteenth-century texts and commentaries.
In Architecture and the sciences: Exchanging metaphors, ed.
A. Picon and A. Ponte, 2051. New York: Princeton
University Press.
. 2004. Landscape and landschaft. GHI Bulletin
35:5771.
. 2006. Modernity, community and the landscape
idea. Journal of Material Culture 11:4966.
Cosgrove, D., and S. Daniels, eds. 1988. The iconography of
landscape. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Cottini, P. 2004. Le origini: Rilettura delle fonti e ipotesi
interpretative [The origins: A re-reading of the sources
and interpretative ipotheses]. In Topiaria: sculture vegetali
nel giardino occidentale dallantichita a oggi [Topiaria: Veg-
etal sculptures in the Western garden from Antiquity to
the Present], ed. M. Azzi-Visentini, 115. Treviso, Italy:
Fondazione Benetton.
Crandell, G. 1993. Nature pictorialized: The view in landscape
history. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Curry, M. 2005. Towards a geography without maps: Lessons
from Ptolemy and postal codes. Annals of the Association
of American Geographers 95:6891.
Delano-Smith, C., and A. Scafi. 2005. Sacred geography. In
Sacred places on maps, ed. Z. Torok, 12140. Pannon-
halma, Hungary: Pannonhalmi Fapatsag.
della Dora, V. 2008. Mountains and memory: Embodied vi-
sions of nineteenth-century Aegean peaks. Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers 33:2132.
. 2010. Mapping metageographies: The cartographic
invention of Italy and the Mediterranean. Cali-
fornia Italian Studies 1:125. http://escholarship.org/
uc/item/6g23b4fs (last accessed 8 March 2011)
Demetrakou, D. 1958. Mega Lexikon oles tes Ellenikes glosses
[Great Dictionary of the Greek language]. Athens,
Greece: Ekd. Demetrakos-Revezikas.
De Sols, D. R. 1992. Lanima del paesaggio [Landscapes
soul]. In Paesaggio mediterraneo [Mediterranean land-
scape], ed. Y. Luginbuhl, 6873. Milan, Italy: Electa.
Devoto, G., and G. C. Oli. 1971. Dizionario della lingua italiana
[Dictionary of the Italian language]. Firenze, Italy: Le
Monnier.
Dilke, G. A. W. 1987a. Cartography in the Byzantine Empire.
In History of cartography, Vol. 1, ed. J. B. Harley and
D. Woodward, 23475. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
. 1987b. The culmination of Greek cartography with
Ptolemy. In History of cartography, Vol. 1, ed. J. B. Harley
and D. Woodward, 177200. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
. 1987c. Itineraries and geographical maps in the early
and late Roman Empire. In History of Cartography, Vol.
1, ed. J. B. Harley and D. Woodward, 23457. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Diogenes Laertius. 1901. The lives and opinions of eminent
philosophers, trans. C. D. Yonge. London: George Bell
and Sons.
Dolezal, M. L., and M. Mavroudi. 2002. Theodore Hyr-
takenos description of the garden of Saint Anna and
707
the ekphrasis of gardens. In Byzantine garden culture, ed.
A. Littlewood, H. Maguire, and J. Wolschke-Bulmahn,
97158. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks.
Du Cange, C. 1688. Glossarium ad scriptores mediae et infimae
Graecitatis [Glossary of Medieval and late Greek]. Lyon,
France: Amissonios.
Edney, M. 1993. Cartography without progress: Reinterpret-
ing the nature and historical development of mapmak-
ing. Cartographica 30:5468.
Elden, S. 2009. Place symbolism and land politics in Beowulf.
Cultural Geographies 16:44763.
Elkins, J. 1994. The poetics of perspective. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press.
Farinelli, F. 2003. Geografia: Unintroduzione ai modelli del
mondo [Geography: An introduction to the models of
the world]. Torino, Italy: Einaudi.
. 2007. Linvenzione della Terra [The invention of the
Earth]. Palermo, Italy: Sellerio.
Fentress, J., and C. Wickham. 1992. Social memory. Oxford,
UK: Blackwell.
Fiorani, F. 2005. The marvel of maps: Art, cartography and poli-
tics in Renaissance Italy. New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press.
Foltz, B. 2001. Nature godly and beautiful: The iconic Earth.
Phenomenology 1:11355.
Gautier Dalche, P. 2007. The reception of Ptolemys Geogra-
phy (end of the fourteenth to beginning of the sixteenth
century). In The history of cartography. Vol. 3. Cartogra-
phy in the European Renaissance, part 1, ed. D. Woodward,
285364. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gold, V. 1958. The mosaic map of Madeba. The Biblical Ar-
chaeologist 21:5253.
Gregory, T. 2006. Narrative of the Byzantine landscape. In
Byzantine narrative: Papers in honour of Roger Scott, ed.
J. Burke and U. Betka, 48196. Melbourne, Australia:
Byzantina Australensia 16.
Grimal, P. 2000. Larte dei giardini: Una breve storia [The art of
gardens: A short history]. Rome, Italy: Donzelli Editore.
Harvey, D. 2000. Continuity, authority and the place of her-
itage in the medieval world. Journal of Historical Geogra-
phy 25:4759.
. 2002. Constructed landscapes and social memory:
Tales of St. Samson in early modern Cornwall. Environ-
ment and Planning D 20:23148.
. 2003. Territoriality, parochial development, and the
place of community in later medieval Cornwall. Journal
of Historical Geography 29:15165.
Hirsch, E., and M. O Hanlon, eds. 1995. The anthropology
of landscape: Perspectives on place and space. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
Ingold, T. 2000. The perception of the environment: Essays
in livelihood dwelling and skill. London and New York:
Routledge.
Jackson, J. B. 1964. The meanings of landscape. Kulturgeografi
16:4750.
Jacob, C. 1996. Towards a cultural history of cartography.
Imago Mundi 48:9198.
. 1999. Mapping in the mind: The Earth from an-
cient Alexandria. In Mappings, ed. D. Cosgrove, 123.
London: Reaktion.
James, L., and R. Webb. 1991. To understand ultimate things
and enter secret places: Ekphrasis and art in Byzantium.
Art History 14:117.
708 della Dora
Johnston, R., D. Gregory, G. Pratts, and M. Watts, eds. 2000.
Dictionary of human geography. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Jones, R. 2004. What time human geography? Progress in
Human Geography 28:287304.
Kazhdan, A. P. 1991. The Oxford dictionary of Byzantium.
Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Kitzinger, E. 1951. Studies on late antique and early Byzan-
tine floor mosaics: I. Mosaics at Nikopolis. Dumbarton
Oaks Papers 6:81122.
. 1973. World map and fortunes wheel: A Medieval
mosaic floor in Turin. Proceedings of the American Philo-
sophical Society 117:34473.
Koelsch, W. 2004. Squinting back at Strabo. The Geographical
Review 94:50218.
Kymalainen, P., and A. Lehtinen 2010. Chora in cur-
rent geographical thought: Places of co-design and re-
membering. Geografiska Annaler B 92:25161.
Lafaye, G. 1912. Dictionnaire des antiquites grecques
et romaines, dapres les textes et les monuments
[Dictionary of Greek and Roman antiquities, ac-
cording to the texts and monuments]. Paris:
Hachette.
Lane, B. 1998. The solace of fierce landscapes: Exploring desert
and mountain spirituality. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Liddell, G., and R. Scott. 1977. Lexikon tes Ellenikes glosses
[Dictionary of the Greek language]. Athens, Greece:
Ekd. Sideres.
Lilley, K. 2004a. Cities of God? Medieval urban forms and
their Christian symbolism. Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers 29:296313.
. 2004b. Mapping cosmopolis: Moral topographies of
the medieval city. Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space 22:68198.
. 2009. City and cosmos: The medieval world in urban
form. London: Reaktion.
. 2011. Geographys medieval history: A neglected
enterprise? Dialogues in Human Geography 1:14762.
. Forthcoming. Introduction: Mapping medieval ge-
ographies. In Mapping medieval geographies, ed. K. Lilley.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Littlewood, A. 1992. Gardens of Byzantium. Journal of Garden
History 12:12653.
Longus. Daphnis et Chloe. http://hodoi.fltr.ucl.ac.be/
concordances/longus daphnis chloe 01/texte.htm (last
accessed 8 March 2011).
Lossky, V., and L. Ouspenski 1982. The meaning of icons.
Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimirs Seminar Press.
Lowenthal, D. 2007. Living with and looking at landscape.
Landscape Research 32:63759.
Lukermann, F. 1961. The concept of location in classical
geography. Annals of the Association of American Geogra-
phers 51:194210.
Maguire, H. 1974. Truth and convention in Byzantine
descriptions of works of art. Dumbarton Oaks Papers
28:11140.
. 1983. Christians, pagans, gods and the representa-
tion of nature. Riggisberger Berichte 1: 13160.
. 1987. The mantle of the Earth. Illinois Classical Stud-
ies 12:22128.
. 1993. The beauty of castles: A tenth century descrip-
tion of a tower at Constantinople. Deltion Christianikes
Archaeologikes Etaireias 17:2124.
. 2000. Gardens and parks in Constantinople. Dumb-
arton Oaks Papers 54:25164.
. 2002. Paradise withdrawn. In Byzantine garden cul-
ture, ed. A. Littlewood, H. Maguire, and J. Wolschke-
Bulmahn, 2335. Washington, DC: Dumbarton
Oaks.
Mangani, G. 2005. Intercettare la chora: Luogo e spazio nel
dibattito geografico degli ultimi trentanni [Intercepting
chora: Place and space in the geographical debate of
the past thirty years]. Paper delivered to the seminar
Cartografia e progettazione: Dalle carte coloniali alle
carte di piano, Universita degli studi di Bergamo.
. 2006. Cartografia morale [Moral cartography]. Mod-
ena, Italy: Cosimo Panini.
. 2009. The landscape-garden of Marche region and
the building of identity. Paper presented to the sym-
posium The interlacing of words and things in gardens
and landscapes: Beyond nature and culture, Dumbarton
Oaks, Washington, DC.
Mann, A. T. 1993. Sacred architecture. Shaftesbury, UK:
Element.
Martin, G. 2005. All possible worlds: A history of geographical
ideas. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mavian, L. 1992. Il ruolo della mitologia nella percezione
della natura e nellorganizzazione delle sue risorse: Luoghi
mitici o illustri [The role of mythology in the perception
of nature and the organization of its resources: Mythical
or famous places]. In Paesaggio mediterraneo [Mediter-
ranean landscape], ed. Y. Luginbuhl, 3641. Milano,
Italy: Electa.
Mayhew, R. 2011. Geographys genealogies. In Handbook of
geographical knowledge, ed. J. Agnew and D. Livingstone,
2138. London: Sage.
Mazer, C. M. 1981. Shakespeare refashioned: Elizabethan plays
on Edwardian stages. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research
Press.
Merriman, P. 2006. A new look at the English landscape:
Landscape architecture, movement and the aesthetics of
motorways in early postwar Britain. Cultural Geographies
13:78105.
Mitchell, W. T. J., ed. 1994. Landscape and power. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Mpampiniotes, G. 2006. Lexiko tes neas ellenikes glossas: Me
scholia gia te soste chrese ton lexeon [Modern Greek Dictio-
nary: With notes on the right usage of words]. Athens,
Greece: Kentro Lexikologias.
Nelson, R. 2006. To say and to see: Ekphrasis and vision in
Byzantium. In Later Byzantine painting: Art, agency and
appreciation, ed. R. Nelson., 14368. Burlington, VT:
Ashgate Variorum.
Nora, P. 1996. Realms of memory. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Nuti, L. 1999. Mapping places: Chorography and vision in
the Renaissance. In Mappings, ed. D Cosgrove, 90108.
London: Reaktion.
Olwig, K. 1996. Recovering the substantive nature of land-
scape. Annals of the Association of the American Geogra-
phers 86:63053.
. 2002. Landscape, nature and the body politic: From
Britains Renaissance to Americas New World. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press.
. 2005. Representation and alienation in the political
landscape. Cultural Geographies 12:1940.
 Topia: Landscape before Linear Perspective
. 2008. Has geography always been modern? Choros,
(non)representation, performance, and the landscape.
Environment and Planning A 40:184361.
Ouspensky, L. 1982. Theology of the icon. Crestwood, NY: St.
Vladimirs Seminar Press.
Panofsky, E. 1997. Perspective as symbolic form, trans. C.
Wood. New York: Zone Books.
Pearsall, D., and E. Salter 1973. Landscapes and seasons of the
Medieval world. London: Paul Elek.
Photius. 1958. The homilies of Photius, Patriarch of Constantino-
ple, trans. C. Mango. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Pickles, J. 2004. A history of spaces: Cartographic reason, map-
ping and the geo-coded world. London and New York:
Routledge.
Plato. [360 BCE] 1892. Critias. In The dialogues of Plato. Vo1.
3, ed. B. Jowett, 34359. Oxford, UK: Clarendon.
Pliny the Younger. Letters of Pliny, trans. W. Melmoth. http://
www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2811/pg2811.html (last
accessed 8 March 2011).
Ptolemy, C. 1948. Geographike Yphegesis (excerpts). In A
sourcebook in Greek science, ed. I. E. Drabkin and M. R.
Cohen, 16281. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Rees, R. 1973. Geography and landscape painting: An intro-
duction to a neglected field. Scottish Geographical Journal
89:14757.
Robb, D. M. 1973. The art of the illuminated manuscript.
Philadelphia: Philadelphia Art Alliance.
Ryan, J. 2004. History and philosophy of geography: Disci-
pline and discourse, 20012002. Progress in Human Ge-
ography 28:23545.
Sallis, J. 1999. Chorology. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
. 2006. Topographies. Bloomington: Indiana Univer-
sity Press.
Sauer, C. 1925. The morphology of landscape. Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press.
Scully, V. 1979. The earth, the temple and the gods: Greek sacred
architecture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Simon, J. Forthcoming. Chorography reconsidered. In Map-
ping medieval geographies, ed. K. Lilley. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Sophocles, E. A. 1900. Greek lexicon of the Roman and Byzan-
tine periods (from BC 146 to AD 1100). New York:
Scribners.
Correspondence: School of Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, University Road, Bristol BS8 1SS, UK, e-mail: veronica.
delladora@bristol.ac.uk.
709
Tatius, A. 1917. The adventures of Leucippus and Chte-
siphon. In Achilleus Tatius, trans. S. Gaselee. London:
W. Heinemann.
Thrift, N. 2007. Non-representational theory: Space, politics,
affect. London and New York: Routledge.
Tilley, C. 1994. A phenomenology of landscape: Places, paths
and monuments. London: Berg.
Tongiorgi Tomasi, L. 2004. Tradizione iconografica, sim-
bologia e scienze in alcuni progetti di arte topiaria
tra 500 e 600 [Iconographic tradition, symbology and
the sciences in some topiary projects, 15001600].
In Topiaria: Sculture vegetali nel giardino occidentale
dallantichita a oggi [Topiary: Vegetal sculptures in the
Western garden from Antiquity to the Present], ed.
M. Azzi-Visentini, 10413. Treviso, Italy: Fondazione
Benetton.
Triantaphyllides, M. 1998. Lexiko tes koines Neoellinikes [Mod-
ern Greek Dictionary]. Thessalonica, Greece: Institouto
Neoellenikon Spoudon Aristoteleiou Panepistemiou
Thessalonikes.
Tuan, Y. F. 1989. Surface phenomena and aesthetic experi-
ence. Annals of the Association of American Geographers
79:23341.
Van Passen, C. 1957. The classical tradition of geography.
Groningen, Netherlands: J. B. Wolters.
Vitruvius, ed. 2004. De Architectura, trans. B. Thayer. http://
www.ukans.edu/history/index/europe/ancient rome/E/
Roman/Texts/Vitruvius/2.html (last accessed 20 January
2011).
von Humboldt, A. (1858) 1997. Cosmos: A sketch of
the physical description of the universe. Vol. 2, trans.
E. Otte. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University
Press.
Wallace-Hadrill, D. S. 1968. The Greek patristic view of nature.
New York: Barnes and Noble.
Webb, R. 2009. Ekphrasis, imagination and persuasion in ancient
rhetorical theory and practice. London: Ashgate.
Wilkinson, J. 2006. Egerias travels. Oxford, UK: Aris and
Phillips.
Williams, M. 1989. Landscape in the Argonautica of Apollonius
Rhodius. New York: Peter Lang.
Wylie, J. 2002. An essay on ascending Glastonbury Tor. Ge-
oforum 33:44154.
. 2007. Landscape. London and New York: Routledge.
Yates, F. 1966. The art of memory. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Copyright of Annals of the Association of American Geographers is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and
its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's
express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.