| Unit name | Classical Arcadia and Gardenesque (1720-1820) |
|---|---|
| Unit code | ARCHM0106 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | M/7 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
| Unit director | Emeritus Professor. Mowl |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of Anthropology and Archaeology |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
This is the second of two core mandatory units, which cover the history of landscape gardening in Britain. The principal focus of the Unit will be the philosophical and literary responses to 'Nature' of English society in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The influence of writers such as Pliny, Horace and Virgil on the form and design of landscapes will be studied to determine why such Classical literature should have influenced plans in which architecture and planting, artfully disposed, replaced the flora and rigid formality of the previous fifty years. The key contemporary theorists are Pope, Addison and Shaftesbury; the garden practitioners are Vanbrugh, Kent, Batty Langley, Lancelot Brown, Humphry Repton and J.C. Loudon. These intensely intellectual Classical gardens of the first half of the eighteenth century gave way, through an expanding world view, to more eclectic designs - Chinese, Gothick, Turkish, Hindu - the so-called 'Rococo' gardens of the 1740-60. Brown's ideal, if bland, Claudian parkscapes followed only to be softened by Repton and with the new century came a return to formal enclosures, bedding plants and the 'Gardenesque'. It is a period where Classicism moves paradoxically into Romanticisim and it will be the chief aim of the Unit to convey this apparent contradiction. The Unit is intended to relate the formal aesthetics of landscape and garden designs to the cultural contexts that inform them.
