A Template for Pop-Up Notes

The relationship between the poetic word and the pictorial image belongs in the context of a tradition stretching back at least to Classical times, and it operates on several levels. In its simplest and most enduring form, it is the relationship between description and depiction, both informed by a shared intellectual and imaginative vision based in prevailing philosophical and religious values: it is a commonplace of the parallel development of European literature and art that ideas have always shaped the ways in which reality is portrayed in any medium, and indeed perceived in the first place. There has always been some traffic between the realms of poetry and painting - to put it simply, shared conventions of selectivity and distortion have often had poets and painters doing each other's work. This process is most obviously exemplified by the relationship between pastoral poetry and the pastoral landscape, or between the poetic and the painted versions of the Romantic mountain landscape. Two examples are enough to illustrate this. The first is the anonymous engraved frontispiece to an early nineteenth-century edition of the English Sentimental poets [ 1 ], in which almost every routine component of the Sentimental idyll can be found - the 'babbling brook', the 'lowing herd' grazing on one of the 'gently rolling hills' in the background, while flowers and berries become 'nature's bounty' overflowing the basket of the children harvesting them, the rustic path and stile, and even a token cascade in the brook. The second example is an 'imaginary landscape' by the Flemish baroque painter Paul Bril (1554-1626) entitled Rocky Waterfall with Landscape and Castle (1607) [ 2 ]. The conventional elements that became the metaphorical language of the Romantic landscape were well established in European art more than a hundred years before the first stirrings of Romanticism as such - most of them are already present, if only in embryonic form, in Bril's landscape fantasy. The reason for this is simple enough: the significant features of almost any European landscape have acquired complex metaphorical values that are closely linked to their equivalent in an unbroken tradition of literary description going back to the Classical world. In this tradition, distant horizons can symbolize unattainable ideals, while rivers and lakes reflect the moods of Nature, which can both nurture and threaten, both give life and take it away. Mountains reach up to the heavens, mountain-top dwellings bring humans closer to the heavens, and in the sky birds soar free between heaven and earth. But mountains are also dangerous obstacles in life's path, which is symbolized by tortuous roads and the travelers on them, often crossing man-made bridges over the rivers that Nature puts in their way as they climb towards their lofty destination. The distinctive stamp of successive ages and philosophies appears in the relative emphasis given to the ingredients of the conventional landscape. It is worth emphasizing the antiquity of this metaphorical vocabulary of landscape - poetic descriptions of mountain travel that would do justice to the fully-fledged Romantics can be found as early as the late Classical epic. [ 3 ] More generally, landscape portrayal has always been iconographic, at least in a weak sense of the term, simply because the natural world is vast, never entirely understood by human beings although they have always tried, and fathomable only in terms of selected fragments taken to represent the whole. Lastly, the importance of the 'imaginary landscape' as a genre cannot be underestimated: it demonstrates that conventional elements of landscape depiction can be recombined to produce a composition that is unconstrained by a particular view of a particular place, though not independent of topography as such, in whose techniques every element is firmly grounded.