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has also taken place. "Its shock waves? are felt perhaps more keenly now in the age
of networks and virtual communication than ever before.
In light of the above, it is expedient to discard the idea that landscapes develop.
Landscapes change and, in parallel, so do our thoughts on them. We should also
set aside the evolutionist idea which ranks the guality of landscapes from primitive
to advanced. This mentality is not alien to the scientific, and especially the agrarian
and technical scientific approach, if one takes development as a synonym of a
change in guality towards perfection (see Sárkány — Somlai 2004). Instead of
development, one may speak of the polyphony of landscapes, of permanently
changing spatial structures appearing within the minds of individuals and large
collectives, which show immense variety when placed side by side both
synchronically and also diachronically on the “timeline of history”.
Thus, landscape was not brought about by Dutch landscape painting; it merely
mediated the ideas about it in a new medium (cf. Radnöti 2022). True, landscape
came to the foreground of ideological systems, fashions and policies in which it
was taken out of its physical reality and began to “behave” in an abstract manner.
It found a market for itself. A special, important aspect of this is implied in the
identification of nations with certain landscapes. Besides languages, history, music,
and costumes, landscapes can also have a national character, so much so that over
the centuries, some have even become brands. Switzerland became identified with
the Alps, Hungary with the puszta, Scotland with the foggy barren highlands.
These are majestic areas of the presence of humans and nature, but to make them
successful, one had to “fit” history to them. It had to remain unsaid that in the
Middle Ages the Alps were the realm of ice and snow where people did not long
to go, but rather fled from it. (On the “discovery” of the mountains: Albert 1997:
17-23.) On the Hungarian Great Plain, the disastrous devastations in the age of
Ottoman rule cleared the way for the spread of the image of the puszta devoid of
villages, with wild shepherds and melancholy inns. The dearth of the land in the
19" century almost perfectly eradicated its last remaining requisites (see Máté
2019a). The enclosures in the Scottish territory in the 18" and 19" centuries
considerably redrew the earlier landscape, replacing the mosaic-like landscape with
the planned agrarian areas of large estates. The spaces that were left out of the
transformed cultivation with or without reason became promoted to an imaginary,
exalted world full of good virtues (“Highlandism”) (Withers 1999; Whyte 2002:
75-79). What is common to these examples? Travelers, artists, and landowners
created them and fitted them into narratives about European nations, and in this
way they became reflections of a certain Zeitgeist.
Landscape is thus a timeless, universal category, which is not identical with
space; its meaning changes in parallel with human society, economy and thinking.
In Richard Whyte’s view, although landscapes are productions of the web of
relations between the physical surroundings and human society, they are also social
constructions. They cannot be correctly understood, unless they are examined in
their natural and cultural contexts (Whyte 2002: 7).!
' On the artistic concept of the landscape, see the chapter, Nature, art, activism.