Land | Sea | Sky

Autojektor, Basilisk, 2019

Well, the weeks drag on and I am starting to forget what hills, rivers and shorelines actually look like.  I keep wondering whether it is worth the health risk to hire a car or take a train to see something other than Victorian terraces.  But where would we go?  The virus has drawn attention to the way we pick destinations to experience and how much effort we are prepared to make to get to them.  Conversely it has shown how much interest there is in exploring the local streets - not exactly deep topography, but still a lesson in noticing previously overlooked details.  I'm sure I'm not alone in having made a short film based on these exercise walks - it seemed an obvious thing to do, even if I am no Jonathan Meades (despite insisting on posing in similar shades).

Lockdown walks near our home in London 

 

Mersea Island photographed by me in 2011

When I asked my wife where, in theory, she would most like to travel to outside London, she thought about it for a bit and then started reminiscing about Mersea Island.  I was thinking about this when I started reading a place-themed edition of the Moving Image Artists Journal, since Mersea Island is actually where the editors Danial & Clara have been living under lockdown.  How, I wondered, did these different filmmakers, with all the possibilities of mobility before coronavirus, choose particular landscapes to be the focus of their films?  A few examples from the thirteen articles:

• Estrangement and escape: The Super 8 artist Autojektor lives in London but made Basilisk in the Black Forest.  They refer to the story of Hansel and Gretel, lost in the woods, and write of being an innocent abroad themselves: 'as someone that had only been out of the country once before as a kid, it was easy to lose myself.'  The landscape became a creative space to escape from our permanently connected world.  'I would purposely get myself lost – I’d let my phone run down and I’d walk into the thickest woods and heaviest fog until I started to panic. And then I would sit and write.' 

• Memory and family history: 'Landscape is the lens through which I see the world, and the landscape of my lifetime is defined by loss,' writes Seán Vicary. His project, Chain Home West, involved 'active place-based research, that was often reflexive and sometimes even ritualistic or performative.'  The film's locations had personal associations and centred on his desire to seek out the site of a mobile radar unit that his father had been assigned to during the war.   

• Hauntology and psychogeography: For Headlands, Yvonne Salmon and James Riley headed to a hauntologically-rich location in North Cornwall: setting for a 1981 BBC Series, The Nightmare Man, and linked to a 17th century maid who is recorded as having encountered fairies (or possibly aliens).  On their filming trip, 'things happened which we found difficult to explain' and they returned from Cornwall 'not the same people who started out on the journey.'   
• Aesthetic choice: Peter Traherne's Atmospheric Pressure began with an attempt to make a film inspired by Gawain and the Green Knight.  In looking for locations he found a farm in Sussex with flooded fields and dead pigs.  'Needless to say, the location charmed me. Maybe not the carcasses but the texture of it all.'  The Gawain theme was dropped in favour of a film about 'The Farmer', although the real farmer's involvement was not straightforward: 'we could never shoot his scenes, for he must always be elsewhere.'  The film crew eventually left with 'dark images of a world of weather and animals; images that were densely uncommunicative yet surfeited with sense and matter'.

• Residency: finally, some settings get chosen because they are readily to hand.  Daniel & Clara write about filming with old VHS cameras on walks near their former home in Hastings, or assembling footage taken on a daily basis in Portugal to form a composite landscape film (see below).  They have also taken the opportunity to film when invited to participate in exhibitions or other projects.  In another article, Amy Cutler (whose curating I have written about here before) discusses her recent filmmaking and refers to an artist residency on the Finnish fortress island of Örö last winter.  

Sadly such opportunities are no longer available in 2020 (we were actually due to go to Finland this summer but have now cancelled the holiday).  Experimental films will have to stay closer to home.  Fortunately there is a lot you can do without leaving the house at all - I've recently been looking through old VHS footage from the 90s, exploring the landscape of memory and family history.  And I know from her tweets that Amy, confined to her flat, has been interrogating and repurposing old nature documentaries.  If it is possible to head out of London soon, perhaps even to Mersea Island, I will take the time to record some footage and keep it ready, just in case we have to go into lockdown again...   

Studio Diary Series: Land | Sea | Sky from Daniel & Clara

Mallorca

I was intrigued by a story in the Guardian the other day: 'almost a century after it was shot, a brief but beautifully made documentary that could be the first talking picture directed by a woman in Spain has been discovered after the forgotten and miscataloged footage was re-examined during the coronavirus lockdown.'  You can read the article for the story on the film's rediscovery and how they found out about the director, María Forteza. In the context of this blog, it was interesting to read the comments by archivist Josetxo Cerdán, that the film was 

'well shot and structured, and far better than most of the “aesthetic documentaries” of the time that were intended to show off the beauties of the countryside and of historical monuments. “They tend to be painfully dull: you get a monument, then another monument, then a mountain,” he said. “But this isn’t like that. You have the explanatory prologue and the little narrative of the boat arriving on the island and then the tour. The camera is also very well positioned in every shot.”'

That last point can be seen in the two screen grabs I have included here.  In the first shot, sheep move across the screen haloed by sunlight, and in the second a man walks down a narrow street of shadows.  Although music forms the soundtrack, you can imagine the sound of a bleating flock and the quiet of a town resting during the heat of the day. The film features music by Isaac Albeñiz (1860-1909), one of whose compositions for guitar is Mallorca.  Albéniz is best known for his Impressionist Iberia suite which is inspired by twelve places in Spain.

I'm not exactly sure what Josetxo Cerdán defines as 'aesthetic documentaries', although it is easy to imagine them.  By this time, the travelogue film, which dates back to the beginning of cinema, often resembled a clichéd series of moving postcards.  As the BFI website explains, they were often commissioned to promote tourism

'with bodies such as the Travel and Industrial Development Association (TIDA) in the 1930s, and with Tourist Boards from all countries and regions up to the present. The postcard analogy is therefore very apt, with films such as Claude Friese-Greene's The Open Road series (1924-1926) being largely a compilation of beautifully composed, and strangely familiar views, probably informed by a swift visit to the local gift shop.'

Mallorca has been dated to between 1932 and 1934.  I must admit I am unfamiliar with early 1930s Spanish travelogue films, so am not really able to contextualise it.  All I know about is the parody Luis Buñuel made, Land Without Bread, released in December 1933.  His controversial pseudo-documentary highlighted the poverty and disease of the inhabitants of Las Hurdes.  Graham Greene, who saw it in 1937, described it as "an honest and hideous picture", although the truthfulness of the film has long been disputed (see a Guardian article from 2000, 'Buñuel and the land that never was').  As I write this, the news is full of hideousness and it is tempting to keep to a diet of cultural escapism.  Travel looks impossible for some time and any footage recalling the simple pleasures of tourism now seems charming and nostalgic, no matter how clichéd it is.

Onuphrius in the wilderness

Master of the Darmstadt Passion, Saint Onuphrius, 1460

You could write a whole book about landscapes in depictions of the Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers (and I would read it).  A chapter on Saint Onuphrius would certainly include this painting, which I photographed three years ago in Zurich.  The desert here resembles a summer lawn and the little stream seems to provide just enough water to irrigate a few herbs.  Also in Switzerland, the Kunstmuseum Basel has an austere landscape from 1519 in which Onuphrius prays among bare red rocks and broken tree trunks. It was painted by a local artist, Conrad Schnitt.  Sadly there is no image freely available online - all I could find was one overwritten throughout with 'Alamy' to prevent copying.  I'm therefore only able to provide a tiny detail below, showing a distant building that I'm guessing is the monastery Onuphrius lived in before he headed into the desert.  In the Zurich painting there is a similarly-placed structure, which looks like a beautiful medieval castle standing out against the golden sky.

We only really know about Onuphrius from an account of Paphnutius the Ascetic, a fourth century Egyptian anchorite.  Paphnutius ventured into the desert to see what it would be like to be a hermit and there he saw a wild man covered in hair, wearing only leaves.  This was Onuphrius, who said he had survived as a hermit out there for seventy years.  They spoke until sunset and spent the night in prayer.  In the morning Onuphrius died and Paphnutous covered his body with a cloak and left it in a cleft in the rocks because the ground was too hard to bury him. 

Cornelis Cort, Saint Onuphrius, 1574

Source: Prints and Principles

  
You would think such an inhospitable place would always appear as a bleak-looking landscape in art.  But this isn't always the case, as can be seen in Cornelis Cort's print.  Here there are trees in full leaf and plentiful water in a wonderfully well-drawn river.  I have reproduced another print below by Albrecht Dürer.  It shows John the Baptist with a saint once thought to have been Saint Jerome, but as the National Gallery curators write, there is no lion to be seen and 'instead, the garland of hops points towards Saint Onuphrius.'  They note that 'the relatively densely worked areas in the centre of the print contrast with almost rudimental landscape in the background.'  However, for me, the distant vista is beautiful rather than 'rudimental', with its sense of space and light, and that sea fringed with trees and dotted with two small boats beneath waves of cloud... 

Albrecht Dürer, John the Baptist and Saint Onuphrius in the Wilderness, c. 1503-4

I won't try your patience here by describing lots more images of Onuphrius in the history of art.  There have been many icons in which his standing figure is placed in front of his cell, between hills or on a rocky plain.  Artists whose views of the saint are set in interesting wilderness landscapes include Lorenzo Monaco (c. 1370-1425), Francesco Morone (1471-1529), Jan van Haelbeck (1595-1635), Francisco Collantes (1599-1656) and Salvator Rosa (1615-1673).  I will conclude with just one more: a painting orginally made for the Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid.  The artist responsible for the figure of Onuphrius is not known but the painter of the landscape is unmistakable.  The life of a hermit in this sublime landscape looks almost inviting.

Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Saint Onuphrius, c. 1638

Source: Prado

Landscapes Drawn towards and away from the Sun

Thomas Kerrich, Diagram of Three Landscapes Drawn towards and away from the Sun, 1796

I just came upon a photograph I took of two remarkable drawings by Thomas Kerrich - I think they were in Patrick Keiller's 2012 exhibition, The Robinson Institute?  I last featured Kerrich here when I highlighted one of his views of the beach at Lowestoft, far more minimal than you would expect from a painting done in 1794.  These sketches come from around the same time: the cloud study is undated, but the three landscape views in circles were drawn around noon on March 18, 1796. Those three circular views could almost be conceptual art and remind me of photographs taken through Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels. The colour trials might be strange light effects somewhere beyond the stratosphere, although at first glance this image could be taken for fleeting impressions of pennants in a regatta and foam tipped waves.

Thomas Kerrich, Cloudscape with Colour Trials, c.1795 

The Tate has some other nice cloud studies by Kerrich - I have included one below.  The British Museum also has five of his sketches which 'record changes in the light and weather along a stretch of coastline near Lowestoft and Pakefield in Suffolk in August 1794.'  The curators suggest that 

'Their immediacy and freshness are due to the fact that they were done directly from nature, as indicated by the artist's notation; but also because as an amateur, Kerrich was not constrained by conventional landscape formulae and was free to explore weather and cloud effects with a simplicity and directness not equalled until the work of Constable nearly two decades later.'

Thomas Kerrich, Study of Two Clusters of Cumulus Clouds, c.1795

On a sunlit day

I recently read Jeremy Noel-Tod's excellent anthology The Penguin Book of Prose Poetry and it prompted me to get down a few books from our library and look up some examples of prose poems.  James Wright, for example: in Above the River: The Complete Poems there are several short prose pieces written during the seventies, when he and his wife were spending their summers in Europe.  I have chosen seven of these in order to quote brief imagistic landscape descriptions; but as usual when I do this kind of thing, I need to apologise for taking such descriptions out of context and failing to do convey the actual point of the poems.  Still, as I sit writing this in London under lockdown, these fragments of text are a pleasant reminder of the light and beauty of Italy, and an excuse to include again a photograph of the Colosseum from our 2014 trip.

The Colosseum, Rome

As Donald Hall notes in his introduction, James Wright's Italy was a literary place: the landscape of Catullus, Virgil and Ovid, of Goethe's Italian Journey, Keats and Shelley, and the American novelists - Henry James, Edith Wharton and William Dean Howells (who was 'the other literary figure born in Martins Ferry, Ohio').  Sometimes thoughts of Ohio comes to Wright when he writes about Italy.  In the poem 'One Last Look at the Adige: Verona in the Rain', he imagines the Ohio river once looking something like the Adige, 'to the people who loved it / Long before I was born'.  Verona was, for Wright, 'one of the earth's loveliest places' and I will begin and end my quotes there.

On a sunlit day its pink and white marbles glow from within, and they glow from within when it is raining.

- The Arena, Verona

In all directions below us were valleys whose villages were just beginning to appear out of the mist, a splinter of a church here, an olive grove there.  It was a life in itself.

- San Gimignano

The fragrance of the water moves heavily and slowly with mussel shells and the sighs of drowned men.  There is nothing so heavy with earth as the sea's breath and the breath of fresh wilderness, the camomilla fields along the shore.

- Bari

All over Apulia, currents of sea air snarl among winds from the landwise mountains.  I can see thistle seeds tumbling everywhere, but I lose their pathways, they are so many.

- Apulia

At noon on a horizon the Colosseum poises in mid-flight, a crumbling moon of gibbous gold.  It catches an ancient light, and gives form to that light.

- The Colosseum, Rome

It is only the evenings that give the city this shape of light; they make the darkness frail and they give substance to the light.

- Venice

Its shape holds so fine a balance between the ground and the sky that its very stones are a meeting and an intermingling of light and shadow.  At noon, even the fierce Italian sunlight cannot force a glare out of the amphitheatre's gentleness.

- The Arena, Verona

There is one of Wright's prose poems written in Italy that I particularly like, 'The Lambs on the Boulder'.  It is about Cimabue and the story of how he 'discovered' Giotto, then just a shepherd boy, scratching sketches of lambs on a rock.  I always like the idea of treating such fanciful stories seriously (a different example of this impulse is Eric Rohmer's serious treatment of pastoral in The Romance of Astrea and Celadon).  'One of my idle wishes,' Wright says, 'is to find that field where Cimabue stood in the shade and watched the boy Giotto scratching his stone with his pebble.'  He imagines the way Cimabue would have observed the boy:

    I wonder how long Cimabue stood watching before he said anything.  I'll bet he waited for a long time.  He was Cimabue.
    I wonder how long Giotto worked before he noticed that he was being watched.  I'll bet he worked a long time.  He was Giotto.
    He probably paused every so often to take a drink of water and tend to the needs of his sheep, and then returned patiently to his patient boulder, before he heard over his shoulder in the twilight the courtesy of the Italian good evening from the countryside man who stood, certainly out of the little daylight left to the shepherd and his sheep alike.
    I wonder where that boulder is.  I wonder if the sweet faces of the lambs are still scratched on its sunlit side.

Gaetano Sabatelli, Cimabue and Giotto, 1846

Springwell Quarry

I was thinking the other day about the old cliché that alien planets in Dr Who were always filmed in quarries.  Apparently David Tennant (the tenth Doctor) once said "I've been to many planets in the solar system, and you'd be surprised how many of them look like quarries in Wales."  There is, you may be unsurprised to learn, a website devoted to the locations of Dr Who up until 2012 and from this I have extracted and listed below the complete list of quarries. The most frequently used (four times each) are Springwell Quarry and the Gerrards Cross Sand and Gravel Quarry.  Springwell Quarry is in Hertfordshire and was first used in 1972 for The Three Doctors.  The locations website has a small photograph from this with the caption 'The Brigadier begins to wonder if he really is at Cromer ...'  They note that 'part of the quarry is now a landfill site, but a huge part of the quarry still exists, and has been left to its natural state'.  As for Gerrards Cross Sand and Gravel Quarry, this was first used for an episode broadcast four days before I was born, and most recently in 1984 for Attack of the Cybermen (their photo is captioned 'The Doctor realises gastropods are involved.')  The quarry is still in use.

The image above shows the first use of a quarry in Dr Who, for the 1964 series The Dalek Invasion of the Earth.  This story was mainly set in central London but John's Hole Quarry in Kent was used as the site of a Dalek mine. As noted already, the locations website stops in 2012 and the last quarry location it mentions is Aberthaw Quarry in Wales.  I imagine there have been more recent examples, but I've not been watching Dr Who since the Tom Baker era so can't really comment on this myself.  I see from Wikipedia (which has information on every series) that overseas locations are now used, but I hope they still manage to fit some quarries in.  Some of the recent Jodie Whittaker episodes were made in South Africa.  The Daily Express relayed the news that Jodie had 'opened up on what the experience was like. She told Doctor Who Magazine how the shoot in the warm country lasted three weeks. The actress said: “It was warm, so that was good!"'

Aberthaw Quarry (The Time of Angels)
Argoed Quarry (Utopia)
Associated Portland Cement Company Quarry (The Macra Terror)
Beachfields Quarry (Frontier in Space)
Beachfields Quarry (Planet of the Daleks)
Beachfields Quarry (The Invasion of Time)
Betchworth Quarry (Genesis of the Daleks)
Betchworth Quarry (The Deadly Assassin)
Castle Cement Quarry (Battlefield)
Cloford Quarry (Time and the Rani)
Cwt y Bugail Quarry (Rigcycle) (The Five Doctors)
Gerrards Cross Sand and Gravel Quarry (Attack of the Cybermen)
Gerrards Cross Sand and Gravel Quarry (The Dominators)
Gerrards Cross Sand and Gravel Quarry (The Tomb of the Cybermen)
Gerrards Cross Sand and Gravel Quarry (The Twin Dilemma)
Hanson's Aggregates (Binnegar Plain quarry) (Death to the Daleks)
John's Hole Quarry (The Dalek Invasion of Earth)
Little Rollright Quarry (The Stones of Blood)
Shire Lane Quarry (The Savages)
Slickstones Quarry (The Hand of Fear)
Springwell Quarry (Delta and the Bannermen)
Springwell Quarry (Earthshock)
Springwell Quarry (The Three Doctors)
Springwell Quarry (The Twin Dilemma)
Tank Quarry (The Krotons)
Trefil Quarry (Enemy of the Bane)
Trefil Quarry (Planet of the Ood)
Trefil Quarry (The Temptation of Sarah Jane)
Vaynor Quarry (Last of the Time Lords)
Warmwell Quarry (Survival)
Warmwell Quarry (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy)
Wenvoe Quarry (The Impossible Planet)
Wenvoe Quarry (The Satan Pit)
Wenvoe Quarry (Utopia)
West of England Quarry (The Krotons)
Westdown Quarry (Time and the Rani)
Whatley Quarry (Time and the Rani)
Winspit Quarry (Destiny of the Daleks)
Winspit Quarry (The Underwater Menace)
Worsham Quarry (The Android Invasion)
Wrotham Quarry (The Dominators)

Nature is not a place to visit

One use now made of writing on landscape that didn't exist when I started this blog is the Instagram Caption.  Many websites now offer Instagrammers advice on captions for their landscape photographs, because of course these images won't simply speak for themselves.  "Having a cool text will bring attraction to your photos and your social profile will gain popularity (that means more followers, likes, comments…)"  Some of the phrases suggested are inspirational statements with no definite author that seem to have arisen spontaneously from the internet itself, but others are real quotes.  Elite Daily, for example, has a Top Thirty for you to pick from, ranging from "Sometimes, all you need is a change in scenery" (no author) to "I seek to sea more" (which I guess I guess is just a bad pun?  Again, no author).  The actual writers in this list form a strange kind of pantheon: Confucious, Cat Stevens, John Ruskin, Dr. Seuss, John Muir, Mattie Stepanek and George Santayana.

Here are some other Instagram caption sites:

• Captionclick has "150+" quotes.  "Nature captions for Instagram are in demand as we live on the most beautiful planet i.e Earth.... We see nature, enjoy it and click pictures of every moment and post it on social media..."  They have a section of real quotes which includes some writers I have featured here on this blog in the past: Gary Snyder, Walt Whitman, Jane Austin (sic), Dante Alighieri and Henry David Thoreau.

• Quotesmaster boasts "200+" nature captions.  None of these are attributed to writers, although "Nature is not a place to visit it is home" is there and this is an unpuctuated version of the Gary Snyder quote provided on the other site.  Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the actual word "landscape" appears nowhere in their list.

• Sweety High gives just 13 examples but offers specific advice to Instagrammers. "For the pic of you looking happy and carefree among the trees," they suggest: "Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you" (Frank Lloyd Wright). Or, "for the over-the-shoulder image of you creating art inspired by the world around you", there is: "The richness I achieve comes from nature, the source of my inspiration" (Claude Monet).  And then there's Gary Snyder again: "For the shot of you camping out in your favorite place: 'Nature is not a place to visit. It is home' - Gary Snyder."

• I have embedded a video above with suggestions form a site called Travel+Leisure.  They recommend using their list of nature captions "so you can spend more time exploring our nation's amazing national parks, or chasing fleeting natural wonders — and spend less time brainstorming. That way, when the Wi-Fi signal picks up again, you can thank us for your most-liked nature posts ever." They have some different suggestions of writers, including Edgar Allen Poe, Sylvia Plath and Robin Williams ("Spring is nature's way of saying ‘let's party!").  They also suggest embellishing a John Muir quote: '"The mountains are calling and I must go.” ― John Muir *insert mountain emoticon*' [it occurs to me that the resulting post would provide an interesting semiotic combination of icon, index and symbol].

• These websites may sound a bit obscure, but lists of suggested Instagram captions appear everywhere. Good Housekeeping, a media institution that dates back to 1885, had some seasonal spring quotes recently, although Robin Williams didn't feature in their selection.  Dickens, Neruda and Lady Bird Johnson were on the list, whilst they also had songwriters like The Beatles and John Denver (though sadly nothing from George Formby's 'Springtime's Here Again').  

So do people on Instagram really use these quotes?  I have just checked and the asnwer is: Yes!  However, the quotes and authors seem mostly to be turned into hashtags.  There are 1,218 posts with the hashtag #natureisnotaplacetovisititishome and 5,802 with #garysnyder. Instagram actually allows you to 'follow' #garysnyder, along with the 'related hashtags' which are as follows: #sunrise_sunsets_aroundtheworld, #treesilhouettes, #worldonsunset, #skypainters, #firesky, #cloudscapephotography, #powerofnature, #sunsetsworld, #cloudshot, #mothernature.  Nothing here about poetry, Buddhism, or ecology - presumably the algorithm's idea of 'garysnyder' is based on what photographs people have captioned with his name.

I should probably point out that in their 11 tips for crafting the perfect Instagram caption, Hootsuite advice against the use of quotes of 'the cliché inspirational variety'.  They also recommend a special app for ensuring Instagram texts are clear and use simple words: "Readability is key, especially on a medium like Instagram where users scroll through content quickly. The Hemingway app will help you craft clear, punchy copy that draws in a scanning set of eyes."  This suggests that accompanying a landscape photo with a quote from, say, Gerard Manley Hopkins, would not be advisable.

In some ways the unattributed caption suggestions on these sites are as interesting as their choice of literary quotes (especially as some of them seem to have been put through a translation package to give sentences like this: "I receive more than I initially seek when I walk in the nature.")  Most of these lists include a section of 'funny' captions.  The IG site explains that "by using nature captions for Instagram in lighthearted tone, does not mean that you are not appreciating it. It is actually the opposite instead, you are so awed by the nature that it is reflected through your witty personality."  The first suggestion in its list is this: "You won’t experience nature on the internet."

Hope-of-dew the giants call them, power-of-storms the elves

Alvíssmál ('All-Wise's Sayings') is a poem in the Poetic Edda in which Thor outwits a dwarf called Alvíss, 'All-Wise'.  All-Wise is 'the image of an ogre' and as 'pale as a corpse', but otherwise he's a kind of Robert Macfarlane character, ascending from the underland to list and explain poetic words and phrases for natural phenomena.  Here, for example, is the exchange on clouds, beginning with Thor's question.

'Tell me this, All-wise - I reckon, dwarf,
that you know all the fates of men -
what those clouds are called which mix with showers,
in each world.'

'Clouds they're called by men, and hope-of-showers by the gods,
the Vanir call them wind-floaters,
hope-of-dew the giants call them, power-of-storms the elves,
in hell the concealing helmet.'

W. G. Collingwood's illustration of the poem: 

The god Þórr holds his daughter Þrúðr while conversing with the dwarf Alvíss

Here are some of my favourites from the rest of Alvíssmál - the elves seem best at coming up with memorable kennings.

Earth: 'splendid-green' (the giants), 'the growing one' (the elves)
Sky: 'wind-weaver' (the Vanir), 'the dripping hall' (the dwarfs)
Moon: 'the hastener' (the giants), 'counter of years' (the elves)
Sun: 'everglow' (the giants), 'the lovely wheel' (the elves)
Wind: 'the waverer' (the gods), 'din-journeyer (the elves)
Calm: 'wind-end' (the Vanir), 'day-soother' (the elves)
Ocean: 'rolling one' (the Vanir), 'liquid-fundament' (the elves)
Fire: 'waverer' (the Vanir), 'ravener' (the giants)
Wood: 'wand' (the Vanir), 'lovely boughs' (the elves)
Night: 'unlight' (the giants), 'sleep-joy' (the elves)

Some of these kennings endow nature with human abilities (weaving, journeying) whilst others (used elsewhere in the Poetic Edda) attribute elements of landscape to the human body: a beard is a cheek-forest, a head is a shoulder-rock. Humanity was created, according to the 'Seeress's Prophecy', from driftwood and people are often compared to trees. One hero, Helgi, is called a 'splendidly-born elm'.  Warriors are an 'apple-tree of strife' or a 'maple of sharp weapons'; the blood they shed is 'slaughter-dew'.  Animals too can be linked to landscapes - wolves are heath-wanderers - and places can be names for animals - one of the dwarf Alviss's phrases for the sea is 'eel-land' (I prefer the kenning for sea used in Beowulf - whale-road.)  

I have quoted so far from the translation by Carolyne Larrington (The Poetic Edda itself was compiled in Iceland in the 1270s, drawing on much older material).  There is an excellent online resource, the Skaldic Project, which has a list of kennings found in the wider corpus of Skaldic verse, including those The Poetic Edda (i.e. the Codex Regius). Some of the longer kennings can read like cryptic crossword clues or compressed landscape poems in their own right.  I will conclude here with three examples from the site's list of 'big kennings' - those with at least four referents.  'Generosity' is gold, arising in a landscape of green rocks or from the 'salty, cool meadow' of the sea, whilst 'poetry' is a powerful drink, found in a cave on the 'path of the snow-drift.'

Sea Pictures

On 5 October 1899 attendees at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival heard the first performance of Edward Elgar's Sea Pictures, with Elgar conducting and Clara Butt singing, dressed as a mermaid.  The five songs were each based on a nineteenth century poem.

'Sea Slumber Song' by Roden Noel

Sea-birds are asleep,
The world forgets to weep,
Sea murmurs her soft slumber-song
On the shadowy sand
Of this elfin land...

Roden Noel (1834-94) was a poet attracted to sublime landscape: he called an 1885 collection Songs of the Heights and Deeps. One of these poems is 'Suspiria' - a word that for the modern reader recalls De Quncey's Suspiria de Profundis and the Dario Argento films it has inspired.  Like the film Suspiria, it is full of colour and drama. 'Do you remember the billowy roar of tumultuous ocean? / Darkling, emerald, eager under vaults of the cave, / Shattered to simmer of foam on a boulder of delicate lilac, / Disenchantless youth of the clear, immortal wave?' (and so on).  A posthumous collection was called My Sea and Other Poems and its editor praised Noel's nature poetry: 'numerous are the poets, still living, who will babble to you of brooks and flowers, but few or none who care to fathom the deeper mysteries of nature'.  It was the sea, above all, that 'had an overmastering fascination for him' and his poems inspired by it ring with a 'grand yet subtle music'.

In Haven (Capri) by Caroline Alice Elgar

... Closely cling, for waves beat fast,
Foam-flakes cloud the hurrying blast ...

The second 'Sea Picture' uses text by the composer's wife, who had also written 'The Wind at Dawn', a poem she gave Elgar on their engagement and that he had set to music in 1888.  'The Wind at Dawn' gives a dramatic description of a day beginning: 'The wind went out to meet with the sun / At the dawn when the night was done, / And he racked the clouds in lofty disdain / As they flocked in his airy train...'  C. Alice Roberts was actually a published novelist before she met Elgar.  In his book about the composer, Jerrold Northrop Moore notes the landscape symbolism in her book Marchcroft Manor (1882), where 'the feminine presence of Nature is recognised as the initiator of insight.'  In it she describes the beauty of autumn days when 'the lights and shades which we see varying and changing in the sunlight, enter into and work strange changes in the lives of some of us as well as play over the surface of the waters and hills.'

Sabbath Morning at Sea by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The ship went on with solemn face:
    To meet the darkness on the deep.
        The solemn ship went onward...

This one can't be called a seascape poem. Harper's Magazine for some reason reprinted it a few years ago and explained that 'for a modern audience, this may still be one of the less approachable of her major poems. It seems a typical example of Victorian religious sentimentality – the theme is the approach of death, and on All Saints Day, the narrator finds herself on a ship at sea.'  Of more interest to readers of this blog would be 'A Sea-side Walk', published three years earlier in 1836.  Again, the mood of the landscape affects the thoughts of those walking through it: 'For though we never spoke / Of the grey water and the shaded rock, / Dark wave and stone unconsciously were fused / Into the plaintive speaking that we used / Of absent friends and memories unforsook...'

Where Corals Lie by Richard Garnett

The deeps have music soft and low
When winds awake the airy spry,
It lures me, lures me on to go
And see the land where corals lie.

Richard Garnett was a biographer employed by the British Museum - Constance Garnett, translator of the Russian classics was his daughter-in-law and Bloomsbury writer David Garnett was his grandson.  His poems are (perhaps deservedly) seldom read these days.  Looking through the contents list of his collection Io in Egypt a few titles look promising, but they are marred by stale and out-dated language. 'Summer Moonlight', for example, begins with clouds leaving the moon 'half pillaged' of her light, until suddenly she is revealed and lights up a cascade.  Then, in an effect quite hard to imagine, the 'lustrous foam' melts 'into the rosy fires that made / The brown demureness of the rocks superb.' Another poem, 'Fading leaf and Fallen-leaf', sounds almost Japanese in its theme, but I couldn't get beyond the opening lines: 'Said Fading-leaf to Fallen-leaf, / "I toss alone on a forsaken tree..."'

The Swimmer by Adam Lindsay Gordon

With short, sharp, violent lights made vivid,
   To southward far as the sight can roam;
Only the swirl of the surges livid,
   The seas that climb and the surfs that comb...

The final poem is by an Australian poet whose reputation has fluctuated over the years - Bernard Shaw mocked him but he is the only Australian in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.  The Queen (praised for her coronavirus speech yesterday) actually quoted him in her 1992 annus mirabilis Christmas message.  'The Swimmer' appeared in Gordon's second collection Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes, published a day before his suicide in 1870.  The phrase 'galloping rhymes' is an allusion to his career as a jockey.  At Blue Lake in South Australia an obelisk was erected to commemorate one of his horse-riding feats: 'This obelisk was erected as a memorial to the famous Australian poet. From near this spot in July, 1864, Gordon made his famed leap on horseback over an old post and rail guard fence onto a narrow ledge overlooking the Blue Lake and jumped back again onto the roadway...'  From a landscape perspective this monument may be his most significant contribution - few of his poems stop long to admire a view.

Stamp issued in May 1985

Sea Pictures itself is apparently not well known outside Europe, possibly affected by Elgar's Last Night of the Proms reputation, as an Arts Fuse article suggests.  I cannot comment on the music because it so far removed from what I normally listen to, but it certainly drew praise at the time.  'A certain amount of less favourable criticism was directed towards the poetry,' however, according to an ABC article.  'Elgar did seem to have sentimentally Victorian tastes when it came to lyrics.'  Of the five writers he alighted on, only Roden Noel could really be described as a landscape poet and his work is now largely forgotten.  It is strange how some creative figures have an afterlife only via another medium, painted by a great artist, say, or inspiring a character in a novel, or in this case, drawn into a piece of music that has carried this odd little collection of poems floating out of their original time like flotsam drifting on the sea. 

This grove, these fountains, this interwoven shade

Occasionally you read a sentence in an old book and you become suddenly aware of the vertiginous gulf of time separating you from its writer.  In one of Martial's Epigrams (4.25), written in 89 CE, he describes a region of northern Italy where he imagines spending his old age.  Its first line mentions the coastal town of Altinum and in a footnote to the poem, translator Gideon Nisbet says that its remains 'now lie a little inland.  After its sack by Attila the Hun in 452, its inhabitants, the Veneti, relocated to islands in the lagoon where their descendants would one day build Venice.'  So there is Martial, writing for a civilised and sophisticated Roman audience, unaware of the fate that would befall this town four centuries later, or the whole subsequent history of the rise and fall of the Venetian Republic.  Nor at that point could he foresee that he would spend his final days back in Spain, at Bibilis, the town where he had grown up.  Or that Bibilis too would disappear, to be replaced by a city the Moors called Qal‘at ’Ayyūb, the castle of Ayyub, and which we know today as Calatayud.

Sundial from St Buryan Church, Cornwall

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Martial dealt with the passing of time in a poem in praise of his friend, Julius Martial (5.20).  Instead of having to spend time on 'frowning lawsuits and the gloomy Forum' he imagines their days devoted to living well and spending time with books.  'As it is now, neither of us lives for his own benefit; each of us can feel his best days slipping away and leaving us behind.  They're gone, they've been debited from our account.'  That line - bonosque soles effugere atque abire sentit, qui nobis pereunt et imputantur - inspired a fashion for carving the phrase Pereunt et imputantur onto sundials. I've included here a couple of examples.  It is tempting here to digress onto the fascinating topic of sundial mottoes, but I will refer you instead to an Atlas Obscura article (here) and return to the poetry of Martial.
  

Sundial from Exeter Cathedral

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Even those of us who enjoy living in busy capital cities sometimes long for a more peaceful and beautiful environment.  Martial wrote (6.64) admiringly of the home of his friend Julius Martial, sited well above the streets of Rome, on the Janiculan Hill, a place 'more blissful than the gardens of the Hesperides'. Here is a late 19th century public domain translation of the next few lines:

Secluded retreats are spread over the hills, and the smooth summit, with gentle undulations, enjoys a cloudless sky, and, while a mist covers the hollow valleys, shines conspicuous in a light all its own. The graceful turrets of a lofty villa rise gently towards the stars. Hence you may see the seven hills, rulers of the world, and contemplate the whole extent of Rome, as well as the heights of Alba and Tusculum, and every cool retreat that lies in the suburbs...  

It is pleasing to think that Martial was able to enjoy a pleasant garden in his retirement.  The twelfth book of Epigrams was written in Spain and one of its poems (12.31) describes a retreat apparently gifted by his patron and mistress, Marcella.

This grove, these fountains, this interwoven shade of the spreading vine; this meandering stream of gurgling water; these meadows, and these rosaries which will not yield to the twice-bearing Paestum; these vegetables which bloom in the month of January, and feel not the cold; these eels that swim domestic in the enclosed waters; this white tower which affords an asylum for doves like itself in colour; all these are the gift of my mistress; Marcella gave me this retreat, this little kingdom, on my return to my native home after thirty-five years of absence. Had Nausicaa offered me the gardens of her sire, I should have said to Alcinous, "I prefer my own."

Scrub and quarry

Painting en plein air can bring many unexpected problems, from the bandits encountered by Thomas Jones to the waves that drenched Claude Monet.  The British artist Ray Atkins has not made it easy for himself:

'He sets up his boards – sometimes up to 10 foot wide, and weighing a hundredweight – in the landscape he's painting, tethering the work to the ground with rocks and leaving them in situ for weeks at a time. Obviously this method leaves the work at the mercy of the elements and of vandals - indeed, one of his monumental works of the Thames at Millwall ended up floating downstream after his secret painting place was discovered by local vandals.' (The Guardian, October 2012)

Wind is a particular risk if you're going to set up pictures on this scale - once one of Atkins' pictures ended up at the bottom of a quarry, as William Feaver noted in his catalogue essay for a 1996 retrospective.

Catalogue for the 1996 Ray Atkins exhibition at Art Space Gallery, Bristol

It would be easy to criticise this approach to painting as playing out the stereotype of 'man' against nature.  But William Feaver argued that

'there is no need to label Atkins 'heroic' in his persistence. The difficulties he makes for himself are essential to the outcome. Without them he would lack the resistance necessary for deep impetus. Painting on board rather than canvas gives him another sort of resistance. He dedicates himself to laborious cultivation; his is a kind of fieldcraft and makes him more the hunter-farmer than the painter of pleasing projects.' 

Feaver was impressed by Atkins's paintings of Cornwall, which were mainly done inland in an environment of 'scrub and quarry, land worked over and worked out.'  Scrapyard IV (1989) is particularly striking - 'crumpled colours dumped on the landscape'.

Painting with Ray Atkins, 2019

Eventually Atkins left Cornwall for the French Pyrennees, where he still lives and paints.  There is a YouTube video of him made in 2018 which shows a soft-focus sun-dappled landscape a world away from the docks of Millwall and scrapyards of Cornwall.  Here, near his home, you see him fixing up one of his boards in a field and beginning to work, before breaking off to enjoy the sunset.  As someone says at the end of the film, artistic fame may have passed him by, but at least he has been able to spend a lifetime painting.

Driving with Greenland Dogs

In these days of forced isolation, lots of people are turning to film streaming sites.  If you are interested in silent movies, I can highly recommend the Danish Film Institute's new site which so far has 64 good quality videos from the Golden Age of Danish cinema, including classics like The Abyss and A Trip to Mars.  The first Danish film, Peter Elfelt's Driving with Greenland Dogs (1897), can also be seen there in all its 40-second glory.  It is like a haiku in its brevity, single memorable incident and strong seasonal imagery.  Of course this film's original viewers would have been amazed by the way motion is captured, but viewing it now, what I like is the moment of stillness half way through, after the sled has left the shot and before it enters again from the other side (see image above).  For a second or so you just see a winter landscape with a line of trees like musical notes on the high horizon and fresh tracks written in the snow.

Another film you can see on Stumfilm.dk is Løvejagten (The Lion Hunt, 1907) made by Ole Olsen's Nordisk Film and directed by Viggo Larsen.  It is an extraordinary eleven minutes - a catalogue of tasteless moments that I can't really do justice to in a short description (do all hunters enjoy a sort of post-coital cigarette with the carcass?)  Attitudes change, but even back then the film caused an uproar because the two lions (bought by Olsen from Hamburg Zoo) were actually killed.  Even before these poor creatures and the film they starred in were shot, the Danish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was protesting in vain to the Minister for Justice.  The publicity just helped the film become a success. 

Most stories from the early years of cinema with external scenes were set somewhere easy to simulate with local scenery.  But Denmark is not well-endowed with jungles and so one was recreated in Jægersborg Dyrehave near Copenhagen, a beautiful deer park (as I recall from visiting it once) but not an obvious setting for a lion hunt.  There's something a bit Douanier Rousseau about the scenes filmed there, with unnatural looking tropical plants sticking out of woodland paths.  The shore on which the lions met their end (see above) doesn't exactly bring to mind a tropical beach either - this scene was filmed on the island of Elleore in Roskilde fjord and watching it you can almost feel the cold wind whipping off the sea.

I will end here with something more uplifting, two lovely tinted photographs which can be found in an article on Danish art cinema by Vito Adriaensens.  He speculates that early non-dramatic travelogue films (now lost) may have had 'atmospheric exteriors' resembling picturesque postcards,

'as could possibly be demonstrated by one of the two Nordisk films Fiskerliv i Norden [literally: Being a Fisherman in the Nordic Countries] (Viggo Larsen, 1906) or Ved Havet [literally: By the Sea] (Ole Olsen, 1909). These two fisherman tales only survive in a Swedish distribution copy in which the two were cut together, but what remains contains two beautiful tinted atmospheric inserts of a moonlit and sunset seascape though it is unclear in which of the two these are featured.'

This footage is not yet available on Stumfilm but perhaps under current circumstances the Danish Film Institute will be able to add more titles like this soon.

A Lane Near Arles

One of the many pleasures of Vincent van Gogh's paintings is the way he changes his style of painting at different places in the composition whilst retaining their overall harmony.  Here we have densely stippled foliage, a path defined by broad strokes of yellow and lavender, and a sky in which the zig-zag swirls of blue suggest the movements of a Provençal breeze. As you can see below, there are also blocks of pure colour - the green of the fields, the yellow of the house, the blue (!) of the tree trunks.  But it all works perfectly together. The same can be said of other landscapes from this time, like Farmhouse in Provence with its wonderful lilac wall and turquoise sky.  You imagine van Gogh looking at these landscapes and intuiting the phenomena before him - tree, path, sky - in such a way that the right means of conveying them in paint came almost instinctively.

Vincent van Gogh, A Lane Near Arles, 1888

Wandering on the Tiantai Mountains

Unknown artist, Jade Mountain Illustrating 

the Gathering of Scholars at the Lanting Pavilion, 1790
Source: Wikimedia Commons

This landscape in jade shows Mount Kuaiji (in present-day Zhejiang) and the celebrated Orchard Pavilion Gathering that took place there during the Spring Purification Festival on the third day of the third month in the year 353.  The event is most famous for a piece of calligraphy, the Lantingji Xu - 'Preface to the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion' written by Wang Xizhi (303-361).  He describes the location, with its

'mighty mountains and towering ridges covered with lush forests and tall bamboo, where a clear stream with swirling eddies cast back a sparkling light upon both shores.  From this we cut a winding channel in which to float our wine cups, and around this everyone took their appointed seats.  True, we did not have harps and flutes of a great feast, but a cup of wine and a song served well enough to free our most hidden feelings.' (trans. Stephen Owen)

Feng Chengsu, Tang Dynasty copy of Wang Xizhi's Lantingji Xu (now lost) 
Source: Wikimedia Commons

There were forty-two literati at this famous party and one of them was the poet Sun Chuo (Sun Ch'o, 314-71), whose fu 'Wandering on the Tiantai Mountains' has also been translated by Stephen Owen.  Here is an extract:

... I pushed through thickets,     dense and concealing,
I scaled sheer escarpments     looming above me.
I waded the You Creek,      went straight on ahead,
left five borders behind me     and fared swiftly forward.
I strode over arch     of a Sky-Hung Walkway,
looked down ten thousand yards     lost in its blackness;
I trod upon mosses     of slippery rock,
clung to the Azure Screen     that stands like a wall ...

Burton Watson has also translated this poem and writes of Sun's journey that 'as he proceeds up the mountain, the scenery becomes increasingly fantastic and idealized, until at the end he reaches a plane of pure philosophy, in which Taoist and Buddhist allusions are balanced one against the other.'

Dai Xi,  Rain-coming Pavilion by the Stone Bridge at Mt. Tiantai, 1848

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Sky-Hung Walkway referred to in this poem was a natural stone bridge.  It has often been depicted in art - The Smithsonian has a twelfth century painting of it by Zhou Jichang and they describe it as follows:

'The natural rock bridge spanning a waterfall is one Tiantai's most famous sights. According to legend, this arch is also a pathway to paradise where the five-hundred luohan, saintly guardians of the Buddhist faith, worship and dwell among magnificent celestial temples. Those who venture to tread this perilous trail, however, find that the bridge, which narrows to a width of several centimeters, is obstructed at its far end by an insurmountable block of stone.'

There are some photographs online of tourists admiring what I assume is this same rock bridge (e.g. on Wikimedia).  In the Japanese ink painting below by Soga Shōhaku (1730–1781) it looks much more spectacular.  In this dramatic scene a mother lion throws cubs over the cliff to see which will succeed in life by being able to climb back up to her.

Soga Shōhaku, Lions at the Stone Bridge of Mount Tiantai, 1790 

Source: Met Museum

An article by Zornica Kirkova explains that Mount Tiantai also features in a poem by Sun Chuo’s friend, the Buddhist monk Zhidun (314–366).  This 'opens in the idyllic setting of a spring garden, where the poet leisurely reflects on the passage of time and, “moved by things” ... lets his thoughts soar up to the sacred realm of the Celestial Terrace Mountain'.

The piping creek plays clear tunes.
Empyrean cliffs nurture numinous mists,
Divine plants, holding moisture, grow.
Cinnabar sand shimmers in the turquoise stream,
Fragrant mushrooms sparkle with the five brilliances.

In this poem, 'the mountains are envisioned as a sublime and sacred realm of purity and beauty.'  As with Sun Chuo, more realistic images - the cool breeze, the clear tunes of the creek - are combined with 'fantastic paradise depictions, pertaining to the theme of immortality (eternal divine plants, cinnabar sand, magic mushrooms)'.  It is easy to forget when you read poetry like this that it is a real mountain, so I will end here with an image from the internet taken with an iPhone 6S in June 2016, 1,663 years after the Orchard Pavilion Gathering.

The cliffs of Mount Tiantai

Source: Huangdan2060

White torrents and emerald depths

Because this blog focuses on the arts, I have rarely mentioned books by geographers, although it goes without saying that they often write beautifully about landscape.  In A Commentary on the Book of Rivers, Li Tao-Yuan (Li Daoyuan, d. 527) quoted no less than 437 different sources, but he also drew on his own memories and included the kind of description that would become common in future Chinese travel writing.  His monumental book was an expansion of an earlier author's Guide to Rivers, now lost, and it described 1,389 Chinese rivers (or 1,252 - I've seen both numbers quoted, but either way, that's a lot of water).

Li is regarded as the first writer to describe the famous Three Gorges landscape in detail.  For example:

'When winter turns to spring, there are white torrents and emerald depths; reflections appear upside down in the swirling eddies. Many oddly shaped junipers grow forth from jagged mountain peaks from which waterfalls plummet clamorously. Pure, verdant, lofty, flourishing—such qualities provide innumerable kinds of fascination. After a storm has cleared, or on frosty mornings, among forests chilled and streams desolate, the loud cry of a gibbon is often heard, prolonged and mournful. As it echoes through the empty valleys, its despairing wail lingers before disappearing. So the fishermen sing,

Of the Three Gorges in Eastern Pa
   Shaman Gorge is the longest.
Three cries of the gibbon
   and one's clothes become drenched with tears.'

Xie Shichen, Clouds and Waves at the Wu Gorge, 1368

Source: Wikimedia Commons

This translation is from Richard E. Strassberg's Inscribed Landscapes, a wonderful book I have quoted from here before.  Strassberg also includes Li's descriptions of two other landscapes.  Meng's Gate Mountain (Meng-men-shan) straddles the Yellow River and Li describes its slanting cliffs with giant boulders poised to fall, white mist on the water where currents collide and colossal waves that 'multiply and collapse all the way down to the outlet.'  Lotus Mountain (Hua-shan) is one of the Five Sacred Mountains of China and Li describes climbing it: ascending through junipers and past shrines and rock altars until, at the summit, he is able to see two sacred springs, one called Reed Pond that flows westwards, and the other, Supremely Exalted Spring, flowing east.

An artificial island on the Arno

Netherlandish Master, after Jacques Callot, 

The Mock Battle Between the Weavers' and Dyers' Guilds

on the Arno in Florence on 25 July 1619 (detail), c. 1620

In seventeenth century Florence there was an annual festival in which the Weavers' and Dyers' Guilds fought for possession of an artificial hill, built in the middle of the river.  This painting of the event, in Frankfurt's Städel Museum, was based on an etching by the French artist Jacques Callot (1592-1635).  Several museums have copies of Callot's print, which was made in the form of a fan.  The Grand Duke, Cosimo II, had these fans made before the event and distributed to the spectators.  It would be good if one of the people shown in the foreground of this picture could be seen holding one of those fans, but I can't see one. Callot may have included one though in his original design, as a Courtauld blog post about the print explains.

From a landscape perspective I would love to know more about this artificial island.  Who designed it?  How was it made?  It looks pretty big.  How was it anchored so that it didn't drift away or collapse under the weight of the battling weavers and dyers? An earlier artificial island on the Arno, complete with a temple, had been constructed as part of the extravagant wedding celebrations for Cosimo and Maria Magdalena on the 18 October 1608.  It was the stage for a re-enactment of Jason and the Golden Fleece and you can see it in the print below by Matthaeus Greuter (1564–1638).  But this doesn't look as impressive as the one built in 1619, which resembles a real landscape.  Did this hill only look real from a distance?  Were actual trees used?  I imagine a group of picnickers rowing out to enjoy this temporary idyll on the night before the battle.

Has anyone done a study of such islands?  They seem to have featured prominently in various European festivals and royal pageants.  In 1638, for example, another Medici, the Queen of France, was led in procession to an artificial island in the Amstel River for a display of dramatic tableaux. In England, Queen Elizabeth was entertained at Kenilworth Castle in 1575 with a famous display that included a floating island with the Lady of the Lake attended by nymphs (these festivities may have inspired Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream). There is an interesting description on the Brown University site, of one of these islands, made for the marriage of Louise-Elizabeth of France and Philip, prince and grand admiral of Spain, in August 1739.  It was not designed to resemble a natural island; this was pure stagecraft - it even contained a salon for an eighty-piece orchestra.

'The structure was suspended on two large boats which were concealed beneath the artificial rock outcroppings along the island’s perimeter. ... The citizens of Paris would instantly recognize that the island was not part of the natural landscape, but an illusionary construct on the river’s surface. However, rather than detracting from its ability to awe, in fact it added to the island’s captivating quality. The entirety of the structure was created for the conspicuous consumption of the spectators.'