著者

蜷川 順子

出版者

関西大学東西学術研究所

雑誌

関西大学東西学術研究所紀要 (ISSN:02878151)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.41, pp.3-22, 2008-04-01

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A View of Delft preserved at the Mauritshuis in The Hague is well known as a rare cityscape by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), who otherwise depicted mostly interior everyday life. Kenneth Clark, the English art historian who published the Landscape into Art in 1949, described it as "like a postcard" to underline its property as the truth of the total view, commenting that no particular part would catch beholders' eyes. On the other hand, Marcel Proust, the French novelist who inserted a scene of Bergotte's death in front of the painting into A la Recherche du Temps Perdu (1913-27), emphasized the beauty of a particular part of yellow wall in the composition. It makes us notice that the very source of light exists out of the painting and then that the tower of the New Church of Delft is also illuminated by the light in the center of the city. As the tomb of Willem of Orange the Silence is located in the church, some scholars indicate that the connection between the city and the house of Orange is herewith intentionally underlined. Therefore, we may infer that there is a twofold aspect of the modern for the Europeans: the uniform or scientific view and the particularized or intentional view on the surroundings. The author is to compare the modern imagery with the medieval one in order to make the former clearer. Concerning the uniform or scientific view, the history of the cityscape of Jerusalem is most worth noticing. Jerusalem became the prototype of European or Christian cities since the publication of De Civitate Dei by Augustine in the 5th century. It gave an ideal imagery of city, which should be constructed from artificial matters by the efforts of devotional people. It contrasts to that of nature, including the nature in the human being, which had only negative meaning for the early medieval Christians. The images of medieval city were filled with buildings, or churches, within the city wall, while surrounding nature of the city had gotten to be depicted or appropriated little by little in diverse images towards the era of Renaissance. The landscape, the original meaning of which is considered to be the issue of property, was depicted as scenery of nature where people were laboring, enjoying, observing etc., viewed from the city or the owner’s house. The cityscape of Jerusalem was changed in the fifteenth century from the older type to the new one, which became surrounded by nature or filled with greens. When both the city and the nature of surroundings were viewed with the same appropriation, people obtained the germ of the linier perspective, the system of scientific view, namely the uniform view over the world. The linier perspective, on the other hand, proscribed the position of a viewer, which could in its turn related to the particularized or intentional view on the surroundings. In the sixteenth century, for example, when God was far less visualized in the way with similitude, the bird's-eye perspective found among the so-called world landscape seems to indicate the very place of the invisible God. It was also the age of discovery for the Europeans and both the geography and the topography were rapidly developed with map- and landscape-making relating each other. In the seventeenth century, lots of landscapes of non-European regions were made on the model of drawings made by VOC people etc., reflecting diverse intentions of image makers. These images aroused the concerns of beholders toward the depicted imagery of foreign places.