Whether the aesthetic resides mainly in the response of the experiencer or mainly in the qualities of that which is experienced is a complex question within aesthetics. Historically the shift has been from thing to person with an important turn taking place during the late seventeenth to early eighteenth century.

Definitions of landscape vary and some play on the relationship to landscape painting or the scene for a painting from the Dutch landschap , which became Anglicised as landskip. However, the root word for both the Dutch and English is the German Landschaft, which is more directly translated as region, rural jurisdiction or system of rural spaces (Muir 1999: 3). Thus it carries the sense of a vaguely bounded whole that includes the landform and the inhabitants’ particular way of organising and interacting with the landform. (This concept of the landscape as ‘lived in’ rather than simply as ‘viewed’ becomes important in understanding contemporary landscape aesthetics.)

In the West our past means that we currently tend to appreciate landscape under three distinct aesthetic categories: the beautiful, the sublime and the picturesque.

Beauty as a distinct category (rather than its commonplace usage for anything pleasing) can be thought of as the quality of those things that please due to their regularity, smoothness, tranquillity and unity, as well as a certain smallness of scope. In landscape terms the pastoral equates with the beautiful. A traditional pastoral landscape is one that has close-cropped grass, calm water, some variety of plants and trees but nothing abrupt, chaotic or demanding. Historically such landscapes were imagined as inhabited by figures from classical myths or allegory. Parkland created in a pastoral style often included small classical buildings – follies that looked like temples in the distance. The landscapes of William Kent and Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown are pastoral in style.

The sublime in landscape is more challenging and appears as a positive aesthetic category in the eighteenth century (Nicolson 1959).The sublime relies on an emotional response to the grandeur of features such as rugged mountains, the tumultuous water of thundering rapids or huge cascades, vertiginous cliffs and the atmospheric effects of thunder and lightning or swirling fog (Brady 2013).The term sublime can also be accurately used for other landscapes that are challenging in terms of human flourishing, for example, deserts or arctic ice floes (Tuan 1995). Sublime landscapes are typically vast and irregular; they create a sense of awe in the person experiencing them. The sublime as an aesthetic response was initially understood as a pleasurable feeling that arose from being close to danger but in a place of safety (Burke 1757). The frisson of danger adds to our pleasure in the landscape experience. If the feeling moves into real danger, then the sublime retreats.

For some Romantics the awe felt in such places connects to the power of God as a creator, for others to the power of Nature. With industrialisation came a new dimension to the possibilities of sublime experience.Vast industrial machines of great power and noise could be pleasingly fearful in a similar way. More recently the spectacle of environmental destruction has been viewed through the sublime lens (Peebles 2011; Kover 2014).

The picturesque as a specific aesthetic category arises out of a blending of the pastoral and the sublime. It takes the craggy irregularity of the sublime into the smaller more intimate compass of the pastoral. Or, as an early proponent, Gilpin, said, it is: ‘Beauty lying in the lap of horror’ (1786: 22). Distinct elements of the picturesque are its endorsement of variety, intricacy, wildness and decay (Brook 2008: 112). In eighteenth-century park design, the picturesque rejected both the order of formal symmetry and the quasi-natural of the designed Brownian pastoral (Price 1842: 187). In the picturesque landscape aesthetic pleasure comes from the wildness of such things as overgrown walls, gnarled roots and rustic paths. The smaller human scale is also reinforced by the inclusion of small-scale agriculture (Watelet 1774).

Evolutionary lens

The ‘savannah hypothesis’ (Orians 1986) or ‘prospect refuge theory’ (Appleton 1990) both point to an inbuilt preference for that which would have sustained our primeval ancestors. Thus a landscape form that affords somewhere to hide and look out from is the kind of landscape in which we feel safe (Gartersleben and Andrews 2013). The sublime tests our limits and introduces some excitement, the pastoral feels safe but can be boring and the picturesque strikes a balance between the two. Moreover, current research in human well-being also emphasises the role of nature or at least some living plants in urban environments (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989).

– criticism: The ‘savannah hypothesis’ (Orians 1986) or ‘prospect refuge theory’ (Appleton 1990) both point to an inbuilt preference for that which would have sustained our primeval ancestors. Thus a landscape form that affords somewhere to hide and look out from is the kind of landscape in which we feel safe (Gartersleben and Andrews 2013). The sublime tests our limits and introduces some excitement, the pastoral feels safe but can be boring and the picturesque strikes a balance between the two. Moreover, current research in human well-being also emphasises the role of nature or at least some living plants in urban environments (Kaplan and Kaplan 1989).

Embodiment

The model of participatory aesthetics leads us away from aesthetics as concerned with a distanced and wholly disinterested perspective and into something embodied and connected to a realm of meaning and relationships that are part of the lived world. This would seem to prioritise the perceptions of those engaged in that deeper relationship, but there might still be good reason to want to interrogate those lived responses and identify the aesthetic within them.

Conclusion

Landscape is about wholes and the aesthetic experience of landscapes requires that we consider the place – that vaguely bounded area – as a whole. We might be attracted to detail or particular features but the feeling of the whole is our focus. Our thoughts can reach further to the context of that landscape in history and in the wider environment through many channels of information. Our thoughts can also sift the emotions, responses, impressions, and intuitions that arise in order to arrive at considered aesthetic judgements, which can then be discussed and debated. However, none of this can begin before the experience itself; experience is the bedrock of the aesthetic and without it we just recycle the thoughts of others and never enter the aesthetic field.