History of garden art

The course focuses on the history, structure, typology, and use of open spaces in modern garden art. It considers not only the phenomenology of these places but also the landscape and topographical context of major garden concepts and their related image programs, which also encode the respective understanding of nature. While in medieval garden culture, a more theologically justified relationship exists in the sense of a representational function, the Humanism of Renaissance culture stylizes itself as a topos of ancient rural life. With the comprehensive paradigm shift from Baroque gardens to the natural style of landscape gardens, the iconographic orientation changes as well, and the ideal of the Golden Age is replaced by that of Arcadia. The image programs of landscape and nature are to be examined for their major connecting motifs and contextualized with the social and environmental history of the cultural landscape. Historical gardens, understood as archives of the cultural landscape, also consider the processes of transfer and transformation.