building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

works of man are part of a much wider context. The disturbing expanse of felled
trees opens up to a view of a human figure lying on his side, gazing calmly towards
the peaceful horizon. The solitary observer contemplates the spectacle produced by
man and nature exactly as the shepherd used to contemplate Arcadia.
In the final analysis, Innes was capable of recreating the works of landscape artists
in the 17th and 18th century. Poussin and other artists before him introduced the
disturbing presence of a skull into delicate, picturesque idylls as a warning and as a
representation of the motto Et in Arcadia Ego which means “I, too [Death] am in
Arcadia”.
The train of this period enabled the town dweller to have rapid, direct contact with
faraway, uncontaminated areas.
Thus, the machine, and especially the train, does not clash with the pastoral ideal
and contributes towards the creation of what Leo Marx called the middle
landscape 151 .
“The railroad is the chosen vehicle for bringing America into its own as pastoral
utopia”. 152 The conquest of the wild lands, the feeling of being able to improve
uncultivated nature and develop an agrarian economy as Jefferson intended, fired
the myth of the pastoral model up to the 1850s, the so‐called Golden Day years.
However, society in the “middle landscape” had found a balance strongly oriented
towards technological progress, which undermined the bucolic idea of the
development of a rural nation. Not by chance, a project was implemented precisely
in the 1850s to create Central Park in Vaux and Olmsted, a perfect, middle
landscape at the service of the metropolis. In the meantime, “[...] no‐one, not even
Jefferson, had been able to identify the point of arrest, the critical moment when
the tilt might be expected and progress cease to be progress. As time went on,
accordingly, the idea became more vague, a rhetorical formula rather than a
153
conception of society [...]”.F
151 SEGAL, Howard P., (review by) “Leo Marx's "Middle Landscape": A Critique, a Revision, and an
Appreciation”, in SegalReviews in American History, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Mar., 1977), pp. 137‐150,
published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
152 MARX, Leo, The Machine in the Garden, Technology and Pastoral Ideal in America, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1979 [first ed. 1964], p. 225 (Italian translation by Eva Kampmann La macchina nel
giardino: tecnologia e ideale pastorale in America, Rome, Lavoro, 1987, p. 185)
153 Ibid., p.226 (Italian translation p.185)
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