Denis E. Cosgrove (1948--2008)

Progress in Human Geography 33(4) (2009) pp. 552–559

Makers of modern human geography

Denis E. Cosgrove (1948–2008)

Figure 1 Portrait of Denis Cosgrove (reproduced by permission of the Department of Geography, UCLA, and with the kind assistance of Chase Langford and Nick Entrikin)

© The Author(s), 2009. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav

DOI: 10.1177/0309132509334807

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Remembering Denis Cosgrove, Palladian geographer 2008 marked the 500th anniversary of the birth of Antonio Palladio, the famous Venetian architect. It also sadly marked the passing of my colleague and friend Denis Cosgrove, the geographer who has written so perceptively and innovatively about Palladio’s profound influence on the landscape of Venice’s terra firma, and on a whole host of other topics relating to landscapes, mapping, and the ways in which both reflect social and economic as well as physical and aesthetic processes. Denis will be remembered for his central role in creating a new cultural geography that aspired to engage with the humanities in general and the design professions, such as architecture, in particular. He will also be remembered for building important graduatelevel research groups in cultural and historical geography at Loughborough University and at Royal Holloway, London. One of his lasting influences will be the co-founding of the journal Ecumene (now Cultural Geographies). Most of all, he will be remembered as a Palladian person. My first acquaintance with Denis’s work was when David Ley suggested to me and Jim Duncan, when I was visiting at the University of British Columbia in spring 1979, that we both would benefit from reading a brief article that Denis had written in the Canadian Geographer (Cosgrove, 1978). This was possibly the first example of what could be called ‘cultural materialism’, in the Birmingham school of cultural studies sense of the term, that I had seen in a geography journal. But it also had a very specific quality that managed to encompass the best of the landscape tradition within geography. This was manifestly

not an example of the hunt-for-a-new-theorist sort of transfer of ideas into the field. Denis was always able to see the forest even when engaged in among the trees. Theory mattered only when it was of some use. It is as the English-speaking world’s most accomplished voice and authority on Italian landscapes, however, that I shall most remember Denis intellectually. His books on Social formation and symbolic landscape (1984; second edition, 1998), The Palladian landscape (1993), and (co-edited with Geoff Petts) Water, engineering, and landscape (1990) all contribute novel interpretations as to how Italian, specifically Venetian landscapes, were co-produced by material processes (from the physical character of the region to its politicaleconomic production) and the revolution in thinking about conceiving and making a landscape by Renaissance intellectuals and their patrons. The Palladian landscape is for me Denis’s most accomplished book, possibly because I have shared his interest in northern Italy but also because it is so readable an account of a crucial period in the overall transformation of Venice’s fortunes. Peaking geopolitically and economically, the turn away from the Adriatic and towards the interior on the part of a hitherto maritime-orientated elite marks the onset of a period of conspicuous consumption in the countryside at odds with the dominant maritime economy of the citystate itself. Denis provides nothing less than a geographical interpretation of a region of northern Italy which uses to great effect Palladio, the architect of great houses and estates, as a crucial figure mediating between the intellectual zeitgeist of the Renaissance,

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554 Progress in Human Geography 33(4) on the one hand, and, on the other, the wealth of Venetian merchants turning landwards in response to the changing geopolitical position of the Venetian Republic. Characteristic of the study is the equal attention paid to intellectual and spiritual sensibilities as to the economic, social, and environmental desires and constraints with which the Venetians had to contend. Palladio’s architecture provides the bridge between the two sides of the coin, as the story Denis tells moves between the imperial city of Venice into the countryside and the specific country estates designed by Palladio and then back to the city as its populace came to terms with a changing global cosmology and political order. One of Denis’s most lasting influences on human geography as a whole will be the way he tilted thinking away from such simpleminded oppositions as material versus ideal and physical versus human. The title of Denis’s essay in the collection, Water, engineering, and landscape, ‘Platonism and practicality: hydrology, engineering, and landscape in sixteenth century Venice’ gives some of the flavor of this essential contribution. Denis was always an ‘integral’ geographer for whom qualifying adjectives such as human or even cultural never seemed to really fit. A case can also be made that Denis’s later work on the general theme of mapping comes out of this earlier engagement with how maps figured integrally in the ambitious schemes of landscape planning in Renaissance-era Venice. But it as a person and a colleague that I will miss him most. I would want others to say that of me when I am gone. In Denis’s case it

is certainly a widely shared sentiment. During his illness many of us acquainted with him on a regular basis could not believe how incredibly well he bore the burden of knowing he had a poor medical prognosis. In fact, Denis had always had an inner strength of conviction and purpose that set him apart from most other people I know. Perhaps having grown up in Liverpool in a middle-class home and then gone off to and successfully overcome the academic minefield of Oxford University would put spine in anyone. With Denis, though, there was no bitterness or resentment about barriers overcome and mountains climbed despite the best efforts of others to get in the way. As Italians say, he was simpatico. He had a basic decency and dignity to him. He also had a charisma, which I know several of his former PhD students have spoken and written about. Denis was always quick with a joke, often selfdeprecating, and he never behaved in a pompous and self-important manner. Even though he only moved to California in 1999, he fit in immediately. Denis was West Coast from birth. His lack of stuffiness, his wisdom, his enthusiasm for what he did, his sheer likeability appealed to students regardless of their backgrounds or preparation. In a few short years he made a major impact at UCLA in his department and more widely across campus. Denis Cosgrove will be missed every day for who he was rather than for anything he ever wrote. Would that we all could be so lucky when we are gone. John Agnew University of California, Los Angeles

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Denis Cosgrove, humanist Denis Cosgrove was a foundational figure in what has been termed the new cultural geography. His passing symbolically marks the end of the first phase of intellectual ferment that provided alternative ways of thinking about cultural geography to that of Carl Sauer and the Berkeley School. It is common for important thinkers to have periods of intellectual breakthrough that reshape the landscape of a discipline, and then to build upon and consolidate the fruits of their insights. In my opinion, Denis wrote his most path-breaking work in the 10 years from the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s. He was a major figure in that heady time when so much of geography as we knew it was up for grabs. While geography had flirted with humanism before, most notably in some of the work of Sauer and of the humanistic geographers of various stripes from Meinig through Tuan and Buttimer, the mid-1980s saw the beginnings of a sea change within the social sciences as interpretive models from the humanities increasingly, although not without a bitter fight, displaced more positivistic models of explanation. This was, of course, the cultural or representational turn. Denis, a humanist at heart, had the intelligence and good fortune to be offering geographers a distinctive, humanistic, interpretive vision at a time when the intellectual winds of change were at his back. The particular brand of humanism that he espoused in the mid-1980s was humanist Marxism and his monograph Social formation and symbolic landscape (Cosgrove, 1988) outlined in rich theoretical and empirical detail a new way of thinking about cultural landscapes, about the relations between humans and nature and a new way of doing cultural geography. While no doubt in

Britain some geographers recognized the intellectual genealogy of his cultural Marxism, in North America it seemed a radically new departure from cultural geography as we knew it. In this work, Denis opened up a new political dimension for cultural geography at a time when most other Marxists in the field had little sympathy for culture and most cultural geographers showed little interest in the political dimensions of landscape. He offered up a new definition of landscape, not only as a material object, but as a way of seeing, a form of representation. The late 1980s saw him increasingly move away from Marxism or any perspective that was very explicitly theoretical. It was his belief that, theoryladen though interpretation necessarily was, the theoretical load should be light. He thus found himself at odds with an increasing number of cultural geographers who privileged theory, often of a very abstract nature, over the richness of the empirical world. Denis’s interest in geography, nurtured both in Britain and in North America, was always very close to the ground. He loved to walk and observe and to grasp the concreteness and intensity of the cultural landscape. In this regard, he found abstract theory to be too unworldly, too far removed from the materiality and messiness of a world he believed it was a geographer’s remit to understand. Yet, having said this, Denis was theoretically knowledgeable and discerning. Having helped to create a new, more theoretically informed cultural geography, he was of course interested in theoretical developments. He was far too thoughtful and intellectually selfconfident, however, to be interested in being theoretically fashion-conscious. He had a deep knowledge of the history of art, architecture,

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556 Progress in Human Geography 33(4) landscape architecture and cartography, and theories of vision and representation, and he put this knowledge to work with the lightest of touches in his monographs. To my mind, his greatest contribution to geography lay in his work on representation, from his early work on landscape as a way of seeing, which anticipated the representational turn within the field, through his monograph on Venice and the Veneto, to his last work on the representation of the globe – a study of the cosmos that befitted the inaugural holder of the Alexander von Humboldt Chair of Geography at UCLA. Denis moved between Britain and North America both as a student and as a teacher. He, perhaps more than any other cultural geographer, produced a successful synthesis of the two intellectual milieus. In his last years he was seen, particularly in America, as someone who could bridge the gulf between the Sauerian tradition and new cultural geography, a gulf which, ironically, he had helped to create. He managed this because he was synthetic and inclusive, open and generous rather than dogmatically partisan, and importantly because his vision of geography always contained an important environmental component. Denis’s intellectual legacy extends well beyond the borders of geography through his writings, the many papers he presented around the world and his founding editorship

of Ecumene (now Cultural Geographies). Outside geography, his writings have perhaps been most influential in landscape architecture where his books, from Social formation and symbolic landscape (1984) and The iconography of landscape (Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988) to The Palladian landscape (1993), are regularly used in graduate programs. His corpus is also rec-ognized as a distinctive geographical voice, in the history of architecture and the history of art. The latter was clearly evidenced in 2000– 2001 when he curated the exhibition ‘John Ruskin and the Geographical Imagination’ at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and in his selection to be the Getty Distinguished Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, a signal honour which, sadly, he was unable to take up before he died. Denis is one of the few geographers about whom it could be truthfully said that cultural geography would look significantly different were it not for him. Throughout his all too short and yet immensely productive career he devoted his energy to providing us with new ways of thinking about representation, new ways of reconceptualizing the landscape, and a model of humanistic scholarship that was at once theoretically informed and yet deeply engaged in the rich materiality of the world.

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James S. Duncan University of Cambridge

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Denis Cosgrove, European man of vision Denis Cosgrove changed the way we look at the world and at images. Of course before him – but not so long before – geographers were interested in maps and images. Deconstructing the map, denouncing its opacity and its manipulating power is something we have become used to. But the crisis of representation and the rise of critical theory led us to an iconoclastic suspicion, and we ended up demonizing images. Basically, our interest in maps and images mostly concerned their lies and we saw their instrumentalization as part of a process of domination. The recent development of nonrepresentational geography goes in the same direction (albeit for different reasons), considering that images are too rational and hence suspicious. Therefore we would be better off trusting and taking other types of apprehension and knowledge of the world into account. Denis’s The iconography of landscape (coedited with Stephen Daniels in 1988) renewed cultural geography and shows his early interest in images. According to him, we should not consider landscape as an artifact or a portion of space, but as a visual representation that can be understood using the methods of image analysis. The book shows how landscapes have meanings, and are, therefore, social products involved in social reproduction throughout history. The geographer’s hermeneutic work is to explore the many meanings laid in the thickness of the landscape. After proposing a new approach to landscape, Denis turned to images themselves in his influential paper on Apollo (1994) and in his subsequent Apollo’s eye (2001). In this work, he focuses less on images than on vision, showing precisely how vision is built through and by images. He considers them in a positive way, questioning neither the truth of images nor

their referential (in)accuracy but their effects and creative power. Instead of explaining images through conspiracy theories, he shows how some have the ability to produce meaning, transform our world-view and eventually the world itself. He demonstrates that these images, even if they seem radically new (such as the first photographs of Earth taken from outer space), belong to a genealogy and a history that we have to take into account if we want to understand the way they work. Denis was probably a historian more than a theorist – not because he did not like debating ideas but rather because he was fascinated by the world’s empirical richness. In that sense, he belonged to the humanities as much as to the social sciences, more to vita contemplativa than vita activa. His field was wide: from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, from landscape paintings to maps, drawings to photographs, prints to digital images. He explored the archive with rigour and erudition, with grace and conspicuous joy, searching for key moments or images. We feel the jubilation of a scientific mind in his writings, excavating an iconographic treasure, unknown and so precious to his demonstration and calling for a better understanding of our world. Maybe this is why his work is not a denunciation but a celebration of images, less theoretical than empirical. It could have been otherwise: just as postmodern scholars, because of their focus on theory and discourse, have neglected or rejected maps and images, Denis’s concern for them may have diverted him from theorizing per se – not that he did not use and elaborate upon theories but, rather, that he preferred to show them at work. For all these reasons, Denis’s work was much appreciated and read in the Francophone world and on the European continent

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558 Progress in Human Geography 33(4) and not only by geographers but also by historians. His iconography of landscape could only fascinate in a place where landscape historicity seems so obvious and the hermeneutic tradition is still so strong. His analysis of images and vision found a particular positive response among historical and cultural geographers, especially those with specific interest in representations. His writings did not adopt the denunciatory tone of some postmodern geographers which many French geographers find excessive and unhelpful. Denis has been criticized for focusing his research on white dead men, on ‘noble’ or ‘high’ culture (like painting), and not on today’s social and political important issues – but this ‘neglect’ (if it is one) appears much less shocking (and maybe even reassuring) on a continent where the heritage of the humanities is still very strong and present. French geographers are not so familiar with and convinced by French Theory, to whom Denis himself did not much refer. In this sense, Denis’s work was, perhaps, more mainstream in Francophone than in Anglophone geography. His classical dimension, which has do with his humanism, should not obscure the real novelty of his work, which, as far as the image is concerned, is to be found less in its theoretical or conceptual framework than in the approach he established during the 1990s. The subtitle of his Geography and vision (2008) – seeing, imagining and representing the world – describes the very essence of Denis’s analysis. Seeing refers to the senses, but as part of an active perception, voluntary and intelligent and in the context of a social and cultural program, including within it practices such as photography. Imagination allows us to see with our eyes shut, into the open horizon of our dreams, in a creative and potentially emancipatory way, but not without mobilizing the images that our culture and history has made available. Through representation, one can materialize and communicate images provided by the senses or through imagination, and so move from an individual psychological level to a collective social one. For instance,

the Earth was imagined before it was represented and even seen from outer space, and, when for the first time we saw it ‘for real’, we could recognize images we had seen before. Denis suggests thinking about the relations between these three processes through the concept of vision. His work on landscape and on images exemplifies and demonstrates the essential link between vision and geography. According to him, the importance of vision in geographical knowledge (broadly defined) is not anthropological: it is specific to the history of the western scientific project the first traces of which he finds in the Bible and in Greek texts and the full development of which begins at the Renaissance. For Denis, the aim of geography is to explain our relationship to the world, and in this way vision (including perception, imagination and representation) could be its very object. If his geography is a cultural one, culture must be understood as all the available images for a given society: seen, imagined, and represented. These images form an iconosphere in which we live and make sense, and the logics of which cultural geographers have to discover. If Denis’s work has been so broadly acknowledged and deemed influential, it is not only because of its interest and originality, but also because he applied his approach to a miraculously pertinent object: the Globe – which no geographer had previously thought to question in that way. His work on Apollo has the kind of obviousness which is the hallmark of scientific masterpieces. Denis modestly confided that his work applied only to the west, to which his knowledge was confined. But the global diffusion (for better or for worse) of western ‘vision’, on one hand, and the universal dimension of the Globe, on the other, opens the scope of his analysis far beyond western history. Maybe Denis’s humanism made him choose to focus his research on the Globe, and perhaps that is why his work is so appealing and inspirational. It is also the case that his work on landscape and vision make art history and geography, the humanities and the social sciences

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Makers of modern human geography 559 compatible – epistemologically, theoretically and methodologically. Denis opened the door to scientific reconciliation and to a richer world, where the geographer’s work is more relevant, and where we live better. Jean-François Staszak (with the kind assistance of Bernard Debarbieux, Juliet Fall and Ola Soderström) Université de Genève References Cosgrove, D.E. 1978: Place, landscape, and the dialectics of cultural geography. The Canadian Geographer 22, 66–72. — 1984: Social formation and symbolic landscape. London: Croom Helm. — 1993: The Palladian landscape: geographical change and its cultural representations in sixteenth century Italy.

Leicester: University of Leicester Press; University Park, PA: Penn State Press. — 1994: Contested global visions: one-world, wholeearth, and the Apollo space photographs. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84, 270–93. — 1998: Social formation and symbolic landscape (second edition with an additional introductory chapter). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. — 2001: Apollo’s eye: a cartographic genealogy of the earth in the western imagination. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. — 2008: Geography and vision: seeing, imagining and representing the world. London: I.B. Tauris. Cosgrove, D.E. and Daniels, S.J., editors 1988: The iconography of landscape: essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Cosgrove, D.E. and Petts, G., editors 1990: Water, engineering, and landscape. London: Belhaven Press.

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