Spatial Strategies of Self-Representation in the Habsburg Low Countries. The Nobility and the Invention of the Well-Ordered Landscape

The project aims to study the immediate environment of the non-urban noble residence in the Low Countries, from the advent of Habsburg rule (1482) to the end of the Spanish Period (1712), using insights and methods from landscape architecture, history of landscape painting and cartography (Historic GIS). On the one hand, this is a built environment of functional buildings supporting a noble lifestyle (from home farm to stables) and of satellite residences (e.g. for the dowager), hunting pavilions and leisure houses. On the other, this is a designed landscape with, from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, rigorously geometrical features such as tree-lined avenues expressing the owner’s status. The well-ordered landscape constitutes an essential, though mostly unrecognized, part of the early modern nobility’s strategies of self-representation, or “vivre noblement”.

Keywords:Landscape architecture, Early modern history, Architectural history, Garden history, Heritage, Court history

Disciplines:Other history and archaeology not elsewhere classified, Architectural history and theory, Landscape architecture not elsewhere classified, Landscape architecture history and theory