Joanna Paul (Open University)
Ovidian influences on landscape gardens in the Renaissance and neoclassical eras are well understood: from the Villa d’Este to Stourhead, Ovid’s myths inspired various features of many formal landscapes, and helped to structure the visitor’s experience of the space and their reading of its neoclassical pretensions. Yet less attention has been paid to the 20th- and 21st-century gardens in which Ovid remains a powerful influence, and with quite different effects. This paper examines the work of the Scottish poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925-2006), arguing that he uses Ovid to propose a relationship between humankind and nature that is more subjective than that imagined by earlier gardens, more open to contestation, and more fraught with threat.
Receptions of Ovid permeate the garden at Little Sparta, Finlay’s home in Scotland, from silhouetted sculptures of Apollo and Daphne, to a Temple of Apollo. I focus on two examples which foreground the humility (or lack thereof) of the human subject in the face of divine and natural forces, and the human’s eventual integration into (or subjugation by) the natural landscape: the Temple of Philemon and Baucis (1984), with its trunk-like column and gilded roof-tiles, cleverly captures Ovid’s myth; while the reflecting pool in the Hortus Conclusus (2009) evokes Narcissus but (through its inscription) redirects the viewer’s attention away from the self, to the clouds above.
Two examples from projects outside Little Sparta further demonstrate Finlay’s preoccupation with Ovid. The Errata of Ovid (1991, Stockwood Park) inscribes metamorphoses onto wall plaques (‘For ‘Daphne’ read ‘Laurel’), encapsulating the transformation from human to natural form while inviting the reader’s reinterpretation, even correction, of Ovid’s poetry (Eyres 2009: 129). In an unrealised project outlined in Finlay’s The Monteviot Proposal (1979), plaques on trees would commemorate lovers famous for inscribing their names into bark, including Oenone, the subject of Heroides 5.
Discussion of these Ovidian landscape/garden features will elucidate the complexities of the relationship between humankind and nature, and art and nature, that Finlay reads into the Latin text, and reinscribes in his own natural setting. Two concerns dominate my argument: firstly, I argue that Finlay uses Ovid as a component in his Arcadian vision, which is no rural idyll but a landscape in which threat and death lurk close to the surface (Hunt 2008: 94-99). Secondly, I examine the implications of the impulse to write onto the landscape itself: Finlay’s inscription of Ovid (and numerous other texts) throughout his ‘reading gardens’ (Pagán 2015: 147) may be read as a bid for control over the natural world but it is also an act of communication, a call to arms on behalf of a vulnerable landscape, in the same vein as the eco-warrior graffiti and landscape art created by Nick in the Ovidian-hued The Overstory (2018), or the fragmentary inscriptions of the Metamorphoses in the rocks and trees in Christoph Ransmayr’s The Last World (1991). Acutely aware of the threat that humankind poses to the natural world, Finlay found an ally and an inspiration in Ovid.