The Art Instinct_ Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution - Denis Dutton [10]
It is not only the presence of trees that can increase appeal but of trees tending to specific descriptions. High-quality savannas are characterized by Acacia tortilis, a spreading tree that branches close to ground. Tests by Orians and Heerwagen show a cross-cultural preference for trees with moderately dense canopies that fork near the ground common tree type in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting). Trees with either skimpy or very dense canopies were less preferred, were trees whose first branches were well out of human reach. A climbable tree was a device to escape predators in the Pleistocene, and life-and-death fact is revealed today in our aesthetic sense for trees and in children’s spontaneous love for climbing them).
Landscape preference is not always for wildness, a sense of virgin which can appear intuitively forbidding. In particular, the attraction of natural savanna-like scenes can be increased by signs of human habitation—control and intervention. The preferred areas of low grasses may appear to have been grazed by domestic stock. A road going distance can increase appeal, or a cottage with smoke curling from the chimney. Such post-Pleistocene signs of settlement or agriculture have become clichés in calendar or greeting-card art perhaps they seem to humanize a landscape, rendering it less threatening.
Responses to landscape also depend on possibilities for exploration orientation, “reading” a terrain. Experimental work by Stephen Rachel Kaplan shows that the most desirable landscapes have a moderate degree of complexity. Extremes of intricacy, such as an impenetrable forest or jungle, or boring simplicity, such as a flat, open plain, are undesirable sense of a natural or man-made path is the most common cue for along with a surface that is even enough for walking. Appealing landscapes frequently center attention, therefore, on a riverbank that disappears around a bend or a walking path that leads into hills or down fertile valley. Provision of a focal point or glimpse of a horizon the intelligibility of a scene, and hence visual appeal.
The Kaplans have also stressed a preference for an element of mystery, which they define as a feeling that “one could acquire new information were to travel deeper into the scene”—following the path or looking around the bend. They speculate that a sense of mystery implies longer-range, future aspect” of landscape preference. More than other component of landscape characteristics, mystery stirs the human imagination and as such is vitally important to landscape as an art form.
Finally, one of Jay Appleton’s most original hypotheses continues compelling: his idea of “prospect and refuge.” A fundamental in the attractiveness of a landscape, he suggests, is whether it the ability to see without being seen. Human beings like a prospect from which they can survey a landscape, and at the same time they a sense of refuge. A cave on the side of a mountain, a child’s house, a house on a hill, the king’s castle, the penthouse apartment, room with a view are situations with appeal (in fact, with a few exceptions, higher-elevation real estate for housing is more expensive worldwide). People prefer to observe an open but unfamiliar park from edges rather than stride immediately to its center. Protection afforded overhang of some sort (trees, cliff face, trellis, roof) is preferred, along with a sense of being “safe” from observation or attack from The most attractive landscapes tend to combine some of these in pictures as much as in reality. In fact, most landscape repre sentation in the history of painting places the implied viewer either some desirable vantage