38 Elizabeth Meyer
What had previously been an insider's relationship to a vitalize, organic world became an outsider's relationship to a rational, mechanized world. The inhabitant became connoisseur of visual scenery the Picturesque landscape- or an observer/measurer of quantifiable landscape variables. This emphasis on the visual and recordable reduced the landscape to two-dimensional surfaces, either the vertical surface of the picture plane or the horizontal surface of the geographer's map. Both facilitated the control of the landscape through abstraction, detachment, and distance This distancing was complicit with the belief that scientific domination of nature was a prerequisite of progress. Hence, Picturesque theory's reconciling role is a complex one. The idea of the landscape as a scene (versus the site as a place) requires the acceptance of two contradictory conceptual frameworks. The rational and the emotive conspire to distance the viewer (not the inhabitant) from the landscape(not the site) and the specific site from the codified Picturesque. Somehow, these contradictions-held in tension by early theorists of the Picturesque-were to become untenable to late nineteenth and early twentieth-century designers. Each succeeding treatise or design handbook seemed to extract more and more of the Picturesque's complexity until its meaning was reduced to little more than "a pleasing scene”.