The main aim of the article is to historicise the view from above, which is recurrent when the ecological crisis is being addressed within contemporary art and visual culture today. The view from above may be considered a reasonable way to picture environmentally harmful land use and its consequences. In many ways this is perfectly justifiable. However, it also contains a few, but essential, problematic traits. The view from above – of deforestation, opencast coal mining and extreme urbanisation – corresponds with an ideal viewing position established in around the mid-19th century. This viewing position responded, according to art historian Jonathan Crary, to a need for objective perception. It allowed the observer to become supposedly detached, objective and disembodied, yet it also created a distance that was both physical and mental. The starting point in the article is that this viewing position cannot be decoupled from an anthropocentric understanding of the world, through which man has been assigned hegemony over other beings and has become the measure of all things.

This ideal viewing position, however, was not the only one developed during the 19th century. In both art and literature, a multisensory experience of nature and its landscape was articulated, one which anchored people to – rather than separated them from – their surroundings. The examples discussed in the text – J.M.W. Turner’s increasing disassociation from the picturesque landscape; John Ruskin’s exhortations to visit alpine regions, observe geological detail, and viscerally experience the landscape; and Leslie Stephen’s phenomenological experiences of mountain landscapes and his ability to erase the boundary between the Self and the mountain – all testify to a multisensory experience of the surrounding natural world. With Ruskin and Stephen in particular, what emerges is an individual connected and at one with – rather than separated from – the surroundings. Thus, a non-anthropocentric, holistic worldview was fashioned, one which we have reason to re-actualise today.