The cover chosen for the Paladin publication in the 1970's was the painting of The Battle of Alexander at Issus (German: Alexanderschlacht) is a 1529 oil painting by the German artist Albrecht Altdorfer (c. 1480–1538). Altdorfer was a pioneer of landscape art and a founding member of the Danube school. It portrays the 333 BC Battle of Issus, in which Alexander the Great secured a decisive victory over Darius III of Persia. The painting is widely regarded as Altdorfer's masterpiece, and is one of the most famous examples of the type of Renaissance landscape painting known as the world landscape, which here reaches an unprecedented grandeur.
The LODE and Re:LODE projects and Re:LODE Radio are, in art historical terms, and in many ways, an echo of this type of world landscape. The purposes and methods may be very different, but the atmosphere and sense of crisis at a local and global scale are shared across nearly 500 years.
The world landscape, a translation of the German Weltlandschaft, is a type of composition in Western painting showing an imaginary panoramic landscape seen from an elevated viewpoint that includes mountains and lowlands, water, and buildings. The subject of each painting is usually a Biblical or historical narrative, but the figures comprising this narrative element are dwarfed by their surroundings.
The German term Weltlandschaft was first used by Eberhard Freiherr von Bodenhausen in 1905 with reference to Gerard David, and then in 1918 applied to Patinir's work by Ludwig von Baldass, defined as the depiction of "all that which seemed beautiful to the eye; the sea and the earth, mountains and plains, forests and fields, the castle and the hut".
In Altdorfer's work the global scale shown in the detail above frames the action at a particular location, in this case a battle between empires rather than the hermit's hut.
The scope of Norman Cohn's book The Pursuit of the Millennium has this kind of scale, albeit in a world where it is Europe and its Asian adversary that are the real and imagined world pyscho-geography. However, it is worth commenting on the fact that 37 years before Altdorfer completed his work Colombus had begun the "discovery", from a European standpoint, a "New World".
Referencing psychogeography with world landscape rather than, or as well as urban landscapes, has its place in the fact that one of the many people influenced by Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium include the French Marxist philosopher and writer Guy Debord, who considered the chiliastic cults discussed by Cohn something of a model for the Situationist International.
Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."
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