The English 18th century is the century of the landscape. The wide-ranging debate on the aesthetics and positioning of garden art questions the problem of the shaping of nature and its representation. Natural landscape and pictorial landscape share the same problem: which mimetic principle should they be inspired by? What does it mean to imitate nature? Sympathy is called upon to answer these questions, a category that expresses a principle of synthesis of differences, of unity in the multiplicity, which lends itself well to replacing the Aristotelian-derived mimesis on which the unity of representation is based in the modern. Through sympathy it is then a question of interrogating relationality as such, that capacity of nature to express interconnection that will be at the heart of Alexander von Humboldt’s ecology.
Keywords: Sympathy, Landscape Garden, Landscape Painting, Mimesis, Nature.