FIGURE 1.

Two types of explicit (verbal and visuospatial) space representation: example of the Fontainebleau forest. Oil painting La Forêt de Fontainebleau, par Camille Corot (1833) – Reproduced from National Gallery of Art, Washington DC with permission. Verbal description (in French and in English) by Gustave Flaubert (1821/1880) in the novel “la vie sentimentale” 3ème partie chapitre III, page 483. “La diversité des arbres faisait un spectacle changeant. Les hêtres, à l’écorce blanche et lisse, entremêlaient leurs couronnes; des frênes courbaient mollement leurs glauques ramures; dans les cépées de charmes, des houx pareils à du bronze se hérissaient; puis venaient une file de minces bouleaux, inclinés dans des attitudes élégiaques; et les pins, symétriques comme des tuyaux d’orgue, en se balançant continuellement, semblaient chanter”. “The variety of trees furnished a spectacle of the most diversified character. The beeches with their smooth white bark twisted their tops together. Ash trees softly curved their bluish branches. In the tufts of the hornbeams rose up holly stiff as bronze. Then came a row of thin birches, bent into elegiac attitudes; and the pine-trees, symmetrical as organ pipes, seemed to be singing a song as they swayed to and fro”.