*3.2. Thesis No 2: Visual Links Applied to Castle Gardens at a Landscape Scale may Be Divided into Two Main Categories: Eye-Catchers and Prospects*

The views were produced by creating effects with the aid of visual tools, and by delivering symbolic meanings and messages. Regarding the planned visual links between the landscape and the garden, two types are possible to distinguish: the "eye-catchers" and the "prospects".

The eye-catchers are structures that draw attraction even from a greater distance and are applied as focal points of a visual axis or determine a specific visual link. The eye-catchers—as distinctive elements of the landscape—determine the structural layout of landscape gardens. In the periods of the 19th-century Sentimentalism and Romanticism, characteristic structures and buildings in the garden were used not only for functional but also for spiritual, political, and aesthetic reasons [21–23].

The definition of a prospect as a picturesque scene resulted from the large scale composition of designed landscapes comprising the skyline of the natural or built environment, the vegetation, and the water surfaces [9].

The prospect is the virtual extension of the garden boundaries, the inclusion of the surrounding landscape into the garden scenery. Very often, the same landscape composition allows for the definition of several representative visual axes and several connections [10]. This is especially true for larger garden landscapes—at this point, we can refer to an excellent foreign example, the most extended European garden landscape, the English garden of Dessau-Wörlitz, where Edith Kresta mentions more than 300 visual axes applied as parts of the composition [24].

Out of 100 investigated locations in 61 cases, altogether, we found 139 built features (eye-catchers) on site, which proves the garden and landscape compositional role of eye-catchers and can serve as a basis for the renewal of the visual communication between garden and landscape. (Figure 2).

**Figure 2.** Eye-catchers location in Transylvanian castle gardens.

*Land* **2019**, *8*, 192

In several cases, we discovered former eye-catchers as well, which unfortunately disappeared in the course of the last century (Figure 3).

**Figure 3.** The Csicsal Hill in Magyarfenes (Vlaha) nowadays (photo by authors, 2018), without the Gloriette of the Jósika Castle Garden, a vanished eye-catcher represented by a sketch (bottom left) based on a photo (bottom right) [25].
