The Picturesque
Year of lectures: 1959
Abstract:
"Today I want to talk about quite a different kind of beauty which took its rise not from the theories of Greek philosophers, but from the practice of Italian painters - that is, picturesque beauty. It was observed that some painters like Titian and Giogione painted things not as they were known to be in reality, but as they appeared to the eye. The simplest example of this is the painting of foliage in broad masses instead of leaf by leaf, as in say, Giorgione’s Tempesta. So it was that the word pittoresco was coined, meaning ‘after the manner of painters’. Painters, it was realised, had a special way, a highly visual way, of looking at nature. From becoming a mere description of some painter’s methods the word pittoresco, picturesque, gradually established itself as a new canon or standard of artistic values ad judgment; quite distinguishable from the classical and neo-classical notion of ideal beauty. The OUP give its first appearance in England in 1703. During the 18th century the idea of the picturesque as a kind or mode of beauty gained increasing importance as the century progressed: poetry, landscape gardening, architecture and the way people looked at nature and the theory of art all came to be effected by landscape painting."
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