![]() ![]() 1 The picturesque has had these polarities between being a term of aesthetic approbation and a disparaging term for naïve tastes since being borrowed into English from the French pittoresque in the 18th century these polarities were made emphatic by John Ruskin in the mid-19th century when he defended JMW Turner’s ‘noble picturesque’ from sentimental uses of the term. in a weakened sense (sometimes depreciative or ironic): pretty in an underdeveloped or old-fashioned way’. The most recent revision of the Oxford English Dictionary (online) marks the word’s present decline when it adds to the older definitions ‘Now freq. ![]() The result, from the 18th century to the present, is that the word signifies different things in various discourses. In English, picturesqueness can indicate that something has the qualities of a picture or describe a thing that is suited to being painted. ![]() ‘Picturesque’ is one of those concepts which owe part of their success to their ambiguity. At such points we can recover some of the complexity and historical density that has been lost in the schematisation that has come about through translation. Translations, and particularly those that make common words into defined terms, are valuable points of historical enquiry in their own right. Thus, a level of confusion has resulted in distinguishing ‘painterly’ and ‘picturesque’, as if there was a conceptual difference marked in everyday language, rather than a difference constructed by the institutions of art history. In particular, Nikolaus Pevsner, imbued with the German tradition, wrote in his English language texts of the malerisch qualities of architecture and urbanism as ‘picturesque’. Other historians did not accept the neologism. These two inflections of picturesque already existed in English usage, but to make them clearer, translations of Wölfflin since 1932 have rendered the more complex use of malerisch through the neologism ‘painterly’. He defined the art historical malerisch by contrasting it with the belief of naïve observers that picturesqueness was a property of objects. In Heinrich Wölfflin’s influential account of the history of art since the Renaissance, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915), he systematized das Malerische as a formal value in dialectic with ‘the linear’. For historians of art and architecture this ambiguity is ramified by an issue of translation between ‘picturesque’ and its usual equivalent in German, malerisch. Picturesque is a term which owes part of its historical success to its ambiguity, signifying both an origin of subjectivist aesthetics and a popular naïve taste for the rustic. ![]()
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