Abstract
Picturesque is a term which owes part of its historical success to its ambiguity, signifying both an origin of subjectivist aesthetics and a popular naive taste for the rustic. For historians of art and architecture this ambiguity is ramified by an issue of translation between ‘picturesque’ and its usual equivalent in German, malerisch. In Heinrich Wolfflin’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’. He defined the art historical malerisch by contrasting it with the belief of naive observers that picturesqueness was a property of objects. These two inflections of picturesque already existed in English usage, but to make them clearer, translations of Wolfflin since 1932 have rendered the more complex use of malerisch through the neologism ‘painterly’. Other historians did not accept the neologism. 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’. 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. Translations, and particularly those that make common words into defined terms, are valuable points of historical enquiry in their own right. 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.
Highlights
Other historians did not accept the neologism
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
Wölfflin contrasted das Malerische with das Lineare, and this master dialectic of painterly to linear unfolded as five sets of opposing formal values that could be observed across painting, sculpture and architecture
Summary
Other historians did not accept the neologism. 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’.
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