The Long Picturesque, or Unraveling the Rules of Art - by Patricia Emison (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

This book provides a Renaissance art historian's view of how the picturesque aesthetic developed from roots in the sixteenth century (mostly in painting, but with ramifications for printmaking, landscape design, and architecture), and further, how the picturesque aesthetic fundamentally changed the relationship between art and nature, between viewer and image. The book's argument is based on wide reading of obscure yet piquant critical texts, mostly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, together with consideration of varied works of art, ranging from Fra Angelico to Raphael and Michelangelo, and from Rubens to Canaletto, and from James Gibbs to Jacques Demy, all of them studied not for their place in the history of style, but for their spatial imagination.

From the Back Cover

``In this daring and ambitious book Emison recasts the history of European art from the Renaissance to modernity, offering a dazzling array of pictorial, architectural and textual examples that contest narrative-focused, word-dominated accounts of pictorial practice, complementing them with a dramatic story of thoughtful caprice, intelligent disorder, and expressive informality. Rather than ceding to modernity the "unraveling of the rules of art," this book sees this unfolding over centuries and in doing so redefines the subjectivity of patrons as key to the development of a public sphere for art, one that revels in the liberties of the picturesque tradition... In this exhilarating account, we are confronted .... by works that reach out to their viewers suggestively, requiring engagement and spurring freedom of thought and expression.''
- Adrian Randolph, Dean and HW Rogers Professor of the Humanities, Northwestern University, USA

"A history that centers on a genre considered as minor, the landscape, and that privileges the concept of picturesque, which tells the pleasure of an almost sublime aesthetic experience...this unexpected and strikingly rich history...Emison draws on by exploiting all the originality of some little-studied 18th-century art theorists and by casting a fresh eye on the works of great masters.

Thanks to an extraordinary erudition and an admirable freedom and finesse of analysis, Emison succeeds in showing how landscape paintings of the 16th-18th centuries become the place where a new conception of man's relationship with space is elaborated, as well as a new conception of art, as a free activity in which the artist...even criticizes his patrons, and...a new image of human subjectivity according to which the sense of arbitrariness has the positive value of a liberation from the stranglehold of the easy security of rules and of a joyful tolerance for imperfection and its infinite resourcefulness."

- Alberto Frigo, Assistant Professor of History of Modern Philosophy at University of Milan, Italy

How would the history of art look if we traced the roots of the picturesque aesthetic back to the Renaissance, if narrative subjects were not given the priority they had in the theory of the time, but instead images were studied for their spatial imagination?

Patricia Emison, University of New Hampshire, is the author of The Italian Renaissance and Cultural Memory (2012), The Shaping of Art History (2008), Art and its Observers (2022), and Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History (2021).

About the Author

Patricia Emison is Professor at the University of New Hampshire, USA. She is the author of several books on the Italian Renaissance, including The Italian Renaissance and Cultural Memory (2012), a book on the discipline of art history, The Shaping of Art History (2008), an introduction to the history of art, Art and its Observers (2022), and a book on the history of film, Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History (2021).