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Picturesque atmosphere: in-between the past and present

2023; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 43; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14601176.2023.2282196

1943-2186

İlke Hıçsönmezler, Fatma İpek Ek,

Ecology, Conservation, and Geographical Studies

AbstractThe picturesque refers to an influential genre as well as a critical period during which the aesthetic culture of the Enlightenment was blended to form the Romanticist face of the age. Though it means ‘picture-like’ etymologically, the picturesque goes beyond being an eye-based scene and covers the other senses while aiming to provide a scenario with multi-sensory experiences for ramblers on site. Regarding this disposition, the picturesque atmosphere denotes a bridge in-between the past and present with its role in the theories of aesthetics. In this framework, this article aims to read the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century picturesque by referring to the phenomenological theories of the spatial atmosphere of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our research demonstrated that the atmosphere of picturesque landscape designs can be conveyed strongly through spatial representations in different art forms. In doing this, the paper proposes the concept of the picturesque atmosphere as a tool to read the spatiality, especially in art branches, mainly including painting. Therefore, a reading model to examine the spatiality in the picturesque paintings was proposed at the end of the paper, by drawing from the theories of both the picturesque and spatial atmosphere.Keywords: contemporary aestheticseighteenth-century aestheticspicturesquepicturesque atmospherespatial atmosphere Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1. A detailed version of this article is partially available in the Master’s thesis, which is being prepared in the Department of Architecture at Yaşar University, with the title ‘Picturesque Atmosphere: A Method to Read Spatiality and Aesthetics in Verbal and Visual Artworks’. The writing phase of the thesis still continues.2. Isis Brook, ‘Wildness in the English Garden Tradition: A Reassessment of the Picturesque from Environmental Philosophy’, Ethics and the Environment, 13/1, Spring 2008, p. 105. For the etymological entry, also see https://www.etymonline.com/word/picturesque.3. Especially through the works, Sir Uvedale Price, An Essay on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful: And, on the Use of Studying Pictures, to improve Real Landscape (J. Robson, 1794); Richard Payne Knight, The Landscape: A Didactic Poem. In Three Books. Addressed to Uvedale Price, Esq. by R. P. Knight (Bulmer & Company, 1794); Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (Luke Hansard, 1805).4. The emphasis on theatricality was drawn from John Dixon Hunt, Gardens and the picturesque: studies in the history of landscape architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).5. Gernot Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 12.6. Böhme, ‘Atmosphere as Mindful Physical Presence in Space’, OASE Journal for Architecture, 91/21, 2013, pp. 27, 29, 31; Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures; Andreas Rauh, ‘The Atmospheric Whereby: Reflections on Subject and Object’, Open Philosophy, 2/1, 2019, pp. 147–59; Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces (New York: Routledge, 2010); and Griffero, ‘Pathicity: Experiencing the World in an Atmospheric Way’, Open Philosophy 2/1, 2019, pp. 414–27.7. Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’.8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (London: Routledge, 2005).9. ‘Variety, intricacy, engagement, time, chance, and transition’ were also defined as the main themes in Claude-Henri Watelet’s and Price’s works by Brook. And ‘wildness’ was offered as the primary motive instead the ‘picture-like stereotype’: see Brook, ‘Wildness in the English Garden Tradition’, pp. 105–119. Here, it is also important that all these key concepts have the potential to build the spatial atmospheres.10. Erin Lafford, ‘William Gilpin’s Atmospheric Sympathy’, Romanticism, 27/2, pp. 159–72.11. Yuqi Jin, ‘Atmospheric Architecture: Virtual Possibility of the Picturesque’, Architecture Senior Theses. 505, 2019.12. For the ‘generators of atmosphere’, see Böhme, ‘Atmosphere’, pp. 27, 29, 31. For the ‘Felt-Body’, see Griffero, Atmospheres; and Griffero, ‘Pathicity’. For the ‘whereby’, see Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’.13. Böhme, ‘Atmosphere’, pp. 27, 29, 31.14. Ibid.15. Böhme, ‘Atmosphere’, pp. 27, 29, 31; Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’; Griffero, Atmospheres; and Griffero, ‘Pathicity’.16. Böhme, ‘Atmosphere’, pp. 27, 29.17. Böhme, ‘Atmosphere’, pp. 29, 31.18. Böhme, ‘Atmosphere’, p. 29.19. Griffero, ‘Pathicity’, p. 417.20. Griffero, ‘Pathicity’; and Hermann Schmitz, System der Philosophie (Der Gefühlsraum, The Sphere of the Emotions) (Bonn: Bouvier, 1969).21. Griffero, ‘Pathicity’, p. 415.22. Griffero, Atmospheres.23. The terms ‘things’ and ‘quasi-things’ are similar to the ‘things’ and ‘nonthing-like’ generators of Böhme. Therefore, we may also claim that Griffero emphasizes the ‘non-things’ (‘quasi-things’) by indicating their importance. For further discussions of the topic, see Böhme, ‘Atmosphere’, pp. 27, 29; Griffero, Atmospheres; and Griffero, ‘Pathicity’, p. 420.24. Griffero, Atmospheres, p. 2.25. In this sense, it is possible to make a connection between the ‘spatialized’ and ‘spatializing’ space definitions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. From the perspective of Merleau-Ponty, ‘spatialized’ refers to a physical space in which presence is possible to be felt via the senses; however, ‘spatializing’ refers to the ongoing cognitive construction of a space as a concept. For a discussion, see Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 284.26. Griffero, ‘Pathicity’, p. 418.27. We may also find the term ‘feeling body’ in the philosophy of Schmitz, which intrinsically ‘presents an absolute location of subjective orientation’. See Rainer Kazig, ‘Presentation of Hermann Schmitz’ paper, ‘Atmospheric Spaces’’, Ambiances [Online], April 2016, p. 2; and Müllan and Slaby’s section in Hermann Schmitz, Rudolf Owen Müllan, and Jan Slaby, ‘Emotions Outside the Box — the New Phenomenology of Feeling And Corporeality’, Phenomenology Cognitive Science, 10, 2021, p. 244.28. Griffero, ‘Pathicity’, pp. 414–24.29. Griffero, ‘Pathicity’, p. 415.30. Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’, p. 149. For the quotation see, Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmosphere (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), p. 12.31. Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’, pp. 149–50.32. Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’, p. 149.33. Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’; and Griffero, Atmospheres, p. 27.34. This kind of space design is called aesthetic work by Böhme and it ‘consists of endowing things, environments, or people themselves with properties that make something emanate from them. That is, it is about ‘making atmospheres through work on the object’. For further discussion, see Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, pp. 23–24.35. Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’, p. 152.36. Ibid.37. Ibid.38. Ibid.39. Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, pp. 12, 37–54; and Griffero, Atmospheres, p. 144.40. See note 35 above.41. Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, p. 12; and Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’, p. 154.42. Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’, p. 154.43. Böhme, Aisthetik. Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre (Munich: Fink, 2001); and Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’, p. 154.44. Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’, p. 155.45. The term, aesthetics, was coined and defined as ‘the theory of the liberal arts, the logic of the lower capacities of cognition [gnoseologia inferior], the art of thinking beautifully, the art of the analogon rationis’ and ‘the science of sensible cognition’ by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in the eighteenth century. See Baumgarten, Aesthetica (George Olms Verlag, 1790), §1. For the connections between Baumgarten and Kant, one may also examine Baumgarten, Metaphysik (Übersetzt: G. G. Meier, Dietrich Scheglman Reprints, Jena, 2004); Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1764); and Kant, Critique of Judgment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1790).46. Kant, Critique.47. Kant, Critique, §1.204.48. Kant, Observations; Kant, Critique, §2.205.49. Kant, Critique, §2.205.50. Ibid.51. Kant, Critique, §23.245.52. Ibid.53. Ibid.54. Kant, Critique, §24.247.55. Ibid.56. Kant, Critique, §28.261.57. Edmund Burke, On Taste. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful with several other Additions. Reflections on the French Revolution. A letter to a Noble Lord (New York: P.F. Collier and Son Corporation, 1757).58. Burke, On Taste, p.1.59. Burke, On Taste.60. Burke, On Taste, p. 3.61. Burke, On Taste, pp. 7–9.62. Burke, On Taste, pp. 201–254.63. Burke, On Taste, p. 286. The contradiction among the different senses is later called the term ‘synesthetic’ in atmospheric studies. For a discussion, see Böhme, ‘Atmosphere’, p. 29.64. Brook, ‘Wildness in the English Garden Tradition’.65. For further interpretations of ‘framing’ and ‘prospects’, see Karen Valihora, ‘Impartial Spectator Meets Picturesque Tourist: The Framing of Mansfield Park’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 20/1, 2007, pp. 89–114.66. Jacques Rancière, The Time of the Landscape: On the Origins of the Aesthetic Revolution (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023).67. Rancière discusses this revolution initially by citing from Knight: ‘Knight urges landscapists to draw their inspiration from artists who show “men”, not as they are, “but as they seem’d to be”’. See Rancière, The Time of the Landscape, pp. 39–40.68. Norman T. Newton, Design on the Land: The Development of Landscape Architecture (La Editorial, UPR, 1971), pp. 207–220.69. Allen S. Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and 17th-Century Metaphysics (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995).70. John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities (London: Routledge, 2013).71. David S. Miall, ‘Representing the Picturesque: William Gilpin and the Laws of Nature’, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (2005): 75–93.72. Garry Victor Retzleff, ‘Observations on William Gilpin’s Criticism of Literature and the Visual arts’, Diss. University of British Columbia, 1966, p. 7.73. Michael Symes, ‘Gardens Picturesque and Sublime’, The Picturesque in Late Georgian England: Papers given at The Georgian Group Symposium, edited by Dana Arnold (London: 1994), pp. 21–26, 73.74. Anette Stenslund, Atmosphere in Urban Design: A Workplace Ethnography of an Architecture Practice (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2022).75. Valihora, ‘Impartial spectator meets picturesque tourist’.76. According to Macarthur, taste is the main aim of the picturesque, which also combines the picturesque to the aesthetic base discussed by Kant and Burke. See Macarthur, The picturesque.77. Hunt, Gardens and the Picturesque.78. Ibid.79. Ibid.80. In terms of the effects of literature on picturesque movement in garden design see Heinz-Joachim Müllenbrock, ‘The “Englishness” of the English landscape garden and the genetic role of literature: a reassessment’, The Journal of Garden History, 8/4, 1988, pp. 97–103.81. Nikolaus Pevsner, ‘Richard Payne Knight’, The Art Bulletin, 31/4, 1949, pp. 293–320.82. Pevsner, ‘Richard Payne Knight’.83. According to Elisabeth Meyer, eighteenth-century understanding of the picturesque cover a wider perspective in terms of the multi-sensory experience provided by the garden designs, and it is more promising in this respect. However, when we look at the scene in the twentieth century, we see that the term was reduced to a visually oriented nature — by being influenced by the eye-centered perception of space in Modern architecture. Nevertheless, Ian Thompson states that picturesque theory may bear the burden of having a special emphasis on the visual side of the experience. For Meyer’s interpretation, see Elisabeth Meyer, ‘Situating modem landscape architecture: Theory as bridging, mediating and reconciling practice’, in Design + Value: Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of CELA, 1992 (Charlottesville, VA, 1992), pp. 167–178, as cited in Ian Thompson, ‘The Picturesque as pejorative’, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, 26/3, 2006, pp. 237–48. For Thompson’s interpretation see the same source, pp. 240–41.84. Dabney Townsend, ‘The Picturesque’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 55/4, 1997, pp. 365–376.85. Knight, The Landscape; Knight, Analytical Inquiry; Roger Paden, ‘A Defense of the Picturesque’, Environmental Philosophy, 10/2, 2013, pp. 1–22.86. Price, Essay on the Picturesque, p. 285.87. Ibid.88. Price, Essay on the Picturesque, pp. 285–286.89. Ibid.90. Ibid.91. Ibid.92. Paden, ‘Defense of the Picturesque’, p. 12.93. Price, Essay on the Picturesque, p. 188.94. Tom Turner, English Garden Design: History and Styles Since 1650 (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1986).95. Price, Essay on the Picturesque, p. vii.96. Price, Essay on the Picturesque; Stephanie Ross, ‘The Picturesque: An Eighteenth-Century Debate’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 46/2, 1987, p. 274.97. Price, Essay on the Picturesque, p. iii.98. Sir Reginald Theodore Blomfield, The Formal Garden in England (London: The Macmillan Company, 1901), p. 88.99. Pevsner, ‘Richard Payne Knight’.100. Paden, ‘Defense of the Picturesque’; and Pevsner, ‘Richard Payne Knight’.101. Townsend, ‘Picturesque’.102. Knight, Analytical Inquiry.103. Ibid.104. Knight, Analytical Inquiry, §2.105. Knight, Landscape, p. 3.106. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1739).107. See note 102 above.108. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 284.109. Mike Collier, Wordsworth and Bashō: Walking Poets (Dove Cottage, The Wordsworth Trust Museum Grasmere, 24 May − 2 Nov 2014); David McCracken, Wordsworth and the lake district: a guide to the poems and their places (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).110. Collier, Wordsworth and Bashō, p. 14.111. Böhme, Aesthetics of Atmosphere, p. 12.112. Griffero, ‘Pathicity’; Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’.113. Price, Essay on the Picturesque; Knight, Analytical Inquiry.114. Price, Essay on the Picturesque; Knight, Analytical Inquiry; Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’.115. Böhme, Aisthetik.116. Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’, p. 154.117. Knight, Landscape, p. 1.118. Pevsner, ‘Richard Payne Knight’.119. Pevsner, ‘Richard Payne Knight’.120. Knight, Landscape, p. 2; Pevsner, ‘Richard Payne Knight’.121. Pevsner, ‘Richard Payne Knight’, p. 302; and Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, p. 12122. Knight, Landscape.123. Knight, Landscape, p. 20.124. Townsend, ‘Picturesque’, p. 366.125. See note 102 above.126. Pevsner, ‘Richard Payne Knight’, p. 307.127. Pevsner, ‘Richard Payne Knight’, p. 308.128. Griffero, ‘Pathicity’; Rauh ‘Atmospheric Whereby’.129. Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, p. 12; Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’, p. 154.130. Price, Essay on the Picturesque, p. iv.131. Townsend, ‘Picturesque’, p. 366.132. Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres — Architectural Environments — Surrounding Objects (Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2006).133. Hunt, Gardens and the picturesque, p. 114.134. Hunt, Gardens and the picturesque, p. 115.135. ‘Environmental qualities’ and ‘human states’ are the two sides of the same root, the spatial atmosphere, in Böhme, Aesthetics of Atmosphere, p. 12.136. Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures, pp. 12, 37–54.137. Griffero, ‘Pathicity’, pp. 414–427.138. Schmitz, System der Philosophie.139. Garden designs of Brown and Kent are named ‘emotional’ and ‘intellectual’, respectively, and, therefore, by considering them the subgenres of the picturesque, we also added the pictorial subgenre as the third type in the analytical framework of this paper to show the changing balances in the applications of the picturesque atmosphere. In this respect, as also rendered by Böhme, Price’s idea of environmental qualities makes sense with the emotional subgenre, whereas Knight’s idea of the human states corresponds to the intellectual subgenre. The pictorial subgenre as proposed in this paper distributes the feelings of the beautiful and sublime equally and applies to both the ideas of Price and Knight because although they looked from different perspectives in the discussions of the atmosphere — object-based or subject-based — they also adopted equally distributed design treatments for the beautiful and sublime and for the environmental qualities and human states. For the relationships of emotion and intellect, see https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/gardens.140. Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’.141. Robert W. Williams, ‘Alexander Pope and Ut Pictura Poesis’, Sydney Studies in English, 9/1983–1984, 2008, p. 39.142. Therefore, it is the same for the art of poetry. See Leon Golden, ‘Reception of Horace’s Ars Poetica’, A Companion to Horaced, ed. Gregson Davis (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics Part I’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 12/4, 1951, p. 502.143. ‘Augustan derives from Augustus Caesar’, said Russel Fraser and revealed the main idea within these sentences: ‘People who don’t like Augustan poetry say it is too intellectual, while people who like it are inclined to praise its mental toughness. These positions are of course the same discriminated only by an estimate of value … Augustana poetry is primarily poetry of emotion’. See, Russel Fraser, ‘What is Augustan Poetry?’ The Sewanee Review, 98/4, 1990, pp. 620–645, 620.144. Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures.145. Knight, Analytical Inquiry; and Knight, Landscape. Also see Pevsner, ‘Richard Payne Knight’.146. Fraser, ‘What is Augustan Poetry?’, p. 620.147. Williams, ‘Alexander Pope’, p. 64.148. See note 144 above.149. Although Brown did not directly apply the Augustan style in his designs, it is possible to think that Brown was affected by it because in the Stowe Garden, for example, he worked with Kent. However, in the end, he created his own unique approach, that is, the emotional one, different from Kent’s.150. See note 92 above.151. Ross, ‘Picturesque’, p. 274.152. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1980).153. See note 136 above.154. Pallasmaa, ‘Space, Place and Atmosphere’, p. 234.155. Böhme, ‘Atmosphere’, pp. 27, 29.156. Böhme elaborates here on the generators of the spatial atmosphere by also re-mentioning his previous citation from Wölflin as follows: ‘Heinrich Wölfflin established, for example, that the spatial shape of architecture was not merely a matter of what you see, but is rather experienced in and by the body, as if it were realized internally’. See Böhme, ‘Atmosphere’, p. 23.157. Griffero, ‘Pathicity’.158. Rauh, ‘Atmospheric Whereby’.