Pittoresco

About this book

"The painterly (pittoresco) brushwork of Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese and their heirs in the seventeenth century challenged the fondest preconceptions held by many Renaissance and Baroque artists and their critics. Concepts of naturalism, imagination, style and ornament had to be reconsidered as artists began to replace the polished surfaces of tempera or the hazy clouds of sfumato with new techniques of visible brushwork, notably drybrush, impasto and other forms of the loaded brush. This book traces the changing attitudes towards painterly brushwork from Mannerism to Arcadian classicism. At its center stands the Venetian art dealer, critic and painter Marco Boschini, who wrote a rambling, metaphoric defence of Venetian painting in 1660: La carta del navegar pitoresco [sic] (The map of painterly navigation)."--BOOK JACKET. "Pittoresco, "painterly," serves here as the title because the shifting opinions on painterly brushwork are contained in its semantic history, migrating in meaning from a neutral designation of all painting ("pictorial") to a specific type of painting ("painterly" or "picturesque"). It could be interpreted as a sign of inspired creativity and manual facility, or as a sign of showy dexerity unrestrained by learning. By means of linguistic analysis, pittoresco and related terms open up a world of cultural reference where literate art critics bring their taste in poetry and rhetoric to the least literary aspect of painting: the descriptive, ornamental or inspired form of brushwork."--BOOK JACKET. "The book is also a history of reception, as its subtitle suggests: how art critics perceived painterly brushwork and how those perceptions changed over two centuries; and how the critics received the reading of the painterly style by its most sympathetic critic, Boschini. These two aspects - reception of images and reception of criticism - are inseparable and in many ways reflect upon one another."--BOOK JACKET.