Pittoresco

This book traces the changing attitudes towards painterly brushwork from Mannerist norms to the Arcadian classicism of eighteenth-century critics. At the centre of this history of artistic taste 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 (The map of painterly navigation). Pittoresco, 'painterly', serves as the title of this book 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 dexterity 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.