著者

安西 信一

出版者

美学会

雑誌

美學 (ISSN:05200962)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.40, no.2, pp.36-49, 1989-09-30

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According to the fundamental assumption of the picturesque aesthetics, the "painter's eye" or "picturesque eye, " the eye conversant with painting, is privileged to discover "the picturesque" hidden from the common eyes. This is done (often with the assistance of imagination) by abstracting the purely visual qualities of objects and disregarding their utilitarian, moral or emotional contents. "The picturesque" is characterised by irregular movement (Salvatoresque "roughness, " etc.), which corresponds to high valuation of sketchy and free execution as an indispensable element of painting, and in a wider context, to a change in the idea of nature. The "painter's eye, " however, discovers this irregularity only through the medium of painting, a fixed frame-work. Hence, contradictorily, "the picturesque" requires compositional unity (Claudesque "harmony, " etc.). The abstractedness of "the picturesque" enables the "painter's eye" to regard whatever object in the world as possible source of new aesthetic pleasure. But this "discovery of nature" also is occasioned by conforming to the established standard of painting. Because of such circularity and conventionality, the picturesque aesthetics has been criticised since Romanticism. Nevertheless, these aestheticians themselves found the tradition of painting not so much an unassailable authority as an endless succession of exeperiments towards better ways of seeing nature.