 We're beginning to see a new sensibility, and that is a sensibility for the picturesque. The word picturesque should be easy to remember for you. It means like a picture. So I can remember that. Specifically like a landscape picture. And in the 17th century, landscape painting was becoming all the rage. When we were talking about the Venetian Renaissance, we noticed a painting by Giorgione called the Tempesta, or the storm, the Tempest. And it was a puzzling painting for its time, 1510, because we couldn't quite figure out what the subject matter was. We saw the kind of wild naked woman suckling a child. We saw the indifferent soldier guarding the place. Hard to know what the relationship between these people. The only protagonist in this painting that seems to have any clear purpose is the landscape. And the task at hand for the landscape is storm, weather, atmosphere. Giorgione is beginning to suggest that landscape itself is the proper subject matter for a painting. But at this point it's radical. By the time we get to the 17th century, it becomes all the rage. This is a painting by Claude Lorraine, the embarkation of Ursula. And who was Ursula, you might wonder. Ursula is Saint Ursula. She's an early Christian saint, let's say. The Vatican's not always convinced that she's real. They sometimes include her among the saints. They sometimes expel her. Then they bring her back in. I think because so many Catholic girl schools are called Saint Ursulas, that they really can't get rid of her altogether. Legend has it that she was a Romano-British princess, literally betrothed to Conan the Barbarian, a character made popular, I believe, by none other than Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger. She was sent off from her happy home in Britain to marry Conan the Barbarian. And she brought her friends with her, 11,000 virginal handmaidens. Everybody needs their friends at their marriage time. A miraculous storm permitted them to land in France after only a day's travel. And there Ursula wanted to make a pilgrimage to Rome until she postponed the marriage, all the while hoping to remain maidenly for the rest of her life. Ursula was supposed to marry a Barbarian. She was taken away to marry a Barbarian. She refused and she and her best friends were slaughtered. And that's why she's a saint. Good for you, Ursula. If anybody in this room is named Ursula, I apologize. But I think she could have maybe taken one for the team. Apparently, there's a church in Cologne called the Basilica of Saint Ursula where the ribs, shoulder blades and femurs arranged in zig-zags and swirls and even the shape of Latin words. And that there is a chamber of treasures attached to the basilica that is full of little reliquaries with petrified heads decked out in silver or little velvet caps. Another theory about this cult of Saint Ursula is that she's actually a Christianized version of the Nordic goddess Freyja who had among her tasks that of welcoming the souls of maidens into the afterlife. Anyhow, this is a painting by Claude Lorraine that shows you the sensibility of the picturesque. One thing that's going on is an attitude about light, which we already saw in Giorgione. Typically in Claude Lorraine, instead of getting clear light that illuminates a subject, we get back light. We see these dramatic silhouettes. We see strong shadow. In fact, Claude Lorraine paintings have this kind of yellowy quality to them, maybe because of the varnishes that he put on them, but maybe because most of his paintings are either early morning or evening where the sun is low and things become yellowish. These Claude Lorraine paintings were so much the vogue that people began to walk around with a piece of yellow glass in a beautiful frame and look at the world. You probably have done something similar. When you look at the world through your camera, it looks different than if you look at it without putting a frame around it. But since they didn't have cameras, they would make little landscape paintings for themselves as they walked through the countryside. This is a self-portrait of Thomas Gainsborough, a 18th-century painter holding a Claude glass. And you see that he's looking into the Claude glass and making a sketch. One of the things that was advantageous about the Claude glass is that it was a darkly tinted mirror, slightly convex, and it had the effect of abstracting away the scenery. So instead of seeing the complexity of all of nature, you saw this framed view with dimmed tonalities, very much like a landscape painting. Another amusing thing is, in order to properly use the Claude glass, you had to turn your back to the object that you were beholding and look in this very abstracted way away from the natural phenomenon into this artificial construct in order to see the beautiful landscape that's deeply stirring your soul. That's kind of a charming thing to do, and these are the kinds of things they see. So this notion of the vista, this notion of the folly, this notion of architecture as something that is not significant in and of itself, but simply adds atmosphere comes from landscape painting and it becomes very common in landscape painting and interestingly enough gets fed back into architecture. We've been seeing this all along when we looked at the Renaissance. Something happens in architecture, it gets folded into painting. Something happens in painting, architects appropriate it. And in the case of landscape painting, there becomes a strong desire to capture the kind of views, to construct the kind of views that you get in landscape painting. These are some paintings by Poussin. For my money I like Claude better than Poussin. Poussin's a little bit too stiff, but don't get me started on Poussin. Here we see classical things and we also see other kinds of staffage. Staffage is an art history word meaning people or animals stuck in a picture to create a mood. We have some farm animals here, some goats. You get a sense that this is a perfect world before too much culture began to create fences, but shepherds and shepherdesses could run around and simply chase their goats and play their lutes. Those were the good old days. Sometimes things got wild in the good old days, but here we have the picturesque and some of the terms associated with picturesque are the idea of Arcadia. And Arcadia is this mythical time before culture when people lived this agrarian life or this nomadic shepherding life. You had this connection with nature that was unmediated and direct and that people in a sense were living out of time. They weren't caught in history, they were simply part of the natural continuum. The word pastoral has to do with the idea of having sheep being the pastor of a flock of sheep and it's this kind of landscape of the meadow and the clumps of trees and the little babbling brook. The Claude glass is this yellow piece of glass. Contraluce means things that are being illuminated from the back, things that are being silhouetted like these Claude paintings that we have here and that it's such a common feature in this landscape painting. And here's a new word that we can add and that word is romantic. Romantic grows up in the 18th century dialectically opposed to, let's say, an enlightenment interest in hyper-rationality. If the enlightenment is all about progressively acquiring knowledge and categorizing and cataloging and organizing all things in the world, in opposition to that this romantic impulse arises which is about feeling, about emotion, about genius rather than acquired knowledge. So this is my opportunity to read you something in the world of romantic poetry. This is late 18th century. This is, however, a great poem by William Wordsworth. The story of the poem is the story of romanticism which is how can you be part of nature again? Once out of nature, how can you connect to nature again? Wordsworth goes to this ruined Cistercian Abbey, Tinter and Abbey with his little sister. And his little sister is maybe ten years younger than he is. She's the age that Wordsworth was when he first saw Tinter and Abbey. And when he first saw Tinter and Abbey, he was blown away. The ruin, the tangle, the strong light, it was a raw emotional experience. And now coming back again, he can't look at Tinter and Abbey without somehow remembering when he saw Tinter and Abbey. There's a nostalgia for the moment when he was fresher and that he could receive emotion in a less layered way. And he looks at his sister and he thinks, his feelings onto her thinking, she now feels what I once felt and I can never feel that again. And what's more, in a few years, she will never feel that again. It's incredibly complex. It's all about the kind of loss of authenticity. Here we go. This is not all of it, by the way. You can read all of it online because it's everywhere. This was considered to be the best poem in the English language until 1930, by the way. So you should at least hear some of it. I asked five summers with a length of five long winters. And again I hear these waters rolling from their mountain springs with a soft inland murmur. Once again, do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs that on a wild, secluded scene impress thoughts of a more deep seclusion and connect the landscape with a quiet of the sky. Dot, dot, dot. These beauty forms, through a long absence, have not been to me as a landscape to a blind man's eye. But oft in lonely rooms and mid the din of towns and cities, I have owed to them in hours of weariness sensations sweet. Therefore, let the moon shine on thee in thy solitary walk and let the misty mountain winds be free to blow against thee. That means his sister. And in after years, when these wild ecstasies shall be matured into a sober pleasure, when thy mind shall be a mansion for all lovely forms, thy memory be as a dwelling place for all sweet sounds and harmonies, O then, if solitude or fear or pain or grief should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts of tender joy wilt thou remember me. That's kind of romanticism. And romanticism is wrapped up in this idea that authenticity has been lost, nature, instead of being thought of as something that corrupts and contaminates and leads you away from this contemplation on the divine, which had been the major mindset for quite a long time, nature begins to present itself as something that removes you, that connects you back to an authentic moment. And in this culture, in this culture where landscape painting becomes important and where this idea of the genius and the original and the work of art for the sake of the work of art becomes important, so too does the whole branch of philosophy called aesthetics become more and more important. Aesthetics is the branch of philosophy that has to do with making judgments about what is beautiful, about how do you know if a work of art is good? How do you know if it's bad? How can you judge that? And that's a hard thing to do. I noticed in studio that your critics always get it wrong. You have done something magnificent, and they simply don't get it, what is wrong with them. So the idea of aesthetics existed back in classical times, but it gains great popularity in the 18th century. And one of the major writers on the topic is Edmund Burke, who writes inquiry into the origins of the sublime and the beautiful. Another major contributor is Immanuel Kant, who writes critique of pure judgment. They're trying to get at what is this thing? What is beauty? How do we know it? What is a work of art? Or also another contemporary of theirs, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who begins systematically to write about art history, to write about not so much a theoretical way of judging works of art, but a direct confrontation with works of art that he then elaborates upon. In Burke, he talks about these two terms, the beautiful and the sublime. And the beautiful really confirms your own sense that reason holds the world together. It makes you understand that there's something central about being a human being in the world, that your proportion extends and governs the proportions of architecture, that geometry is clear and understandable. So certain qualities that adhere to the beautiful for Burke would be things like clarity, smallness, proportion. In opposition to that, you have the sublime. The sublime has to do with reason not holding it together, emotions running wild, being confronted with something that puts you into such a powerful mood that you feel something that Burke calls delight, which is, well, that's delightful. Next time you say delightful, use it in Edmund Burke's sense. For Burke, delight is what you feel if you think you're gonna die and you don't. Like, that's delightful. What's a delightful cookie you brought me? You probably have this experience. Has anybody been to Niagara Falls? Did you feel delight? It's scary, isn't it? Has anybody been to Grand Canyon? Kind of scary also. I have to be like 20 feet minimum away from the edge of both those places. Otherwise, I will inevitably hurl myself into the abyss. It's so delightful to me. That's what's gonna happen. This painting by Frederick Church of the Niagara Falls exemplifies the sense of wonder and awe at this great natural phenomenon, the power of the waves rushing down. Even the idea of this painting as a long horizontal format was meant to evoke a sense of the sublime. Notice there's no foreground to you. You feel like you're at the precipice. You feel like you are in peril. You are so close to the edge of this powerful engine of water turning away. This painting in 1857 was the subject of a one painting exhibition in New York City. Everyone had to pay 25 cents for the opportunity to look at one painting and within two weeks 100,000 visitors came to see this. This was a way to get a sense of the sublime without leaving New York City. It's difficult to travel to Niagara Falls, but the format of this painting, so long that it exceeds your cone of vision and becomes like a horizon, was a way to allow people to directly enter into the landscape and experience the sublime for themselves. A painter of the sublime is Kasper David Friedrich. This image of wanderer above the Sea of Fog from 1818 is a good example of the romantic in a landscape. Dwarfed by the scale of nature, backlit, solitary, nature itself can barely flourish. The trees that we see off here on the horizon are alone in the wind and barely have any leaves on them. The vista is vast. And as a curiosity, this is a picture of one of the KSA students taken last year in China, standing on the Great Wall of China, which is sublime, I might add. And by chance, he happens to be assuming almost exactly the same pose as Kasper David Friedrich's wanderer above the Sea of Fog. Amazing. A big question that circulates around these ideas about aesthetics is the notion of taste. Taste is the ability to make correct judgments about the beautiful or the sublime. And the question is, is taste cultivated or is taste innate? The Enlightenment would say taste can certainly be cultivated. You can learn things. You can go out. You can acquire knowledge. But you can also cultivate your taste by simply having exposure to excellent examples. The more beautiful works of architecture you see, the more critical you will be about what constitutes a beautiful work of architecture. The more beautiful paintings you see, the more critical you'll be. The more beautiful landscapes you see, the more critical you'll be. As opposed to the romantic impulse, which would say, you're a genius or you're not a genius. If you were born great, lucky you. If you were born not great, you will never improve. Part of this idea about taste comes up in the fact that all countries, not simply France, but all countries are forming academies, people in those countries can be exposed to these great examples. And there's also a new institution coming into play called the Grand Tour. The Grand Tour, in a sense, formalizes what Inigo Jones already did. And that is, you go off to Italy, the home of classicism. It's where the good stuff is. These are the great examples that if you familiarize yourself with them, you too will be able to accomplish greatness. You go off to Italy for at least two years and you look at this stuff. Goethe, the great romantic poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe went off. This is a picture of him reclining in the landscape on the outskirts of Rome, which is, of course, littered with classical ruins and fragments everywhere. Or here's Winckelmann. Winckelmann actually went under the patronage of the court of Dresden to just collect good art. And that's why if you go to Dresden, the art museum there is amazingly fabulous because you had the guy who wrote the first book on art history collecting stuff. This is a portrait of Winckelmann after he spent a little time in Rome studied and got some taste. And you can see how much, much more tasteful his attire is here. The turban, the fur-lined satin robe. His master work is Geschichte der Kunst des Altortums, or History of Art in Antiquity published in 1764. And in it, he has a very particular way of discussing works of art. They're emotional, they're not rational. He talks about the feelings that a highly tuned intellect, someone with excellent taste would have when confronted with a work of art. One of his favorite works was the Apollo Belvedere. And I'm just going to read you a few snippets from what Winckelmann says about this work to give you a sense of this strange tone and this almost rapturous, subliminal erotic take that he has because beauty stirs his soul so greatly. The Statue of Apollo is the highest ideal of art. His stature is much loftier than that of a man and his attitude speaks of the greatness with which he is filled. An eternal spring as in the happy fields of Elysium, closed with the charms of youth, the graceful manliness of ripe in years, and plays with the softness and tenderness about the proud shape of his limbs. Let thy spirit penetrate into the kingdom of incorporeal beauties. Neither blood vessels nor sinews heat and stir this body, but a heavenly essence diffusing itself like a gentle stream seems to fill the whole contour of the figure. In the presence of this miracle of art I forget all else. My breast seems to enlarge and swell with reverence like the breasts of those who are filled with the spirit of prophecy and I feel myself transported to Delos and to the Lecheun Gros, places which Apollo honored by his presence. But he gets rapturous. It's not the kind of lucid analytical discussion of works of art. It's weird art history but what Winckelmann identifies is that there is something more authentic in Greek sources than in Roman sources. So there's another debate that gets spun through between whether you should look at Greek sources which are earlier, which are closer to the truth, which are less littered with historical detritus or should you continue looking at Roman sources. Winckelmann would say Greek sources are closer archeology of the Greek monuments is now available to us because the political situation in Greece has quieted down. Teams of archeologists start going off to Greece to measure Greek antiquities and Winckelmann would say you can get your taste ramped up faster by looking at Greek things because Greek architecture has to do with quiet simplicity and calm grandeur. Opposing Winckelmann's Greek mania is a local guy in Rome called Piranesi and Piranesi is an architect but he's also an engraver. Let's say he's a print maker. He makes these fabulous drawings. This is a drawing of the Colosseum or it's an engraving of the Colosseum by Piranesi and he did a series of sets of these engravings Modern Rome Ancient Rome the Campus Marchus which is a kind of reimagining of what the texture the mapping texture of Old Rome was. He even did some that I think are really spectacular about the hydraulic systems in Italy water coming in from the lake and coming forward. So you have Piranesi promoting in a very strong way the authenticity of the Roman model or the Etruscan model over the Greek model. These are just some drawings from Stuart and Revit who were some of the first archaeologists or architects to go off and measure Greek antiquities and I think these two ways of representing the antiquities are pretty interesting. One measured drawing very precise, very archaeological and the other this romantic landscape something that could have come out of Claude Lorraine with a strong backlight the extensive landscape a couple of follies organizing your view and staffage of like cows and shepherdesses running around. These are a few more Stuart and Revit's plates from the antiquities of Athens showing the Acropolis and again very picturesque but nobody's as picturesque as Piranesi. Piranesi exaggerates the scale. Like could this be the Colosseum or is this thing like seven miles long making things seem bigger than they are. He's taking these vantage points. This is Piazza del Popolo high up in the sky to make the space moving through the trident in Rome seem even more vertiginously accelerated. Piranesi is interested in the ruin. He's not trying to give you images of Roman antiquities in their perfect state like Stuart and Revit were drawing you a perfect plan. Piranesi is giving you the emotional impact of looking at something that was once great that has now fallen into ruin and Piranesi also does a couple of really weird series of drawings. One are these Capriccios that Piranesi does and the Capriccios means Caprice like whimsical thing. The Capriccios tend to be just piles and piles and piles and piles of sources that an architect might look at or an artist might look at the clutter of history. If Piranesi were doing a drawing the title of which was The Burden of History or too many things to think about in the 18th century it could look a lot like one of Piranesi's Capriccios but probably Piranesi's most famous prints are a series on the prisons that he did called the Carcere Piranesi actually did two versions these are engravings and the way you do an engraving is you take a copper plate and you coat it with lacquer and then you incise in the lacquer and you dip it in an acid bath and the place that you've scratched away the lacquer will have a line cut into it through the acid. One thing about these plates is that you can operate on them again and again you simply recode it with lacquer and you add more information. So this is the first printing these are plates from the first printing of the Carcere the prisons and they're crazy spaces and it's a crazy subject matter. This is a new institution by the way the idea of the institutionalized prison where people at the margins of society are isolated. You had dungeons maybe but you didn't have these kind of big mega prisons. In 1760 Piranesi re-engraves he operates again on the plates and what he does is take these things that are already quite quite chaotic. Ramps going nowhere, stairs going nowhere and just clutters them up with more bits and pieces of strangeness. It seems as though what Piranesi is representing here is the impossibility of operating as an architect in a period of time when you are no longer in history in an authentic way but out of history looking back at it and trying to find choices. You look at this and you have an emotional response. You don't really have an intellectual response and in many ways that's what the picturesque is doing. The last of the Piranesi plates that I want to show you are just some things from the imaginary reconstruction of the campus marshes and the campus marshes is this area of central Rome where the forum is located. Here we see the Colosseum for example. It is just totally invented or almost completely invented but invented in a kind of wild and fabulous way. So much so the architect Louis Kahn had a plate of the campus marshes behind his desk and every time he couldn't think of what to do it is said that he would stare at the campus marshes and pull an idea out of there. Piranesi's own work is not as great as his engravings. He's trying hard to think about what the Etruscan temple might look like as a way of making an architecture more authentic, more original earlier than the architecture of Greece and thereby claim authenticity for the Roman moment. And for Piranesi the Etruscan temple is a wall architecture rather than a columnar architecture and because it's a wall architecture he has an opportunity to just shovel the glop on it like he shovels glop everywhere.