Anna Wood

Professor Kristen Schaffer

History of Western Architecture

ARC 242-001

Spring 2024

Eighteenth Century Take-Home Exam: The Sublime, the Beautiful, and the Picturesque

The Renaissance ushered in major developments in society, bolstered by an appreciation for the arts, sciences, politics, and architecture.  While these achievements continue to

leave an inspirational impression on modern culture, underlying many of these great works and buildings was the desire to exude power and reiterate hierarchical rhetoric.  The

momentum of art and science came to a head towards the end of the 17th century with the Enlightenment which allied itself with rationality and curiosity.  Revolutions in thought

against the Ancien Regime and Copernicus’s heliocentric model which proclaimed that the Earth was not the center of all things, but instead revolved around the sun in a non-

circular pattern brought about a major change in aesthetic taste (Trachtenberg and Hyman 388).  The ellipse specifically along with other decorative, irregular forms took hold

during this time known as the Baroque period evidenced in architecture through undulating facades and decentralized floor plans previously considered improper conventions. 

Despite the evolution of values, style was still a marker of status, and decadence prevailed throughout the Baroque not solely through material luxury, but in the realm of fantasy.  

Romanticism coddled the truth as rationalism did in the Enlightenment, but in a distinctly “anti-classic” manner; from the privileged position of empiricism, the senses (Pierson

7). Being that sense experience is inherently subjective, philosophers of the age sought to orient aesthetics under an agreeable truth. Historicism became the favored channel of

inspiration for romantics because it grounded principles of art in objective neoclassicism yet allowed for “uniqueness of the individual,…[cultural heroism, and personal genius],”

through escapism into “nostalgic and idyllic moods,” (Trachtenberg and Hyman 388, 403). Reformed villas and English gardens in particular became “laboratories” and playscapes to

experiment with these old traditions, new cultures, and artistic theories (Bergdoll 73). 

The philosopher Edmund Burke in his essay A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas on the Sublime and the Beautiful, conceived beauty to be that which was orderly and

clear, “[smooth, small, and delicate] (Pierson 9).” Under this definition, much of previous art from the Renaissance was beautiful, though there is much more to aesthetics than

affectionate regularity.  He asserted a counter sensibility to “harmonious beauty”; the sublime (Ingersoll and Kostof 589).  That “delightful horror,” derived from “obscurity, power,

privation, vastness, and infinity,” which “[moves] men to terror rather than to love,” is equally as striking to the emotions, and the “truest test of the sublime (Trachtenberg and

Hyman 399) (Bergdoll 83) (Pierson 9).” These dual ideals served as aspirational guidance to artists and experiencers of the Renaissance and, in part, gothic styles, yet there was still

ecstasy to be found outside of love and terror; the fascination of variety.  Even this novelty was to be codified by philosophers like Uvedale Price and William Gilpin under the title of

picturesque.  Originally, alla pittoresca, a term to describe drawings painted with a brush rather than drawn with crayons, the picturesque captured the charms absorbed “by

whatever organs they are received”, those pleasures which do not fit neatly into rules of art and painting yet appeal “to the eye of the painter, “ (Pierson 10) (Trachtenberg and

Hyman 399). 

That which speaks most clearly to the artist, or dilettante, is not entirely gleaned from adherence to order or language, but from the moods evoked and the associations an

experience cultivates.  “The earth, water, foliage, open space, and sky,” were just as much instruments to designers and architects as columns and pediments in the orchestration of

their “frozen music” (Pierson 15) (Trachtenberg and Hyman 398).  For example, Chiswick House by Lord Burlington and William Kent, inspired by the style and writings of Andrea

Palladio and Inigo Jones, was built with a Neopalladionic sensibility enmeshed in a theatrical, picturesque garden.  The house itself appears in tight order with Palladio’s refined

architectural conventions of symmetry, classic proportions, and use of rustication. This austere dereference to the earlier Renaissance and Roman sensibility exists to be revealed

and approached within the naturalistic landscape and curving paths “blurring distinctions between the composed and the natural, between art and nature” (Bergdoll 76). Far beyond

the novelty of Italy and Europe, this concept of exoticism sparked interest among the high class in England who began “borrowing landscapes”, and even times, to incorporate them

into their garden schemes, otherwise known as “exotic follies” (Ingersoll and Kostof 589-590).  From artificial ruined arches that harken the sublime to Chinese pagodas and pseudo

Greecian temples, Stourhead Garden by Henry Hoare, and Henry Flitcroft indulged its patrons to travel through time and space uncovering “souvenirs of antiquity…and the

imaginary futures of utopian blueprints,” (Bergdoll 73).  These casually continental gardens promoted the reunion of the nature of man with his acquired worlds, and nature itself; a

narrative which underlaid revolutionary social and political movements to come (Ingersoll and Kostof 586).  Jean Jacques Rousseau, a luminary of the French Revolution and

romanticism proposed that man is, above all, both good and an individual.  He found such places agreeable to his sensibilities, for within the respite of the English garden “objectivity

gives way to subjectivity, the universal to the individual;” it could be a place that stood apart from the “constraints of governments and social traditions,” if only in the realm of

imagination (Pierson 7) (Bergdoll 73).  After all, not even Arcadian gardens could be detached from guiles of social exclusivity.  

Discovering one’s nature is an unsuspecting journey taken on by the best of men riddled with those distinctly human sensations of terror, awe, love, and all the nuance in

between.  No better is self-realization showcased than wandering throughout an English garden.  Its exhibits and paths may seem disparate or unfamiliar depending on where one

stands, but such “irregularity [is] the result of changes over time rather than a unitary design,” just like man’s legacy (Bergdoll 75).  Every day, each turn of a corner is seen in “a new

light as an object of aesthetic experience,” bringing one closer to man’s truest nature.  

Works Cited

Bergdoll, Barry. European Architecture. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, pp.73-85.

Ingersoll, Richard, and Spiro Kostof. World Architecture: A Cross-Cultural History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013, pp. 586-591. 

Pierson, William. “Technology and the Picturesque, The Corporate and the Early Gothic Styles.” American Buildings and Their Architects, Vol II, Doubleday & Company Inc, Garden City, New York, 1978, pp. 7-15. 

Trachtenberg, Marvin, and Isabell Hyman. Architecture from Prehistory to Post-Modernism: The Western Tradition, Prentice-Hall, 1986, pp. 388-404.