6 - Picturesque Mountains
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2021
Summary
Abstract
This chapter focuses on how the geomorphology of the Dolomites, characterized by picturesque involutions and fantastic drifting, elevated them to a pictorial extravaganza on the English art market. The ‘Dolomite picturesque’ was the result of a particular response to landscape initially inscribed onto the English landscape in places like the Lake District. This chapter explores the way in which British tourists imposed on the Dolomite landscape a picturesque signature crafted at home by the poetry of Wordsworth, the paintbrush of Turner, and the spade of Humphrey Repton. The chief exemplar and source for explaining this interchange of the picturesque aesthetic and its practice is the artist Elijah Walton who exploited the so-called ‘Turnerian mystery’ to render the Dolomites iconic for the British art market.
Keywords: picturesque, art market, chromolithography, Lake District, Elijah Walton
What these noble giants want is not simply that somebody should go and look at them […] They want to have picturesque villages and church spires in their valleys; to have zigzag paths traced up their sides by the feet of succeeding generations; to have châlets built on the pastures, and terraced fields creeping up their sides.
− Leslie StephenIn the eyes of Victorian travellers, the Dolomite landscape was seen through an articulated picturesque gaze, imbued with ethnographic, feminine, domestic, and artistic ingredients, as fully formulated by Amelia Edwards (1873). Josiah Gilbert's Cadore, or Titian's Country (1869) also helped establish the Dolomites as a geographical space in which a special kind of artistic sentiment came progressively to be perceived as embodied in the landscape itself. In this chapter, the focus lies on the artistic element of this embodied sentiment, already identified by Gilbert in the art of Titian and the physicality of his native mountains, characterized by ‘picturesque involutions and fantastic drifting’ (ibid., p. 38).
This chapter argues that the ‘Dolomite picturesque’ was a particular aesthetic response to landscape, which recycled and transformed the cultural movement of the picturesque.
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- Topographic Memory and Victorian Travellers in the Dolomite MountainsPeaks of Venice, pp. 163 - 186Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020