Landscape Painting Into Cultural History

In a dissertation both comparative and interdisciplinary, a metaphorical understanding of historical representation in nineteenth-century Europe is explored: more specifically, the interrelationship of cultural historiography and landscape painting. The dissertation is divided into five parts.The first part is introduction, which begins with the thesis that poetic metaphor is picture-like, and there is a pictorial dimension in representation in poetic language, along with wholeness and presentness. The histories of landscape painting and cultural historiography are briefly traced, with their new developments in the nineteenth century. Then the point of view is proposed that the sense of Romantic lyric poetry in landscape painting be fully concentrated upon within a kind of imagetext, and furthermore, cultural history is an ideal place for such a research.Chapter 1 is a case study of the nineteenth-century cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt. The art historian as a kind of cultural historian, Jacob Burckhardt dwells sensitively and intensively upon the phenomenal feelings of his subject, however without particular reference to some definite causality. His idea of historical representations is developed in the tradition of painting with the humanistic heritage. Landscape painting in Burckhardt’s writings could well be understood as a metaphor for cultural historiography, and it is possible that this metaphorical understanding is without embracing the claims of post-modernism.Chapter 2 is a counterpart case study of the nineteenth-century art and cultural critic John Ruskin. The art critic as a serious thinker on cultural history, John Ruskin’s enthusiastic work on landscape painting, especially his Modern Painters is analyzed as a historical text. Issues of the relationships of landscape painting with historical consciousness, and with historical writing are treated. The point comes to that historical understanding of "seeing" in Ruskin’s way is a critical cultural history, which has a kind of methodological turn to the pictorial.In Chapter 3, contemporary theories of historiography, Hayden White’s and Frank Ankersmit’s critical works in particular are analytically discussed. Their viewpoints have furthered Burckhardt’s and Ruskin’s pictorial way of thinking of historiography. White’s model is literary text, but has an influence on art historians. Ankersmit claims for a "turn to pictures" in historical studies. It is argued that the pictorial elements in historiography should be paid more attention to, but not that the picture as the paradigm.The last part is conclusion, in which the theme of landscape painting as a metaphor for the development of historiography is outlined, along with the suggestion that it might be necessary for us to revalue the eighteenth and nineteenth-century term "picturesque". The conclusion is:the "picturesque" might be a better name for our studies on historical representation, its aesthetics and styles in the innermost.