This double vision of history as both an illumination, ‘the true. The activity of an historian, as described by Thomas Carlyle, is a difficult and demanding endeavour, designed to produce truths about past worlds that will enable us to interpret present and future conditions, and yet destined to be incomplete and incoherent because the manuscript of history is ultimately beyond interpretation. At such points we can recover some of the complexity and historical density that has been lost in the schematisation that has come about through translation. Translations, and particularly those that make common words into defined terms, are valuable points of historical enquiry in their own right. Thus, a level of confusion has resulted in distinguishing ‘painterly’ and ‘picturesque’, as if there was a conceptual difference marked in everyday language, rather than a difference constructed by the institutions of art history. In particular, Nikolaus Pevsner, imbued with the German tradition, wrote in his English language texts of the 'malerisch' qualities of architecture and urbanism as ‘picturesque’. Other historians did not accept the neologism. These two inflections of picturesque already existed in English usage, but to make them clearer, translations of Wölfflin since 1932 have rendered the more complex use of 'malerisch' through the neologism ‘painterly’. He defined the art historical 'malerisch' by contrasting it with the belief of naïve observers that picturesqueness was a property of objects.
In Heinrich Wölfflin’s influential account of the history of art since the Renaissance, 'Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe' (1915), he systematized 'das Malerische' as a formal value in dialectic with ‘the linear’. For historians of art and architecture this ambiguity is ramified by an issue of translation between ‘picturesque’ and its usual equivalent in German, 'malerisch'. Picturesque is a term which owes part of its historical success to its ambiguity, signifying both an origin of subjectivist aesthetics and a popular naïve taste for the rustic.
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