Picturesque Reconsidered and Preserved

In this essay the picturesque is discussed not so much for its own sake, as in terms of the mutable attitudes towards it from the eighteenth century to the present. From a first debate in which romantic attitudes penalised the formalist rules indicated by William Gilpin, and after some aesthetic assessements which considered it impure and inferior, the essay moves toward recent discussions of the picturesque within the realm of cultural studies, within the culture of tourism and more recently of visual studies: the result shows that this much discussed category is still at the centre of the debate on landscape, environment and its representation.