Julia Sandstrom Carlson
University of Cincinnati
Water, earth, sky, and animals? At first glance, one of the four sections into which Technologies of the Picturesque is divided seems unlike the others. We come quickly to recognize, however, that the likeness of “animals” to the other categories lies in its also being an object of picturesque vision: one of the basic “elements of nature” (15) encountered, perceived, and composed in visual art according to the rules of picturesque aesthetics. Water, earth, sky, and animals are the basic vocabulary of the picturesque. Yet, as Ron Broglio shows, Romantic artists were not alone in representing these objects and fitting them to human use; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientists and surveyors encountered and inscribed the same elements according to their particular technological, cartographic, agricultural, and immunological agendas. In six tightly focused chapters, the author compares artistic and scientific encounters with nature, their tools and epistemologies, and their respective effects on human subjectivity and sense of space. Crossing disciplinary divides consolidated only after the Romantic period, Broglio brings to light the reliance of poets and artists on the technologies of scientific endeavor and, conversely, the employment by scientists of picturesque principles and tools. Both sorts of optical projects and systems made chaotic nature “legible” to humanity but in doing so enforced a Cartesian divide between human perceiver (eye, mind) and nature (body, matter) that materially distanced human beings and the environment.
Drawing on recent cultural-studies research and contemporary science studies, the book examines inscriptional technologies associated with nationally significant events of measuring the four featured elements of nature. Chapters consider the development of an accurate method for determining longitude at sea, the Ordnance Survey of Britain, the scientific classification of cloud types for weather prediction, and the selective breeding of cattle along with the principal tools these projects employed, including lunar charts, William Harrison’s H4 clock, the triangulation survey and map, the theodolite and measuring chain, cloud nomenclature, and the bodies of cattle and grazier guides. Broglio strikingly pairs these technologies of measurement and representation with the tools and aesthetics of picturesque tourism, prospect poetry, cloud paintings, and cattle portraiture, exposing thereby the analogous and sometimes mutually reinforcing effects of art and technology: both transform nature into culture, render the opaque thing an intelligible object with an economic or aesthetic use value, cultivate a possessional subject position, and abstract the perceiver from the visible scene. But Broglio does not stop here. In movingly persuasive sections throughout the book, he considers Romantic counter-currents to optical hegemony: instances of phenomenological encounters with nature that refigure relations between the human and the environment. Haptic engagements with nature in Wordsworth’s poetry, encounters governed by the sense of touch rather than sight, and durational depictions of nature in Constable’s painting, which prioritize time over figural space, offer radical constructions of subjectivity and space overlooked in other studies of the picturesque. In Wordsworth’s and Constable’s “bending” (20) of the picturesque aesthetic, Broglio locates an alternative syntax that distributes thought and agency across human and environmental entities. With increasing force as the book proceeds from “Water” and “Earth” to “Sky” and “Animals,” Broglio challenges ecocriticism’s assumption of a stable Romantic subject that pre-exists encounters with nature.
“Part I: Water” recounts the mid-eighteenth-century government-sponsored competition over the most accurate means of determining longitude at sea, comparing Nevil Maskelyne’s astronomical to George Harrison’s mechanical methods. Broglio argues that the determining of longitude by means of Harrison’s mechanical clock produces a worldview parallel to that of the picturesque tourist. The late-eighteenth-century navigator who looks to the face of the H4 clock performs an “inward turn” (29) away from the sea and the night sky to human-made instruments; this epistemological orientation toward the face of the mechanical object is reflected by the representation of abstract geometric lines upon globes and charts. Similarly, the picturesque tourist navigates by means of a cluster of inscriptions and tools (Claude mirror, picturesque poems, paintings, and guidebooks) that collectively produces a “syntax”: a set of compositional rules that render the land intelligible (43). While the grammar of picturesque landscape produces a worldview that values human representations of nature more highly than actual surroundings, tool use distributes cognition across “bodies, minds, and machines” (39).