Ron Broglio. Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments, 1750-1830. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2008. ISBN: 978-0-8387-5700-0. Price: US$50

The picturesque has the well-deserved reputation of being the most difficult aesthetic category to define. Its opacity is the result not only of its complex history and its many transformations since its discursive beginnings in eighteenth-century England but also of the aggregation and juxtaposition of the many different visual and linguistic forms that engage its history and transformations. As Sidney K. Robinson has written, though it is possible to theorize the component parts of the picturesque — such as mixture, artifice, and connection — or what types of responses it produces at the sensual and intellectual levels — such as uncertainty and irritability — it is still hard to say, with precision, exactly what the picturesque is. Ron Broglio’s recent book, Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments, 1750-1830, offers readers a fresh opportunity to engage with all the confusion and complexity we associate with the picturesque. The cover of this provocative study immediately affords a sense of what readers will encounter within. There one sees fancifully preserved the conventional verticality of foreground, middle ground, and background associated with the baroque underpinnings of English picturesque aesthetics, those of Salvator Rosa, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Pouissan, and Gaspard Dughet. The eye is drawn most powerfully to the middle ground, which contains a reproduction of the artwork entitled “The Innocent Eye Test” by contemporary artist Mark Tansey (1981). In this work, the most conspicuous subject and objects of observation are not humans but cows: from its position as observer in a museum gallery, a cow gazes with casual interest at a canvas of depicted cows, also placid, but differently so within the framed bucolic landscape. Human viewers standing to the left and right of the canvas and seemingly also facilitating the cow-subject’s view are variously fixated on the canvas and on this cow-subject in the act of aesthetic contemplation. As this cover art so strongly suggests, the study is less concerned to engage with the aesthetic category of the picturesque and its critical and theoretical tradition per se than with the issues of subject / object relations and the ways that the concomitant relation of nature / artifice determines or is determined by those relations. In this context, Broglio defines the picturesque exclusively as framed nature — nature under the grips of human control. His focus is to uncover how inscription technologies (writings, drawings, paintings, maps) “attempt to make sense of things in nature.” The following two questions guide the trajectory of this book: “How do art and technology function to shepherd nature within the picturesque? Additionally, where does nature resist such wrangling by human hands?” (15). Broglio’s method of response is to synthesize the very different philosophical work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Gilles Deleuze in order finally to theorize instances in the context of the Romantic period that abandon subject-object distinctions in favor of a form of dynamic interplay between humans and nature, an interplay that ultimately replaces the subject-object duality with the immersion of humans with non humans — animal, vegetable, and mineral alike. His goal is to foreground and then theorize how to heal what he takes to be deep wounds inflicted simultaneously on human beings and on nature by human artfulness. Human art, which Broglio understands as the efforts of technologies of art (such as painting and poetry) and technologies of science (such as cartography, meteorology, and medicine), is defined by its goal to “measure” and “represent” (16) nature. Such work both promotes and facilitates transformation of “the ‘stuff’ found in nature into simple, distinct objects with characteristics humans can understand” (15). Such …