This book provides a Renaissance art historian’s view of how the picturesque aesthetic developed from roots in the sixteenth century (mostly in painting, but with ramifications for printmaking, landscape design, and architecture), and further, how the picturesque aesthetic fundamentally changed the relationship between art and nature, between viewer and image. The book's argument is based on wide reading of obscure yet piquant critical texts, mostly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, together with consideration of varied works of art, ranging from Fra Angelico to Raphael and Michelangelo, and from Rubens to Canaletto, and from James Gibbs to Jacques Demy, all of them studied not for their place in the history of style, but for their spatial imagination.

Patricia Emison is Professor at the University of New Hampshire, USA. She is the author of several books on the Italian Renaissance, including The Italian Renaissance and Cultural Memory (2012), a book on the discipline of art history, The Shaping of Art History (2008), an introduction to the history of art, Art and its Observers (2022), and a book on the history of film, Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History (2021).