Humanizing Visual Design by Charles Kostelnick;

Author:Charles Kostelnick;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2019-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

This picture constructs a rich cultural and social mosaic, with multiple human forms representing an amalgam of social classes and occupations in this historical moment and geographical place. The picture in Figure 4.2, Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing from the later eighteenth century, also bears the cultural language of its time and place: aristocrats enjoying the outdoors, one of them flying high on a swing hanging from a tree and tethered with a rope, while others in the party look on, gaze at the sky through a telescope (lower right), or a play with a dog in a fountain (lower left).3 The color and designs of their costumes, their flamboyant hairstyles, and their leisurely poses situate them in the late eighteenth-century, prerevolutionary world of French aristocratic culture, as does the Edenic setting with its animal sculptures, fountains, and stone balustrade in the lower right (preventing figures from falling off the hillside). The romantic grouping of the figures—mainly, attentive males reclining near seated women—also tells us something about the culture in which they are situated, where garden trysts were among the social rituals of the period. And the picturesque landscape, with its textured tree limbs in the foreground and its rough, irregular mountain and panoramic view in the background, captures an aesthetic style that was emerging during this era as human interactions with nature were being redefined, most notably by Rousseau, along the road to Romanticism.

Figure 4.2 The Swing, an eighteenth-century painting by Jean-Honoré Fragonard of a garden scene with aristocratic figures and picturesque elements. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington. Samuel H. Kress Collection.

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