The philosophy or cultural movement that places the highest emphasis on the human individual and his or her interests and accomplishments. The credo of the Greek philosopher Protagoras that "man is the measure of all things" epitomizes this outlook.
picturesque
In general terms, seeing and representing nature as if it were a pleasing picture; more specifically, the aesthetic movement in England and North America in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that sought to create landscape art and design characterized by charming subjects, playful variety, and pleasing asymmetrical arrangements.
Sublime
A state of mind, valued by nineteenth-century romantics, wherein nature at its most passionate and powerful is experienced as awesome and terrifying but simultaneously inspiring and exalting. The romantic way of seeing and representing nature as Sublime is visualized in J. M. W. Turner's painting Rain, Steam, and Speed and in Frederic Edwin Church's painting Niagara.
pictorialism
A movement in vanguard photography at one with the symbolist aesthetics of the late nineteenth century that emphasizes the artistic (pictorial) possibilities of the camera's imagery. Turn-of-the-century photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Gertrude Kasebier considered themselves pictorialists and strove for formal beauty, suggestive moods, and poetic truths in their work.
