Dabney Townsed 
Aesthetics and the Representation of Discovery 
I 
Aesthetics in its philosophical sense has its origins in the seventeenth 
and eighteenth century rationalist and empiricist assertions of the primacy 
of individual experience. The details of this have been worked out in the 
last thirty years by scholars such as Je rome Stolnitz and George Dickie,1 and 
we have come to an increased appreciation of the complexity of those ori-
gins. In particular, concepts of taste, aesthetic experience, and the emer-
gence of an aesthetic attitude have their origins in the primacy of individual 
perception in epistemology, in the emergence of individual feeling and emo-
tion as legitimate parts of value systems, and in the turn to the natural sci-
ences as the model for explanation. 
The systematic linkage between science and aesthetics is obvious in 
many instances. Both Leibnizian rationalism and Newtonian empiricism find 
their aesthetic counterparts in A. G. Baumgarten's »aesthetics«2 and Francis 
Hutcheson's »sense of beauty«3 respectively, for example. From these philo-
sophical investigations there has emerged a parallel recognition of the cul-
tural shifts that shape this modernist aesthetic. Taste as a metaphor for aes-
thetic perception and value can be linked to renaissance art theory. The 
1 Stolnitz,J. (1961). »Of the Origins of 'Aesthetic Disinterestedness'.« Journal of Aesthetics 
and Art Criticism 20 (winter): 131-143. Stolnitz, J. (1961). »On the Significance of 
Lord Shaftesbury in Modern Aesthetic Theory.« The Philosophical Quarterly 2 ,43 (April): 
97-113. Stolnitz, J. (1961). »Beauty: Some Stages in the History of an Idea.« The 
Journal of the History of Ideas 22, 2 (April-June): 185-204. Stolnitz, J. (1978). »The 
Aesthetic Attitude' in the Rise of Modern Aesthetics.« Journal of Aesthetics and Art 
Criticism 36 (Summer): 409-422. Dickie, G. (1984). »Stolnitz' Attitude: Taste and 
Perception.« and Stolnitz,J. (1984). »The Aesthetic Attitude in the Rise of Modern 
Aesthetics - Again.« The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (Winter): 193-208. 
Dickie, G. (1974). Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. Ithaca, Cornell 
University Press. Dickie, G. (1996). The Century of Taste. Oxford, Oxford University 
Press. 
2 Baumgarten, A. G. (1954.). Reflections on Poetry (Meditationesphilosphicae de nonnullis 
ad poema pertinentibu). Berkeley, University of California Press. 
3 Hutcheson, F. (1725). An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. 
London, J. Darby. 
Filozofski vestnik, XX (2/1999 - XIVICA Supplement), pp. 259-200 191 
Dabney Toiunsed 
individualism of reformation theology and the political breakdown of divine 
authority motivate a move away from religious and court patronage in the 
direction of a more mercantile art world. Critical notions of history go hand 
in hand with the rise of the novel as a fictional form of historical narrative. 
Individual experience of nature finds its expression in a desire for the pic-
turesque, which in turn helps shape the aesthetic categories of expression 
and imagination that lead to romanticism. The details of aesthetics as a 
philosophical language and as a mode of awareness can be traced in almost 
every level of culture f rom the lending library and reading public to the 
world of landscape gardening. 
Among the areas yet to be adequately explored, however, is the inter-
relation of aesthetics with the process of discovery. Several aspects he re 
deserve attention. First, philosophers such as John Locke, who provide the 
empiricist foundations for aesthetics,4 are actively involved in the entrepre-
neurial aspects of discovery. Locke, in his role as advisor to the first earl of 
Shaftesbury, provides the political foundation as well as participating as a 
director in the Carolinas colonization. The connection with aesthetics here 
may at first seem tenuous, but it becomes clearer when one examines the sty-
listic and architectural elements in starting a new town or plantation. Just as 
landscape gardening provided a model for assimilating nature to the new 
aesthetic of sense and sensibility, so the new world provides a means of turn-
ing Newtonian mechan i sm and invention into aesthetics expressions. 
London's squares and Edinburgh's New Town set the model for the aesthetic 
assimilation of an urban environment. The carefully laid out towns of Charles-
ton and Savannah are works of art whose material is the new land itself. 
Second, the fascination with travel literature, both actual and imagined, 
brings discovery into literature. In much the same way that picturesqueness 
helps introduce distance into the rural landscape in such a way that land-
scape itself becomes art rather than agriculture,5 travel provides distance 
from the ordinary and thus aestheticizes the otherness of the world. The step 
to imagined and impossible voyages (Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver, for 
example) is the logical aesthetic extension of this fascination with the new 
and physically distant. 
4 Townsend, D. (1991). »Lockean Aesthetics.« The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 
49, 4 (Fall): 349-361. 
5 Barrell, J. (1990). »The Public Prospect and the Private View: The Politics of Taste in 
Eighteenth-Century Britian« in Reading Landscape: Country- City-Capital Ed. S. Pugh. 
Manchester, Manchester University Press: 19-40. Townsend, D. (1997). »The 
Picturesque.« The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, 4 (Fall): 365-376. 
260 
Aesthetics and the Representation of Discovery 
A particular exemplification of this impulse can be found in the history 
of cartography and the place of maps in the popular culture of the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries. Discovery both produces and relies on map mak-
ing, and map making, in its turn, evolves in the context of mathematically 
sound science. Latitude, longitude, and projection are the cultural equivalent 
of freeing perspective and color f rom religious iconography in renaissance 
painting. Even in the most utilitarian maps, there is an underlying aesthetic 
of fascination with and thrill in the unknown and new combined with a scien-
tific attitude toward geographical knowledge and information. 
E. H. Gombrich sets out an important contrast between maps and pic-
tures: »Maps are normally designed to impart information about the invari-
ant features of an area, in other words they leave 'appearances' on one side. 
There are no maps of Vienna in moonlight or of the museums out of focus. 
Nor would it be welcome if maps aroused unexpected visual sensations such 
as flicker. . . .We speak of reading a map, and its foremost requi rement is 
indeed that it should be as distinct as possible. Where such differentiation 
fails the use is put in jeopardy.«1' But maps are not independent of the con-
ventions of representation by which they are read. So maps, like pictures, 
depend on background information. But in contrast to some ways of regard-
ing pictures, maps serve to correct an extreme relativism about representa-
tion. »The great variety of styles we encounter in the images of past and 
present civilizations cannot be assessed and in terpre ted without a clear 
understanding of the dominant purpose they are intended to serve. It is the 
neglect of this dimension which has suggested to some critics that the range 
of representational styles must somehow reflect a variety of ways in which 
the world is seen. There is only one step f rom this assumption to the asser-
tion of a complete cultural relativism which denies that there are standards 
of accuracy in visual representation because it is all a matter of convention.« 
Gombrich continues »Once more it is useful at this point to refer to the 
example of the map. For it is hard to be completely relativistic about maps. 
There can be mistakes in maps which can be systematically rec t i f ied . . . . This 
technique [surveying], moreover, has nothing to do with the way the world 
is seen, for the surveyor who wants to map the invariant features of a region 
can and will never rely on that elusive guide, his visual impression of the 
landscape.«7 Thus maps have an informational function and a representa-
tional function. They differ from pictures in not relying on appearances, but 
6 Gombrich, E. H. (1982). »Mirror and Map: Theories of Pictorial Representation.« 
The Image and the Eye. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 183. 
7 Reinhartz, D. (1997). The Cartographer and the Literati-Herman Moll and His Intellectual 
Circle. Lewiston, MA, Edward Mellen Press, 188. 
261 
Dabney Toiunsed 
they share with pictures our need for prior information about the keys and 
conventions if we are to read them accurately. 
The analogy between pictures and maps used by Gombrich reveals the 
duality in the representational qualities of maps. They are not limited to their 
informational function. The interesting question is whether this is simply 
comparab le to any uti l i tarian object becoming an aesthetic object , or 
whether there is something specifically in maps that plays a role not only in 
their own aestheticization but in the conceptualization of the aesthetic more 
generally at the point in time - the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries -
that philosophical aesthetics takes shape. I think that the latter is the case. 
II 
The dual aspect of objects such as maps leads inexorably to the sepa-
ration of the aesthetic and utilitarian that slowly and gradually takes place 
in the eighteenth century on a broad scale. David H u m e and Adam Smith 
still regard beauty as having its roots in function and use, but by the end of 
the century, beauty is »all ye know and need to know.« It stands alone once 
again as it did in its Platonic forms, but now it is located wholly within the 
sensitive realm of individual feeling. 
One aspect of the separation of the utilitarian and aesthetic can be seen 
in the way that maps are produced and used. Color serves the funct ion of 
delineating areas, but its appeal goes beyond its utilitarian function because 
the map becomes an item of display. If one examines a typical late medieval 
map of Oxfordshire , for example, one finds representat ions of villages 
crowded together so that their sole use is to reinforce the written names. 
While the representation is pictorial, it makes little allowance for display. On 
the other hand, a Herman Moll map as discussed by Dennis Reinhartz8 is a 
form of display, designed as much for the eye as for guidance in location. It 
is an example of the engraver's art. Moll is an entrepeneur with his own shop, 
engraving maps for an audience that will never use them as guides to travel 
but wants to participate in the new knowledge that they represent. Maps 
assume a decorative role; they occupy a place on the wall of the Dutch 
burgher depicted by Vermeer not only as a representation of Dutch colo-
nial expansion and wealth but also as a mark of taste. The new itself takes 
on value and confers on its owners and discoverers the kind of reputat ion 
for good taste recommended by Balthazar Gracian.9 
8 Ibid., 23-28. 
9 Gracian, B. (1945). The Art of Worldly Wisdom. New York, The Macmillan Company. 
262 
Aesthetics and the Representation of Discovery 
In renaissance painting, flora, fauna, and landscape come to play an 
important role in exhibiting color and form for its own sake ra ther than its 
religious and mythical significance. What begins as background becomes 
eventually itself the object of the painting. An eye for detail and direct ob-
servation of nature so that individual plants and places can be identified 
transform painting into an individual exhibition of knowledge, skill, and 
taste. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the decorative embroi-
dery of maps draws another element, the newness of the unknown and its 
subordination to exploration and conquest, into the aesthetic realm.10 While 
this is only one aspect of the aestheticization of nature, it exemplifies par-
ticularly well the way that aesthetic categories emerge f rom the seventeenth 
and eighteenth cultural shifts in economy, science, and philosophy. 
Out of these shifts in cultural perception and intellectual assignment 
of evidential importance emerges Immanuel Kant's concept of the aesthetic 
as a fully disinterested form of pre-theoretical and pre-practical intuition. 
»Interest« is a complex concept, however. Jules Lubbock points out one 
complication in the development of different concepts of »interest.« Lub-
bock distinguishes between an emerging market economy based on com-
petitive consumption and the earlier economy based on a »stable but pros-
perous rural economy.«11 In the latter economy, consumption by the landed 
gentry was a public obligation. Both private and public interest had to be 
defined differently than they are in the economy of competitive consump-
tion. Lubbock observes: »It seems incorrect to say that the difference be-
tween then and now is that the 'concept of a great nobleman serving the 
public for duty rather than gain' did not then exist. There is strong evidence 
of a sense of duty amongst leading statesmen and lesser gentry. But perhaps 
they did not possess our clear-cut distinction between the public interest and 
the private interest of a leading figure who was a member of the government. 
This blurring of distinctions is clearly seen in Burghley's gardens, one of the 
rare arts in which he seems quite genuinely to have delighted, so much so 
that one of his few relaxations was to travel round his gardens on a donkey. 
Such gardens as these were ornamental , ' the purest of human pleasures ... 
the greatest refreshment to the spirit of man ' but they also had a scientific 
and commercial importance.«12 For Burghley, private consumption was a 
public obligation. In contrast, a new distinction between public and private 
interest develops in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Interest is con-
10 See, for example, the Sheldon Tapestry map of London mentioned by Jules Lubbock. 
Lubbock, J. (1995). The Tyranny of Taste. New Haven, Yale University Press, 82. 
11 Ibid., xiv. 
12 Ibid., 68-69. 
263 
Dabney Toiunsed 
ceived as private interest, and public interest must be defended as disinter-
ested in the private sense. One may not profit f rom public responsibility, but 
one is also not privately obligated to spend for the public good. Public life 
and private character are separated in away that disturbed the third earl of 
Shaftesbury.13 Public, moral disinterestedness continues to develop into the 
notion of »aesthetic distinterestedness« that is finally fully conceived in the 
early nineteenth century. 
Utilitarian objects such as gardens and maps appeal both to the eye and 
the ends for which they are made. But the complex relations of personal, 
individual pleasure, private interest, and public interest introduce tensions, 
particularly when private and public interest are separated by the market 
economy. Lubbock argues that »good design« - the valuing of an object for 
its quality and style - is dependent on an ideological conservatism that seeks 
to stabilize society by maintaining class distinctions and an agrarian, non-
commercial economy. A new taste for mass-produced goods that appeal to 
a more common taste and the economy that makes them affordable to a 
wider group promotes the commercial interests of London against the coun-
try and of the lower and middle classes against the luxury-affording aristoc-
racy. 
What follows for a range of art objects and objects of pleasure is that 
in order for them to continue to serve their aesthetic function, they must 
be distanced from their utilitarian functions because aesthetic appreciation 
brings them into conflict with the commercial economy and its new way of 
distinguishing between private and public interest. In that economy, instead 
of luxury being a social obligation so that wealth will trickle down to the 
peasantry, luxury must be justified by its own ends. That cannot be done if 
its social consequences are considered. Esoteric, individual pleasure conflicts 
with social need. The demands of the masses threaten the social stability 
based on landed obligations to consume so that others might work. If one 
belongs to the rising classes, then luxury is increasingly seen as the illegiti-
mate ends of the ancient regime that exists at the expense of the lower and 
middle classes. If aesthetic pleasure is to be retained by anyone, it must be 
reconceived as an end in its own right, f reed f rom the interest of ei ther 
luxury or utility, and that is just what the rise of modern aesthetics does. 
What this means, of course, is that while aesthetic pleasure is a reality 
in both earlier and later ideologies, and in fact may be fairly close to a uni-
versal wherever the exigencies of survival permit, our conceptualization of 
13 See, for example, Cooper, A. A. Earl of Shaftesbury (1964). »The Moralists: A 
Philosophical Rhapsody« in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. J. M. 
Robertson. Indianapolis, Bobbs, Merrill. II. 
264 
Aesthetics and the Representation of Discovery 
it as disinterested and autonomous - the root meaning of »aesthetic« that 
emerges f rom the eighteenth-century theories - must be viewed with some 
skepticism. Whether one is considering gardening or maps, the utilitarian 
and aesthetic are not independent of each other nor of the context in which 
they emerge. They are, if one will allow a bit of jargon, different actualiza-
tions of possibilities inherent in aesthetic objecthood. 
The case of maps is especially clear. A map is at once a picture and a 
guide. It is used to plan such things as gardens and new towns — to map out 
a landscape - and it is used to provide travel directions and conceptual 
schematizations of a world not immediately known. As a picture, a map in-
vites embellishment and imagination. Herman Moll drew maps not only of 
real places but of imagined ones. A map's representative funct ion is satis-
fied best by making it a thing to be viewed, and that easily includes viewing 
it independently of its guiding function. 
But as a guide, it also is a conceptual scheme. The importance of dif-
ferent projections depends both on how they make the map look and the 
information that they can convey. Before satellites, no one actually was able 
to view the patterns and topography of the earth. How lands and routes are 
conceived requires a symbol-system for the mind to employ. When the un-
known is labeled, »there be dragons,« more than simply a confession of ig-
norance is implied. One is moving into the chaos of the ill-formed f rom the 
cosmos of the ordered world. Neither as picture nor as guide is there any 
conflict between the functions and the pleasure that eventuates f rom a pic-
ture and f rom the ordered conceptualization of space. The purely utilitar-
ian aspect of a travel guide may be served as well by an unembell ished map 
as o n e ar t ful ly co lo red and d e c o r a t e d , bu t the util i ty itself involves 
conceptualization. One does not simply travel f rom A to B but f rom Lon-
don to Edinburgh - places of the mind as much as geographical locations. 
The tensions arise because conceptualization itself is no t neutral. Terry 
Eagleton is right to remind us that the aesthetic autonomy that results is not 
itself autonomous.1 4 One factor in the larger picture of middle-class, mer-
cantile appropriation of the symbols of power and art that contributes to the 
aestheticization of the middle class's own material interests can be found in 
maps used for display and decorated for aesthetic effects. Everyone can 
adopt this symbol of power and conquest without having to consider the 
actual consequences of colonial and mercantile conquest.15 If a map becomes 
14 Eagleton, T. (1990). The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 3. 
15 In the same context, and as a part of the same aesthetic movement, one might consider 
Thomas Lawrence's portrait of Queen Charlotte - at once a royal portrait in the 
tradition of court painting and a representation of the German hausfrau, stripped of 
regal trappings. (It is also an entrepreneurial effort on Lawrence's part that failed.) 
265 
Dabney Toiunsed 
a symbol of the breaking out of the old world into a wider new world; if it is 
connected with the making of new fortunes, independent of the old order 
and the old landed assignments, if it is an instrument of commerce and thus 
opposed to the stable, agrarian society longed for by the old order, then 
thinking in terms of maps and what they show is a threat to that old order. 
If a map belongs to a class and an economic ideology, then it is never just 
an autonomous conceptual structure. To hang a map on the wall or to use 
it as the cartoon for a tapestry is to make a statement, to identify oneself with 
the aspirations of the explorers and commercial interests that depend on 
its information. But it does so in a way that does not require the risk and 
danger of exploration, any more than the fictional worlds of the novel re-
quire one to experience the real vicissitudes of society. Tom Jones would 
certainly be hanged in that world. 
Yet as a picture and as an ordering device, a map cannot be limited to 
a single ideology. The kind of reductionism that would make any symbol 
noth ing more than an expression of some political or economic ideology 
ignores the phenomenology of the aesthetic. To save the aesthetic, there-
fore, one must move the symbol f rom its ideological and utilitarian setting. 
That is already implicit in the detachment that arises from display. To hang 
the map on the wall, to include it in a painting, to weave it into a commer-
cial product is already to detach it f rom its basic informational and utilitar-
ian function. Thus the aesthetic in its modern signification emerges f rom 
the tension between what the map is and what it must be in order to be 
enjoyed. 
That too results in a conceptual ideology, however. Modern aesthetics 
is no t a simple analytical detachment. The promotion of the aesthetic as an 
autonomous realm is a »saving of the appearances« that is fundamental ly 
in conflict with its own origins. The result is the kind of nineteenth-century 
aestheticism and twentieth-century anti-social and avant-garde movements 
in art and philosophy that deny the context of the object. Ultimately, such 
de tachment makes the aesthetic irrelevant and unable to fulfil the expres-
sive funct ion assigned to it. If we cease to care what maps are maps of, they 
cease to be maps. Then not only the utilitarian function but the enjoyment 
that belongs to their aesthetic appeal is lost. 
Ill 
What is needed is to extract from this economic, political, and ideologi-
cal mix a coherent philosophical argument as well. A first a t tempt at that 
266 
Aesthetics and the Representation of Discovery 
might consider that maps and other forms of symbolic appropriat ion of the 
trappings of upper-class power are a form of symbolic action along the lines 
of speech-act theory or the theory of conferral advocated by George Dickie.16 
They serve not merely to represent, as Gombrich argues, bu t also to create 
a relationship between an audience and what becomes a form of expression. 
The imitative aspect of maps, found in their utilitarian funct ion to repre-
sent invariant properties, gives them legitimacy as forms of representation. 
But imitation theories of art belong to the ideal world that supports the 
aristocratic power structure. The rights of the aristocracy are based on a 
complex chain of being that gives legitimacy to their right to rule. For the 
new map-makers and map-users, however, the maps work to shift power to 
those who appreciate them. They empower the ent repreneurs , and they 
allow others to exhibit them and participate vicariously in this expansion of 
the world. As such, it is not their imitative possibilities but their expressive 
ones that are important. It does not matter much to the aesthetics of maps 
whether they are accurate or not. It matters a great deal how they look, in-
cluding what they are taken to bring forward. An imaginary landscape will 
do as well as a real one if the object is to express and evoke feelings, so 
Salvatore Rosa, Claude Lorraine, and the seventeenth-century Dutch genre 
and landscape painters create the kind of landscape that will be picturesque. 
Gardens imitate art. Maps work the same way. They create an imaginary 
world of expansion and feelings of excitement. Then bourgeois life imitates 
art in this respect as well. 
Underlying this analysis is something impor tant about the relation 
between representation, fiction, and the functioning of language and sym-
bols. I have argued elsewhere (without much success, it must be admit ted) , 
that metaphors and fictions work by creating quasi-imperative rules that 
guide the player - that is, the person who seeks to understand something 
metaphorical or to participate in a fictional world - and that those impera-
tives take precedence over the normal structure of indicative description and 
assertion.17 One of the basic powers of symbolic construction is this kind 
imperative activity that both establishes and teaches the rules by which one 
is allowed to understand a world. Because those rules are both constrained 
by reality and subject to modification arbitrarily within limits, they account 
for the dual nature of metaphors as at once non-literal and legitimate forms 
of speech. Similarly, they account for our ability to instantiate fictions and 
16 Dickie, G. (1974). Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis. Ithaca, Cornell 
University Press and (1984). The Art Circle. New York, Haven. 
17 Townsend, D. (1989). Aesthetic Objects and Works of Art. Wakefield, NH, Longwood 
Academic Press. 
267 
Dabney Toiunsed 
incorporate them into our emotional lives in spite of the absurdity pointed 
out by Colin Radford.18 
I now suggest that in the transitional period when aesthetics becomes 
aesthetics in its modernist sense and ceases to be the neo-Platonic theory of 
beauty, the transformation of symbols of power by quasi-utilitarian forms 
such as maps, gardening, and royal portraiture act as part of this larger sym-
bolic construction. They provide forms by which one is enabled to play the 
games coherently in a new way. Or, to adapt Dickie's vocabulary, they are 
part of the institutional shift that confers authority on one part of symbol 
users to establish new ways of using old symbols and creates new symbolic 
forms as well (e.g. the novel and the reading public, the bourgeois theater 
in place of the masque, history instead of allegory, etc.) Unlike Dickie's ear-
lier versions of the institutional theory, I argue that not jus t anyone can prac-
tice this conferral. The authority required comes from the economic and 
material realities of a culture. But what is created as a result of that author-
ity is itself implicated in an expanding ability to practice such conferral and 
to establish the rules of the metaphorical and fictional games. Those meta-
phors, fictions, and symbols, reciprocally, empower that portion of a culture 
that creates them. 
The important thing is to recognize that this is not simply a cultural 
relativism. It all takes place within very real constraints. Some of those con-
straints are physical - as physical as the plague that undermined the medi-
eval synthesis or the map-maker's surveys. Other constraints are economic, 
the no less real constraints of the theories and systems of exchange and 
wealth. Art exists in every situation thus far known to us. The aesthetic theo-
ries that arise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries supply one form 
of art and appreciation, one based on individual sensibility and aesthetic 
autonomy. That does not make that appreciation and autonomy any less real, 
however. One cannot do everything at any time. But at any time, there will 
be something that art is capable of doing. I am arguing that if we look at 
what is actually happening in the artworld in relation to its economic, cul-
tural, and social context and simultaneously at the way that representational 
and referential systems work, we will be able to see, judge, and appreciate 
the art that belongs to that particular artworld. That is at once the timeless-
ness and the timeliness of art. It is not bound by its point of creation, but it 
depends on that point for its concrete form, and without that concrete form, 
there is no art. 
18 Radford, C. (1975). »How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?« 
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 49: 67-80 and Radford, C. (1977). »Tears and 
Fictions.« Philosophy 52: 208-213. 
268 
Aesthetics and the Representation of Discovery 
Maps are thus both one of the ways that we determine what is actually 
happening and one of the clearest instances of how it can happen . It would 
have been pointless and unthinkable to treat maps as objects of decoration 
for the bourgeois until the bourgeois were in a position to change the eco-
nomic and political rules. Once they were, maps also become a means of 
advancing the new order, including a new aesthetic sensibility. One might 
compare them to what goes on with book illumination as it moves f rom sa-
cred to royal and then profane contexts and finally issues in the traveling 
libraries and reader subscriptions of a reading public. The aesthetics of dis-
interestedness and aesthetic attitudes is at once the reality and the ideology 
of that new, modernist order. 
269