Chao-Shan Hsu

The traditional version of the Acquaintance Principle (AP) requires aesthetic judgements to be grounded in direct perceptual encounters with the artwork. Nanay’s recent revision, AP**, relaxes this, permitting testimony-based mental imagery to count as genuine acquaintance. I argue that AP** confuses psycholo- gical richness with epistemic warrant. Because aesthetic properties are holistically constituted and categorially situated, grasping them requires sensitivity to what I call a configuration-response link between a work’s perceptual organisation and the response it elicits. This link is particular rather than law-like, and cannot be reconstructed from propositional information. From this I derive a corrective feedback criterion (CFC): the artwork must be in a position to constrain and revise the perceiver’s representations for the resulting judgement to be robustly justified. Testimony-based imagery fails this criterion, though it may serve a preparatory role. The criterion also supplies a rationale the AP has long been noted to lack: it shows why first-hand encounter is necessary, not merely preferable.

This article reconsiders Michael Fried’s concept of the “pastoral” in eighteenth-century French landscape painting through an examination of a central paradox in his argument. Fried maintains that the same pictorial device intended to absorb the beholder into the scene also serves to secure antitheatricality by removing any indication of the beholder’s presence. Absorption, understood in this context, presupposes the beholder’s presence in order to draw them into the image, yet simultaneously seeks to eliminate the beholder to avoid theatrical address. This contradiction remains unresolved within Fried’s model. To clarify this issue, the study shifts attention from the representation of nature to the function of the landscape figure. Art criticism from Roger de Piles to Denis Diderot consistently identifies figures as the principal bearers of dramatic meaning—a dimension that Fried’s nature-focused reading of Diderot tends to neglect. A close examination of Fried’s analyses of Claude-Joseph Vernet and Hubert Robert demonstrates that the figures in their paintings generate localised dramatic episodes within the scene—precisely the effects that the pastoral framework is intended to exclude. By foregrounding these human figures, the article proposes a revised understanding of the pastoral as a dynamic structure of viewing that coordinates immersion with dramatic tension, rather than simply erasing the beholder. In this way, the article addresses the inconsistency in Fried’s account and contributes to current debates on antitheatricality in eighteenth-century French landscape art.