JAPANESE ROBES, SHARAWADGI, AND THE LANDSCAPE DISCOURSE OF SIR WILLIAM TEMPLE AND CONSTANTIJN HUYGENS

摘要

Dutch state secretary, diplomat and poet Constantijn Huygens (1596-1687) saw his garden Hofwijck as the embodiment of a comprehensive philosophy. It departed from Vitruvius as a classic, geometric foundation that framed the irregularities he observedin human life as well as in free natural growth. In his poem on the garden he illustrated these ideas by pointing to the irregularity of design within the symmetrically cut Japanese robe. English statesman and essayist Sir William Temple (1628-99), of the generation of Huygens's son, Christiaan, was a regular visitor to Hofwijck and elevated the appreciation of irregularity in the garden to a personal judgement, a taste for which he introduced an aesthetic term 'sharawadgi', again of Japanese origin. This paper introduces their discourse in relation to the Dutch fashion for the Japanese robe, and demonstrates how observations of nature and incoming arts from the Far East played a role in the seventeenth-century departure from the fixed frames of Renaissance classicism towards a more enlightened understanding, including the birth of a picturesque taste in landscape art.