Describing Italy as "the only region of the earth that I truly love," James Fenimore Cooper used the style of picturesque impressionism to convey his vision of Italy as the microcosm of an ordered and a beautiful world.

In theory, the picturesque style of writing could produce verbal sketches that embodied a visual complexity similar to that of the great Baroque and Romantic landscape paintings. In practice, the hundreds of travel books written in the picturesque style in the early 1900s communicated rapturous enthusiasm with blurred or even false reports of actual scenes. Cooper, with...