| Sumario: | This article discusses aspects of artistic inventio in landscape painting in the 17th and 18th centuries with a special interest in the changing role of the cultural understanding of memory and its growing influence on art theory. The main focus is on two discourses about artistic invention -an artistic anecdote by the Dutch painter and theorist Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678) that is part of his treatise on painting Inleyding tot de hooge schoole der schilderkonst (1678), and the blotting system, which the English landscape painter Alexander Cozens (1717-1786) presents in New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (1785/86). The article argues that while the earlier text already reflects an increasing awareness of a fundamental shift in traditional concepts of human memory, the latter one finally demonstrates new paradigms of scientific systematization, which gave rise to a different model of creative imagination.
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