The Enlightenment In Europe

An essay outlining the nature of the Enlightenment in Europe, focusing on the ideas and its impact on the arts in Europe in the eighteenth century.

At the beginning of the 18th century the favourable style of painting was the Rococo style. This was a highly decorative, ornate style of art, which lasted throughout the reign of Louis XV (1715-74) and spread to other countries, most notably Austria and Germany. Rococo favoured the complex swirling forms of Baroque art but was airier and more graceful, preferring pleasurable and voyeuristic subject matter. Rococo began as an attempt to reform the teaching of Classical antiquity in the Academies. It introduced sensitivity to feelings and moods, and allowed art to abandon high seriousness in favour of eroticism decoration and pleasure. Chardin and Watteau represented Rococo at its most thoughtful and insightful.
It was inevitable that a rebellion against un-reason and against the flamboyant utopian visions of these paintings, associated with the aristocratic and royal lifestyle, and intellectual bankruptcy.
18th century allied thinkers and intellectuals began to form a new rational approach, brought about the age of discovery and enlightenment. They moved away from the church, employing a secular approach based on their practical experience and observable fact. The thinking was started in Scotland and England. John Locke being the first to return the secular experience in life. David Hume took Locke’s ideas further, writing “The Treatise of Human Nature” (1739), concerning human understanding, that one cannot discover a matter of fact thought reasoning, it has to be discovered from experience. Adam Smith looked into economics theory and wealth on a national
level. Central to Enlightenment thought was the conviction that through rational enquiry a knowledge of basic laws and principles was attainable and doctrines could be formulated afresh, in politics, religion, art or any other sphere of human thought. A quest for the primitive, in the widest sense of the world, became an important element. Enlightenment thinkers tended to look for rules, standards and goals in relation to which values and social practices ought to be judged, and objective material means by which their benefits or disadvantages could be measured. Their ideas about new political concepts, new intellectual and social ideas to support the old political framework. The wanted to waken the monarchs and the church, remake the political system. They wanted to give the power to the people, this was really dangerous. New intellectuals emerged in France were called the “Philosophes”, who were informed by John Locke and other Scottish and English based thinkers. They brought together different branches of knowledge and made it as widely available as possible. “The Encyclopedie” was a compendium of knowledge that they formed, that brought a hostile and suspicious reaction from the government and was twice it was suppressed. This was the essential source of information that was courted by the progressive rulers of Europe, such as Catherine the Great of Russia. The group of thinkers included, Russo, Hume, Voltaire,
Neo-Classicism and Romanticism as movements in art were both a reflection and a reaction to this impulse. Neo-Classicism being the bi-product of the attack made by the enlightenment on traditional ways of looking and thinking, Romanticism being the antithesis. “In the arts, economics, politics, this rationalist movement turned against the prevailing practices, the ornate and aristocratic Rococo.” This call was to return to reason, morality in art, return to ancients, Rome. This had great impact on young artists, like Anton Raphael Mangs and Gavin Hamilton, who were both living in Rome. They took up the school of Poussin and the values of Renaissance artists. Balanced compositions, strong focal points, simplicity of form and extreme restraint of technique. The ancient world of Greek and Roman society was a paradigm, a model for virtue, patriotism and self-sacrifice.