The Enlightenment and Artistic Styles
The Rococo style is dualistic in that it is both private and aristocratic and public and accessible. The aristocratic Rococo reflects the aimless lives of the privileged elite but had a sense of humor, respecting neither church nor state. Rococo art was an anti-style, rejecting the grandeur of the Baroque and aiming to simply please the spectator. With Rococo art, the grandiose Baroque became watered down to an art without serious purpose. Antiquity became an excuse not to wear clothes and to exhibit plump and pink bodies. After decades of religious strife and endless preaching, the sheer prettiness of the Rococo was a great relief to weary viewers. The Rococo was an art of sexual allure rather than solemn instruction, beautifully imagined by Antoine Watteau who pretended that life is an endless game, a fête galant for lovers who lived on a fantasy island. The world envisioned is a world of the court, where as Madame du Châtelet said, “We must begin by saying to ourselves that we have nothing else to do in the world but to seek pleasant sensations and feelings.” One can almost hear the clock of the Enlightenment ticking as it remorselessly reordered Madame’s world of pleasure into a world of democracy and equality. Today’s interpretations of the pleasures of Rococo art and the pretensions of Baroque art would have been largely lost on the actual audiences. Eighteenth Century art consisted of erotic mythologies and simple genre scenes, which existed alongside pompous history paintings as something for everyone, reflecting the rise of the public art audience who attended the art exhibitions. This new art public learned about the art by reading from the livret or catalogue.
Denis Diderot, one of the founders of the Encyclopédie, published in seventeen volumes between 1751 and 1765, used his pen to critique his age. As a hardworking journalist, Diderot used art criticism to press the cause of righteous and moral art, as seen in the genre scenes of Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Jean-Baptiste Chardin, over the licentious art of François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. The art of Chardin displayed the sober and reasonable life style of the middle class. The art of Greuze was an object lesson in morality. The middle class behaved rationally, pursing definite goals through industrious and productive work. “Reason,” Diderot claimed, “must be our judge and guide in everything.” The simple human virtues of ordinary people could be compared to the ideals of a past that existed before the current age of decadence. As opposed to the divine right of the monarchy and the nobles, another alternative morality was to be found in Nature and in Antiquity, the repository of ancient ideals and virtues.
The kind of art preferred by Diderot was moralizing and didactic. As one of the first art critics, his task was twofold, to describe the works of art to people who would never see them and to use art as a vehicle for his social ideas. Although Diderot learned about art through studio visits with the artists, his audience, European despots, who sported the sobriquet “enlightened,” were informed of French art through an internationally distributed newsletter, edited by Baron Friedrich-Melchior Grimm. The newsletter was not subject to French censorship and could freely imply a critique of the social system. The irony of Diderot extolling middle class virtues to the lusty Czarina of Russia, Catherine, is intriguing and one can only wonder what the great queen thought when she read in his review of the Salon of 1763, “First, I like genre–it is moral painting.”
In relation to the works of Boucher, Diderot wrote in 1765, “Depravity of morals has been closely followed by the debasement of taste, color, composition,” and suggested a year later that an appropriate alternative to aristocratic frivolity would be antiquity: “It seemed to me that we should study the antique in order to learn to see Nature.” But Diderot demanded more than mere stylistic servitude, “First of all, move me, surprise me, rend my heart; make me tremble, weep, shudder, outrage me, delight my eyes, afterwards, if you can…Whatever the art form, it is better to be extravagant than cold.” Although Diderot did not live long enough to witness either Neoclassicism or Romanticism, both of which are anticipated in his writings, he articulated many important concepts in his art writing with his emphasis on naïvité, which led to “primitivism” in the Realist Movement and the grand ideal of Nicholas Poussin, grand manner painting based in classicism. He advocated restraint: “Paint as though in Sparta.” Diderot believed that art should teach moral development but at the same time he believed in the idea of genius, a new idea that was beginning to circulate. Although the moral sentiments of the works by Greuze were admirable, Diderot lamented that he was “no longer able to like Greuze,” who occasionally attempted the grand manner, and preferred Chardin, who was not only morally sound but also the superior artist. Reading Diderot, one thinks of Jacques-Louis David as the Messiah of art that the critic was waiting for, but Diderot died too soon and never saw “Spartan” art of David.
The artistic period of the Enlightenment is one of transition, because intellectuals found it hard to either predict the future or to foresee the logical consequences of the newly forming ideals of “reason,” “democracy,” and “equality.” Diderot’s public counterpart, the art writer, La Font de Saint-Yenne, author of Réflexions sur quelques causes de l’état present de la peinture en France, 1757, who also took a middle path and equated the aristocrats with the ancients, was typical in his inability to imagine a form of government or society without these hereditary rulers. The aristocrats, in turn, took the prudent course of denouncing their own decadence and corruption and joined in the vogue for the “natural” by praising simplicity and order. The nobles attacked royal despotism of King Louis XVI and the Austrian Queen, Marie Antoinette, in defense of their own privileges and positions, threatened by the wayward behavior of these hapless monarchs.
The example of ancient virtue, especially the Roman virtue of the early days of the Roman Republic, provided an alternative to the current decline in social standards. Roman virtue was more than a dream, for Rome–ancient Rome–had become the climax point of every Grand Tour for every well-to-do European. Scholars and tourists inspected the ruins and artists, such as Hubert Robert and Canaletto, responded to the demand for Italian vistas with vedutas. Archaeologists explored and discovered the remains of classical civilizations, and these recoveries were made available to the public and to artists through carefully engraved reproductions. Antiquity, from the reading of Homer to the use of the ancient as a suitable subject for artists, became the order of the day from the mid-Eighteenth Century on. The stage was set for a new form of art that would more precisely reflect the Enlightenment ideals.
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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.
