Part V

The enlightenment

The enlightenment

Historical Background

Welcome to “History through Art”. Today we’ll be looking at the history, art and culture of the Age of Enlightenment. The age that began about 1715, was characterized by debate and thought about the issues of equality, freedom, and individual rights. It was the age that inspired America’s Declaration of Independence, but we’ll come back to that later.

As you know opposites often co-exist, and this was true during the Enlightenment in Europe. By 1700, royalty and lesser nobility were busy with their ornate, flamboyant life-style, as illustrated in Baroque paintings. Soon the even more decadent Rococo style emerged. But not everyone had this superficial outlook on life. One group, the common people, was becoming increasingly irritated with the oppressive and insensitive life-style of the noble classes. Another group, the scholars of Western Europe – especially those of Britain and France – reacted to the nobility by developing a new philosophy, based on reason and on the value and rights of people and of their relationship to their government.

Political philosophers, such as John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, and Baron de Montesquieu, were influenced by the events of their time. One was the ill treatment of the average citizen by absolute monarchs such as King Louis XIV. Another influence was the work done in the 1500s and 1600s by scientists and mathematicians such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Descartes. The scientists taught the philosophes, as they were called, to think and observe objectively and to rely on the considerable abilities of human beings to solve problems. This, in turn, convinced them that rule by the people would be better than rule by absolute monarchs, such as Louis XIV and better than rule by the authoritarian Catholic church, whose pronouncements about how the universe actually works had proved inaccurate.

Within this radical viewpoint lay the seeds of revolution. And, indeed, Revolutions did occur. In England, the Revolution was peaceful – but glorious. In 1688, Parliament invited William and Mary of the Dutch Netherlands to take England’s throne on the condition that they support a bill of rights of English citizens that limited the power of the monarchy. It wasn’t long before American political activists began to resent the fact that rights accorded to Englishmen in England were denied to colonists. Eventually, these injustices led to the American Revolution in 1776 – and it was John Locke’s ideas of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that Thomas Jefferson incorporated into the Declaration of Independence.

Less than fifteen years later, America’s revolutionary thinking and action returned to Europe to inspire the French Revolution in 1789. But these weren’t the only revolutions. The Scientific Revolution that began in the 1600s brought new inventions to Europe. Eventually these fueled the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s, which brought millions of people from the farms to the cities. This revolution had enormous impact on city life. In general, the rich got much richer, the poor got much poorer, and a new middle class began to form. Enlightenment thinkers, faced with the Industrial Revolution’s social problems, optimistically believed the problems could be solved with reason.

Composers who wrote in the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods are now called Classical. Their work often reflected the beliefs of both eras. Composers, such as Haydn, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, reflected the Enlightenment in elegant, carefully constructed, logical symphonies that produced breathtaking emotional effects. Enlightenment artists and architects were inspired by these ideas of humanism, by mathematical reason, and by the patterns of nature, as well as its innocence. You’ll see this in the poignant but heroic drawings of common people, in the layout of the Versailles gardens, and in the peaceful landscape paintings produced at this time.

Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher of the age, once said, “The motto of the Enlightenment [is] ‘Dare to Know! Have the courage to use your own intelligence.” While this motto fueled both the thinkers and the artists of the age, it remains an inspiration to us today.