Part I

When the 18^th century began, the robust vigor of the grand style of Louis XIV was diminishing. By the end of the 18^th century, America and Europe were caught up in the passions of Revolution, which were to end three centuries of absolute monarchy. The Enlightenment grew out of the Age of Louis in the 17^th century and led to the era of Revolutions at the end of the 18^th century. To understand the Enlightenment as a style of life and of art, we must understand its heritage and foundation – in the Baroque. The grandiose Baroque style of the 17^th century – its flamboyance and drama gave way, in the 18^th century, to the lighthearted Rococo.

Rococo art was decorative – the last phase in a long history of artistic embellishments for the nobility. It was an expression of the refined tastes of the aristocracy. To these people, life was beautiful and gay. They wanted more than anything to enjoy themselves, to give pleasure to their friends, and to collect the luxurious objects, which made them feel gay, rich, and important. However, the Rococo style represents only one aspect of the 18^th-century art. Some of the most important ideas of the time were not expressed by the Rococo style. Instead, these ideas could be found expressed in the geometric, rigidly symmetrical, and formal plans of the palaces and gardens of Europe. The artistic father for these splendid palaces and gardens was the greatest palace of the 17^th century – Versailles.

Louis XIV made Versailles into a splendid stage for his personal theatrical production – the absolute rule of France. Dazzling in their vastness, the palace and grounds were planned in such a way that King Louis seemed to be imposing geometric order upon his world. The buildings, fountains, and garden pads all spread outward from the center in precise and measured harmony. In every foot of their manicured hedges, the grounds of Versailles express the idea that man controls his world through reason and intellect. What greater control over nature could man demonstrate than this? It is a garden of tropical orange trees all planted in pots, so that they could be brought indoors in cool weather. This, indeed, was man creating an orderly universe. Versailles is a combination of two great intellectual and artistic traditions: the splendor and dramatic scale of the 17^th century along with the geometric order of that century.

The reign of Louis XIV represents the triumph of absolute monarchy. His success was so dazzling that all the princes of Europe wanted to imitate him. Gorgeous palaces and gardens were built throughout France, Germany, and England. The aristocracy of all of Europe spoke French and followed French customs and dress. They sponsored whole armies of artists who could make gorgeous objects like those they had seen at Versailles.

Let us go back in time, to look at the two major traditions and styles of the 17^th century. The Baroque vision of the world expressed itself with an art that was dramatic, flamboyant, dynamic, stupendous in scale, and filled with restless, swirling, curving and diagonal forms.

Another face of Baroque art in the 17^th century was turned toward a world of calm intellect and order. On the left is the painter Peter Paul Rubens. And on the right is another painter, Nicolas Poussin. What do these two self-portraits show us about the Baroque age? Rubens uses sweeping circles and eclipses to generate a sense of action in his composition. Poussin, on the other hand, fills his background with vertical and horizontal lines. He sets himself against rectangular picture frames, thereby giving his composition an orderly, geometric appearance.

In this Baroque landscape, the sky is filled with a stormy turbulence. The land is dramatically shadowed by the threatening clouds. Poussin’s world is populated by the heroes and buildings of classical Greece and Rome. His landscapes are calm, reasonable, and orderly. Is this not nature succumbing to the artist’s rational control? It was the dramatic and flamboyant in the Baroque, which developed into the Rococo style. On the other hand, the world view of intellect and order was also carried on into the Age of Enlightenment.

During the 17^th century, great discoveries in the sciences opened up new areas of knowledge. Galileo, the astronomer, built a telescope in 1609. With it he could see that the planets had substance, like the earth, and that the stars were much farther away than man had thought.

Isaac Newton explained all movement, on the earth and in the heavens, according to a mathematical formula.

In this way, the rigid order of a mathematical proof was imposed on human existence. The 17^th-century scientists made the discoveries. It was for the 18^th-century writers, known as philosophes, like Denis Diderot, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Voltaire, to popularize the difficult theories of the scientists. The philosophes made the new marvels of science understandable and exciting for everyone. One of the most significant accomplishments of the philosophes was the publishing of an encyclopedia. Denis Diderot was the editor. He gathered articles on every subject, written by experts, thus creating in his 34-volume encyclopedia a collection of all the knowledge of the time. The encyclopedia was important as a reference work. It was also important because it expressed throughout its pages the belief that all knowledge was within man's grasp and that, with knowledge, man could create a better world for himself.

Men of the Enlightenment were dissatisfied with traditional ideas and religions. They rejected what they felt to be the old religious superstitions and filled their need for faith with a profound belief in the perfectibility of man through Reason.

The confidence of 18^th-century man was boundless. Never before or since has there been such a widespread and profound belief in man and his ability to make progress towards a better life. The Enlightenment faith in reason and perfection is reflected in one of the most significant movements in the arts - called Academicism.

Academicism included a respect for authority. Artists and architects relied upon rules and principles that were rigidly enforced by the heads of the academies in England and France.

Poussin was such an academic authority under Louis XIV. His Shepherds in Arcadia shows the contrived composition and classical subject matter, which were so highly regarded by the academic painters of the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Obviously, the most important yardstick for the French academics was the art of classical antiquity - the art of the ancients. The civilization of the Greeks and Romans was looked upon as a model and was translated into formulas for art. Nature was seen mainly through the eyes of classical reason and order.

Joshua Reynolds, a famous English painter of the 18^th century, wrote: "We must have recourse to the ancients as instructors… It is from a careful study of their works that you will be able to attain to the real simplicity of nature." We have seen that 18^th-century aristocrats encouraged a love of luxury. To satisfy them, artists created works of beauty and gaiety in the Rococo style.

But we have also talked of the 18^th-century faith in orderliness and in reason, above all. 18th-century philosophers viewed the world as a perfectly working machine, like a fine clock. They looked upon God as a kind of watchmaker in the sky, overseeing the complex workings of His orderly creation.

Part II

18th-century artists and philosophers concerned themselves with the attainment of clarity and orderliness. This desire for an orderly universe reminds us of the Renaissance. The values of the Renaissance – admiration for order and inspiration from classical antiquity – were also very important to the artists of the Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is a direct outgrowth of the scientific inquiry into the physical world begun in the Renaissance. This is an anatomical study by Vesalius, a Renaissance scientist.

In Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson, the gentlemen are looking at an open volume of an anatomy text at the foot of a cadaver. It is identified as one written by Vesalius. Thus, Rembrandt, a 17^th-century painter, illustrates the continuity of the scientific interests of the Renaissance with those of the 18^th century. The spirit of scientific inquiry in the Enlightenment reached extreme limits when an elegant 18^th-century lady kept a cadaver in her carriage to study anatomy in her spare moments. To Enlightenment artists, the Renaissance served as model and formula. Raphael was particularly respected. His classical subjects and use of geometric perspective and symmetry appealed to the system-loving intellects of the Enlightenment. The spirit of the Enlightenment, in its balance and symmetry, is reflected in Newton’s third law, which says that to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction. It is no coincidence that Montesquieu, an 18^th-century philosopher, called for a symmetrical government of checks and balances! This was the logical outcome of faith in man’s reason and of the reaction against the unbalanced, powerful absolutist monarchies of Europe. The political and scientific ideas of the Enlightenment were discussed and debated in the fashionable salon, the 18^th-century equivalent of the modern cocktail party. The salons were conducted by well-known ladies like Madame de Pompadour. In her salon, the brilliant gathered to hear Voltaire’s wit or to listen while the child Mozart played the piano or to chat with that delightful American, Benjamin Franklin, who succeeded particularly in charming the ladies.

Some painters of the 18^th century, like Watteau and Fragonard, illustrated the decadence of the aristocracy, as they danced and flirted away their lives in the years before the Revolution. However, many of the intellectuals and artists of the period held an increasing interest in the middle and working classes. These painters, like Chardin, avoided the frivolous, decorative style of the Rococo. They chose instead clear and simple compositions, selecting charming middle-class children as their subjects or a carefully arranged domestic still life, like this one. The longing for simplicity, which these works reflect, was a reaction to the pomp of the court.

Jean Jacques Rousseau was to have great influence, even on Queen Marie Antoinette, in his writings advocating the simple, country life. The Queen had a country village imported and assembled on one corner of the grounds at Versailles. There she and her court could play at being shepherds and milkmaids. They could dress informally and behave naturally, without having to assume the artificial manners of the court. The 18^th-century interest in Nature may be traced back through European history in an uninterrupted flow, at least to the Middle Ages. However, 18^th-century artists, as artists of all periods, looked upon nature in their own way. The view of nature held in the 18^th century is reflected both in Marie Antoinette’s farmhouses, which express the longing for a simple, innocent country life, and in these complex hedges, with their suggestion that man is able to control the world through Reason.

During the Renaissance, artists sought to control their world through the use of perspective. This pursuit of an orderly, mathematical universe comes to full flower with the scientific theories of Newton on one hand and these clipped hedges on the other. This ordering of nature reached an amusing extreme in the garden mazes and labyrinths on the estates of the nobility. Not all mazes were in gardens, however. The love of intellectual puzzles in the 18^th century could also be found in the complex musical compositions of the times.

An example of this is the chamber music composition called, “The Musical Offering.” It was written by Johann Sebastian Bach for King Frederick the Great. Frederick was King of Prussia and played the flute rather well. He composed a flute theme and gave it to Bach, asking him to write some variations on it. Bach, like Diderot, had an encyclopedic mind. He used all kinds of musical language to write his “Musical Offering.” He began with Frederick’s flute theme. He then proceeded to write 13 different units: each one a variation on this same theme; each one with the same basic melody; but each one quite different from every other. They are a series of brilliant intellectual inventions. Let us listen again to Frederick’s theme, which opens “The Musical Offering,” and then see what Bach does with it. This music is built like the rounds we all sing, but is much more complicated. Musicians describe these techniques with words like fugue, canon, or ricercar. The word fugue means chase, and we can hear the melody being chased by the same melody, only played a little later, and by a different instrument. The word canon means rule or law. The whole composition is a skillful use of musical rules in a variety of ways. Bach’s love of musical structure, his scholarship, his encyclopedic ambition, all combine to identify him as a man of the Enlightenment. Just as nature has been a constantly recurring theme in European history, so the interest in classical antiquity appears again and again.

In the arts, classicism during the 18^th century meant the attainment of the highest standards of beauty. Thomas Jefferson was an architect as well as a farmer and politician. He designed the University of Virginia with the buildings of ancient Rome in mind. The statehouse of Virginia, at his suggestion, was modelled after a Roman temple called the Maison Carrée. Jefferson said of the building that he could sit gazing whole hours at the Maison Carrée, like a lover at his mistress.

This is an office building, designed by a French architect of the 18^th century. And this is a temple in Italy, built during the 5^th century BC. The ancients were important in the politics of the Enlightenment as well. The philosophers of the Enlightenment were dissatisfied with their political situation – a corrupt and all-powerful monarchy. They looked to Greece and Rome, especially Republican Rome, for the model of a better government. We have seen that the men of the Enlightenment had great confidence in their ability to reason out their problems. And we have talked of Montesquieu, with his opposition to absolute monarchy, and his suggestion of a government of checks and balances. King Louis XV said, in 1766: “The supreme authority is vested in my person alone, the legislative power is mine, public order stems from me – I am its highest representative.”

However, Jean Jacques Rousseau, in his Social Contract, observed about conditions in the 18^th century that “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.” And he continued by suggesting that the best kind of government should be based upon an agreement between the people and the ruler – the people giving the ruler his power in exchange for his promise to do their will. In 1775 the “shot heard ‘round the world’” was fired. The American Revolution was to have an electrifying effect on the Europe of the absolute monarchies. What the Americans had done – and done successfully – was to shift the responsibility for government to the shoulders of all the citizens. American state constitutions and the Declaration of Independence were translated into French. We hold these truths to be self-evident (Nous tenons ces vérités pour évidentes…) That all men are created equal (…que tous les hommes naissent égaux…) that they are endowed… with certain unalienable rights… (qu’ils possédent certains droits inaliénables…) that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (… parmi lesquels nous comptons la vie, la liberté , et la quête du bonheur…).

The paintings of Jacques-Louis David were to have special meaning for Frenchmen, inspired by the Americans. He chose subject matter from Greek and Roman history. Appropriate to the time, his paintings carried a propaganda message. Finished in the crucial year 1789, this painting entitled The Lictors Bringing Back to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons suggests that if this Roman consul could make the supreme sacrifice of condemning his own treacherous sons to death, then Frenchmen should also make great personal sacrifices for the causes of liberty, fraternity, equality. The political philosophy of the Enlightenment was given inflammatory purpose by David. In his Oath of the Horaces, painted in 1784, the subject was again from Roman antiquity. The three brothers pledge to fight and to die for freedom and the Roman Republic. The women weep at the thought of their patriotic sacrifice. No Frenchman could mistake the message! The Age of Enlightenment had begun basking in the glories of King Louis XIV’s Court. But in its love of luxury, its fascination with science, its pursuit of the world of ideas, it forgot to listen to the cries of the common man – for equality and justice. The Age of Enlightenment ended in dismay – with the rising up in violence of the new forces for reform – for REVOLUTION!