The Enlightenment: Taste, Feeling and the Sublime
In the 18th century the question of beauty moved from the work to the viewer. What is taste, and can it be right or wrong? At the same time aesthetics acquired its name, the sublime was set alongside the beautiful, and ancient Greece became a new ideal for art and architecture.
Classicism had asked which rules a work must follow in order to be beautiful. The thinkers of the Enlightenment started from the other end: what happens within us when we experience something as beautiful? Behind the shift lay the new empirical philosophy. John Locke had argued that all knowledge comes from the senses, and many philosophers now asked whether beauty too must be understood in terms of our sensations and feelings. In France the Abbé Du Bos wrote as early as 1719 that the public judges art by feeling rather than by reason, much as one tastes a wine. The word taste, which basically denotes one of the simplest senses, became the century’s key term for the capacity to judge art. Du Bos spoke of a kind of sixth sense that immediately decides whether a work moves us, and he held that the public often judges more surely than the professionals, who get caught up in details and rules.
At the same time the public sphere of art was changing. In Paris the academy regularly exhibited its members’ works in the Salon Carré of the Louvre, and the Salons drew a broad public. In London a market grew for prints, periodicals and exhibitions, and journals such as Addison’s The Spectator wrote about the pleasures of the imagination for an educated readership. Art was no longer judged only by the court and the academy but by a public that debated in coffee houses and newspapers. The question of taste therefore also became a social one: who has the right to judge? In 1712 Joseph Addison divided the pleasures of the imagination into the great, the uncommon and the beautiful – an early forerunner of the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful that became so important later in the century.
In Britain Lord Shaftesbury gave the question a moral turn. For him beauty, goodness and truth were at bottom the same thing, and human beings have an inner sense that perceives harmony both in art and in actions. Francis Hutcheson turned the inner sense into a theory: we perceive beauty immediately, without reasoning, and what pleases us is uniformity amidst variety. In The Analysis of Beauty (1753) William Hogarth tried to show that an S-shaped, undulating line is the foundation of beauty. Shaftesbury’s ideas about a national taste also mattered for architecture: the circle around Lord Burlington launched a return to Palladio and Inigo Jones, an austere English Palladianism in deliberate contrast to the splendour of the Baroque. At the same time the English landscape garden emerged. In parks such as Stowe and Stourhead, Le Nôtre’s straight axes gave way to winding paths, lakes with irregular shores, temples and viewpoints. The garden was meant to resemble a landscape painting by Claude Lorrain or Poussin and to arouse feelings and associations, not merely to display order.
David Hume brought the question of taste to a head in the essay Of the Standard of Taste (1757). Beauty is no quality in things, he wrote, but exists in the mind that contemplates them. Yet we rightly say that someone who ranks a mediocre poet with Milton has bad taste. Hume’s solution is that the standard lies with good judges: people of delicate sentiment, practice, experience of comparison and freedom from prejudice. Their joint verdict, and the works that have pleased in all ages, provide a yardstick without beauty becoming an objective property. Hume also conceded that some differences cannot be settled. At twenty Ovid may be one’s favourite author, at forty Horace and at fifty perhaps Tacitus, and such differences of age, temperament and the spirit of the times are blameless. The standard of taste applies to what can be compared, not to everything.
In Germany the development ran through rationalist philosophy. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten wanted to give sensory knowledge – what we perceive clearly but indistinctly, as when we recognise a melody without being able to explain it – a science of its own. He called it aesthetics, after the Greek aisthesis, perception, first in a dissertation on poetry in 1735 and then in the work Aesthetica (1750–1758). For him beauty was the perfection of sensory knowledge. The word quickly caught on, and from the late 18th century it denoted the philosophy of beauty and of art. Baumgarten’s pupil Georg Friedrich Meier spread the ideas in German textbooks, and philosophers such as Moses Mendelssohn developed the discussion further. German philosophy thus acquired a field of its own for what the British called taste, but with greater systematic ambitions.
At the same time the idea of the fine arts took shape. In 1746 the Abbé Charles Batteux brought music, poetry, painting, sculpture and dance together under a common principle, the imitation of beautiful nature. Architecture and eloquence he placed in an intermediate group, since they combine utility and pleasure. The great French Encyclopédie, which Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert began publishing in 1751, took up the system and spread it. There Diderot wrote of beauty as the perception of relationships, and from 1759 he reviewed the Paris Salons. He disliked the charming painting of the Rococo, as inaugurated by Watteau with The Embarkation for Cythera and carried on by Boucher, and called for an art that moves and improves. He found truth in Chardin’s still lifes and moral force in Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s family scenes, such as L’Accordée de village (The Village Bride, 1761).
The most important novelty was the sublime. Longinus’ idea, which Boileau had translated, became in Edmund Burke a theory of the emotions. In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) he drew a sharp distinction between two kinds of experience. The beautiful is small, soft and smooth and arouses love. The sublime is vast, dark, obscure and powerful and arouses a kind of pleasurable terror, as long as we ourselves are safe. Storms, mountains, ruins and infinity became aesthetic subjects. Piranesi’s imaginary prisons, the Carceri, and the architect Étienne-Louis Boullée’s designs for a gigantic spherical cenotaph to Newton (1784) show how architects took up the idea of greatness, darkness and overwhelming masses. The same taste for the obscure and terrifying appeared at the beginning of the Gothic Revival: from 1749 Horace Walpole remodelled his villa Strawberry Hill in medieval style, and in 1764 he wrote The Castle of Otranto, the first Gothic novel.
Against the lightness of the Rococo a new ideal grew up in the 1750s: Greek antiquity. The excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii had aroused fresh interest in antiquity, but it was Johann Joachim Winckelmann who gave the movement its programme. Greek art, he held, is characterised by noble simplicity and quiet grandeur, and the only way for the moderns to become great is to imitate the Greeks. In architecture the Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier similarly went back to origins. In Essai sur l’architecture (Essay on Architecture, 1753) he proposed the primitive hut, with tree trunks as columns and a pitched roof, as the model for all architecture, and he advocated free-standing columns instead of decorative pilasters. Soufflot’s church of Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, later the Panthéon, was an attempt to realise such ideas. In 1761 Winckelmann’s friend Anton Raphael Mengs painted a Parnassus on the ceiling of Cardinal Albani’s villa in Rome, one of the first programmatic works of Neoclassicism. And when James Stuart and Nicholas Revett began publishing their measured drawings of the buildings of Athens in 1762, architects for the first time had accurate models from Greece itself.
The Laocoön group became a meeting point for the debates of the age. Winckelmann saw in the priest’s controlled suffering an expression of Greek greatness of soul. In 1766 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing replied that the explanation lay rather in the nature of the art form itself: a sculpture showing a screaming face becomes ugly, whereas Virgil in his poem can let Laocoön scream. Visual art works in space and poetry in time, and they therefore have different limits. Lessing’s essay is an early attempt to define the specific nature of each art – an idea that recurs right up to 20th-century modernism. Lessing also opposed descriptive poetry, which sought to paint landscapes in words, and allegorical paintings that had to be read like texts in order to be understood.
The ideas spread rapidly across Europe, including to Sweden. The sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel lived in Rome from 1767 to 1778 in the international circle where Winckelmann’s thinking flourished, and his Faun (1774) combines the ideal of antiquity with a new, sensuous naturalness. Gustav III brought him home as court sculptor, and the Gustavian style in furniture and interiors shows how the new ideal of antiquity reached even the drawing room.
Around 1780 several of the century’s threads came together. Jacques-Louis David’s The Oath of the Horatii, exhibited at the Salon of 1785, combines Winckelmann’s austere antiquity, Diderot’s demand for a morally serious art and Poussin’s clarity. At the same time a philosophical question remained unanswered. The thinkers of the Enlightenment had shown that taste rests on feeling, but also that we claim others ought to agree with us. How can a judgement be both personal and universally valid? That was the question Immanuel Kant took up in the Critique of Judgement in 1790. The Enlightenment thus left two answers that seemed irreconcilable: the British emphasis on feeling and taste, and the German attempt to make sensory knowledge a science. Kant’s book can be read as an attempt to unite them.