Classicism, Enlightenment and the ‘Other’: thoughts on decoding eighteenth–century visual culture

Abstract

Cultural historians have been slow to respond to the pictorial turn. They often find images too ambiguous to use as sources in their own right. This problem is aggravated by two characteristics shared by early modern and postmodern visual culture: both transgress boundaries of genre (such as the text/image divide), and both tend to be notoriously fluid and plural in terms of their ‘message’. The nineteenth–century Idealist notion of ‘art’, by contrast, celebrates unity of style and content, and tolerates multiple meanings only where they can be resolved in dialectical synthesis. This legacy continues to prevent us from understanding visual evidence which conforms to neither requirement. Drawing on readings of the contemporary landscape art of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Cy Twombly, this article proposes a new approach to visual culture of pre–Idealist periods, for which ambiguous allusive fields and transgressions of genre were constitutive. The eighteenth century’s use of classical culture is a case in point, here exemplified by a close reading of the multi‐layered trope of Arcadia. The conclusions that emerge from this reading call into question negative assumptions about the Enlightenment’s dogmatic rationalism which have dominated historiography from Romanticism to postmodernism. The ‘image–texts‘ of the eighteenth century destabilized hegemonic rationality without promoting its opposite, instead integrating the ‘other’ into a self–reflexive and self–critical Enlightenment ideology.

The Sister Arts: Textile Crafts between Paint, Print and Practice

“…83 Indeed, scholars such as Maiken Umbach and Sabrina Norlander Eliasson have compellingly argued that such classical allusion had an inherently social function, which transformed classical narratives 'into a fiction or a modern myth perfectly comprehensible to its audience'. 84 The evocative combination of classical references and depicted accomplishments in The Ladies Waldegrave may therefore be understood as creating a 'modern myth' of respectability, readily accessible to contemporary viewers conversant in visual and literary representations of textile crafts. Reynolds's implicit evocation of the Graces, as ratified by the portrait's numerous eighteenth-century commentators, is not only a reference to the Waldegraves' capacity to embody the trio's virtues but also functions on another level, signalling their 'sacrifice to the Graces', which identified the sisters as adherents to a predicated form of feminine gentility.…”

The Modernity of Modernism

“…These fictions were ambiguous and multipleand in this multiplicity lies the 'modernity' (or post modernity) of the Enlightenment. 119 As Umbach indicates, this altered awareness was not only a defining characteristic of the neo-classical and academic reception of antiquity, it also provided a foundation for ideas that would, in the long term, lead beyond academic doctrine and the dualism of allegorical aesthetics towards a Romantic view of the authenticity of the work of art, its organic unity and mythical origins. And, later even, towards a series of Utopian models (the avant-garde) that would overtrump, overthrow and replace one another at an ever increasing pace.…”

Correct Delineations and Promiscuous Outlines: Envisioning India at the Trial of Warren Hastings

“…123 Tensions between the claim to reproduce the real and the mode of representation are neither synthesized nor presented in a strictly dialectical opposition but derive their force from a polyvalence or plurality of meaning that has been noted in other images of the period. 124 In this sense, the contested nature of the images conjured by Hastings is indicative of a change in the meaning of the camera and its mirror around 1800, when it lost its status as a guarantee of unmediated access to empirical reality and became instead 'a metaphor for a dynamic enfoldment of opposites', a site for problematizing questions of vision and representation rather than simply modelling them. 125 Highlighting the close relationship between intervention and invention, Gillray's image anticipates the reinvention of the camera obscura as a figure of concealment and mystification.…”