THERE WAS NO DISTINCTIVE Enlightenment style in the arts. The eighteenth century lived amid a profusion of tastes, techniques, and subject matter; aesthetic ideas and ideals changed and traveled, amalgamating with traditional and foreign styles to produce hybrids and new species. “There is at present,” Hogarth said in the early 1750s, a “thirst after variety.”1 The mixture ranged from late baroque to nascent romanticism, each style with its domestic coloring and differing from art to art and decade to decade. It was further enriched by the invasion of bourgeois sentimentality, fads for Chinese or Gothic motifs, and repeated neoclassical revivals, differentiated one from the other by the models it appealed to and the individuality it permitted itself. And none of these styles was the domestic, or privileged, style of the Enlightenment.
The taste of the philosophes was as varied as the taste of their age. Voltaire admired Racine and detested Richardson; Diderot admired Racine and Richardson, and Voltaire as well; Lessing attempted to free himself from Racine and Voltaire, but not from Diderot. Lessing and Diderot wrote dramas in the naturalistic manner of their contemporaries, while Voltaire persisted in writing tragedies in the neoclassical manner of the seventeenth century. Hume and Jefferson had highly developed, if conventional neoclassical tastes; but while Jefferson hailed “Ossian” as a great poet, Hume exposed him as a fraud. Kant, who, like almost everyone in the Enlightenment, loved the Latin classics and Alexander Pope alike, found music irritating and painting boring—an engraving of Rousseau was the only picture in his house. Neoclassicism, rococo, naturalism, indifference to, and even, with Rousseau, a certain Spartan suspicion of, the arts, were all possible aesthetic positions for philosophes to adopt, and were all compatible with the philosophy of the Enlightenment.
While the philosophes did not agree on what they liked, they agreed on what they disliked—the Gothic—but even this did not markedly differentiate them from other civilized men of their day. Lessing and Winckelmann, Montesquieu and Turgot, Hume and Rousseau detested Gothic as disorderly, capricious, affected, overloaded with detail, rigid, graceless, dull, and barbarous. Diderot, who was, after all, surrounded by some of its finest productions, could ask rhetorically, “How can one admire a Gothic tapestry after one has seen a Raphael?”2 But half a century before, Addison had employed the name “Gothick” in his Spectator as a general term of abuse signifying “tasteless,” and distinguished between ancient writers, with their “majestick Simplicity” and “Strength of Genius,” and lesser writers, compelled to “hunt after foreign Ornaments”—“Goths in Poetry.”3 A distaste for Gothic early in the eighteenth century, therefore, was no mark of radicalism; men who did not equate “Gothick” with Christians disliked it as much as those who did. If anything, the philosophes’ consistent rejection of Gothic finally placed them, rather awkwardly, in a reactionary position: while, at mid-century, a growing historical awareness and a new readiness to find beauty in the unfamiliar permitted Thomas Warton and Thomas Percy to rescue medieval romances from contempt, and Horace Walpole in England, Jacques Germain Soufflot in France, and, a little later, Goethe and Herder in Germany, to reverse the current appraisal of Gothic, the philosophes never permitted themselves to see what the new defenders of Gothic saw—lightness, boldness, inventiveness, and, hidden behind fantastic incrustations, a splendid order. Ironically enough, then, their philosophical radicalism seduced the philosophes into aesthetic conservatism. It never occurred to them that one might appreciate the art of Christians without surrendering to their myth. The Enlightenment’s incurable aversion to Gothic, therefore, illustrates not the connection between art and enlightenment but the baleful influence of dogmatism on taste.
To be sure, traffic between the Enlightenment and the arts was heavy and unimpeded. The philosophes did not hesitate to turn their fictions into vehicles for their program: Voltaire wrote his Mahomet and Lessing his Nathan der Weise to dramatize the horrors of fanaticism and to inspire tolerant sentiments; Wieland and Diderot wrote stories and novels that, more than expressing, candidly preached the virtues of pagan sensuality. And in return, artists reflected enlightened ideas in their work. Handel composed his music in the confident spirit of the secular craftsman, as remote from religious fervor as any philosophe; he preferred pagan to Christian, and worldly to religious subjects. Gluck reformed the opera in the name of reason and nature, and Mozart, whatever his precise religious ideas, imported Masonic notions into his compositions. Hogarth, hostile to the religious enthusiasm of the Methodists and sympathetic to the rationalistic Whiggish Anglicanism of Bishop Hoadly, popularized in his celebrated cycles of engravings the enlightened values of industry, sobriety, and humanity. Januarius Zick paid his tribute to modern science with a complicated allegorical painting celebrating Newton’s Service to Optics. And Goya painted his Caprichos to “banish harmful vulgar beliefs”; he was a rationalist who hailed Voltaire as an immortal.4 None of these artists was a philosophe, all had learned much from the enlightened ideas current in their day.
This interplay documents the obvious: the philosophes were embedded in the antique tradition that held art to be a moralizing and civilizing force, and eighteenth-century artists, far from being recluses or illiterate artisans, lived in the world; many of them were bound to share its more advanced ideas. There were, after all, many artists who had other, rather less revolutionary ideas: for every deist Handel there was a devout Bach, and while Hogarth could not stop improving the public, Fragonard and Boucher obviously felt no obligation to purify the morals of their contemporaries.
At the same time, while metaphorical descriptions of rococo as “free” and the sonata as “rational” are merely facile, parallels between the ideas of the philosophes and the productions of the artists are clues to a new temper. The connection between art and enlightenment was close, the relevance of enlightenment to art enormous. Artists, art criticism, and art theory were, like the civilization of the eighteenth century and its philosophy, under great strain; they were in search of self-awareness, of new ground on which to stand. This was the century in which philosophers first undertook really systematic inquiries into the philosophy of art; the very word “aesthetics” entered the language in the age of the Enlightenment, with Baumgarten’s writings. It was the century that, although it lived in the shadow of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century masters, found it necessary to question what it admired. The Christian myth, once and until recently a fertile source for plays, paintings, and poems, now appeared less credible, and less creditable, than before. Conflicting boundary claims and new genres were threatening accepted categories in poetry and drama, in painting, sculpture, and architecture. A new interest in the psychology of artistic creation and taste was confronting traditional canons of beauty. The whole neoclassical machinery, in other words, was under attack. Neoclassicism had taught that art is scientific, moral, orderly, and refined, capable of developing objective standards, and improving, as it entertained, its public. It required strict separation of genres, the three unities of time, place, and action in the drama, obedience to hierarchies in painting, with historical painting at the top and still lifes at the bottom, and the imitation of nature without coarseness. These ideals continued to find support, and even their opponents treated them with marked respect. But at the very least, neoclassicism required clarification and redefinition in the light of the new philosophy. In aesthetics, as in all areas of thought, the age felt the need to be clear, to reconcile the desire to conserve with the desire for independence, to synthesize freedom and discipline. “The philosophical spirit which has made such progress in our times and has penetrated all the domains of knowledge,” Algarotti observed in 1756, “has in a certain manner become the censor of all the arts.”5 In raising urgent questions about itself, in leaving nothing untouched by criticism, the arts were moving toward intelligent self-appraisal, toward enlightenment—in the Enlightenment’s company.
THE ENLIGHTENMENT developed its ideas on the arts not in some secluded realm of abstract speculation, but amid social struggles and social change. The interplay between the artists’ efforts to escape the need for deference and the aestheticians’ efforts to construct a modern philosophy of art was often obscure and unexpected—a conservative dramatist like Voltaire, for instance, had radical plans for raising the status of literary men; and in contrast an innovating composer like Haydn served his lordly patrons with becoming docility—but the interplay was there, and it was important.
The most eloquent witness to this connection between social ideals and philosophical inquiries is probably the sculptor Falconet, for many years Diderot’s friend; no artist joined more closely than he the campaign for new dignity to the campaign against old theories. Falconet served the cause of Enlightenment more disagreeably than anyone else, but his morose energy reflects not simply his neurosis but quite as much the frustrations facing eighteenth-century artists.
If, then, Falconet had more enemies than he needed, most of them were the right ones: snobs, presumptuous amateurs and connoisseurs, and “anticomaniacs”; his writings and activities read like a point-by-point refutation of them all. While Falconet rose to fame and prosperity, and found royal favor in France and Russia, he paraded his lowly origins, his hard-won erudition, and his philosophical friends ostentatiously and humorlessly, as if to prove that anyone, even a Falconet, could become a learned artist. This learning was of a special kind: the artist, he insisted, is a scholar in his own way, and not in the scholar’s way—in the course of his arduous apprenticeship he acquires arcane information inaccessible even to benevolent outsiders, and this should protect him from the dictates of the rich and the derision of the well-educated: when someone dared to suggest that the ancient Romans had esteemed works of art but despised the artist, Falconet found the man’s “arrogance and pedantry” simply “contemptible,” and answered that the ancient Romans, as a civilized people, had of course honored arts and artists alike.
Much to his dismay, Falconet discovered that there were men of letters—his obvious potential allies—who enjoyed their own improved status so much that they refused to share it, and instead mercilessly ridiculed painters and sculptors for their illiteracy. And wealthy art lovers, it seemed, persisted in treating artists as lowly workmen whose fate they could decide, whose subjects they could dictate, and whom they could buy with their commissions. In reply, Falconet argued that artists are not mere artisans who work by rote and for money, but civilized men who work for their pleasure and glory. And he reinforced his position with some grand gestures: when the Russians negotiated with him about a statue to Peter the Great, they offered him a number of possible designs, but Falconet took the risk of losing his commission by rejecting them all and by insisting on freedom of action which, he said, was wholly indispensable to him. And when he finally secured the commission and was offered four hundred thousand livres, he demanded that he be paid only half that sum.6
The most devastating enemy of modern artists and modern art, Falconet believed, worse than the ignorant amateur or the selfish littérateur, was the anticomaniac—the politics and the philosophy of art join hands at this point. Anticomaniacs, in Falconet’s savage portrait, were rich amateurs in whom stupidity was reinforced by arrogance; idlers who returned from Italy laden with bits of antique sculpture, or expensive drawings of ancient temples, anxious to outdo their social rivals with their collections. They sought to bring modern art into contempt, but succeeded only in arousing contempt for the antiques they worshipped. “Modern artists,” Diderot observed, agreeing with Falconet, “have rebelled against the study of antiquity because it has been preached to them by amateurs.”7 In ostentatious contrast, fighting his private version of the battle between ancients and moderns, Falconet claimed the right to worship as a free man: “I want to look at the idol before I kneel down.” There were some praiseworthy ancient sculptures, doubtless, but most ancient art was inferior to the best modern work: “We owe Greece,” he wrote, “so many masterpieces and so many foolish things.” And the anticomaniacs overlook these sottises, and, blind to the defects of antique art—its lack, in most instances, of variety, grandeur, harmony, grace, intelligence, correctness in proportions and perspective—impose false standards on modern artists and blight their productivity.8
Even philosophes sympathetic to Falconet’s causes did not think that the burdens of deference and of the past could be cast off by inflammatory rhetoric alone. At the same time, the philosophes, many of them artists and friends of artists, found themselves by and large in Falconet’s camp: the artist’s claim to dignity as well as artistic freedom was a kind of test case for their ideal of an open society, in which low birth did not matter and talent was rewarded for its own sake. This is the meaning of Voltaire’s passionate lament for his former mistress Adrienne Lecouvreur, France’s leading tragedienne, who had died young in 1730 and was, as an actress, refused the last rites and buried in unhallowed ground. The verses Voltaire insisted on publishing after her death and the letters he wrote to his friends are, in the highest degree, political: “Whoever has talents is a great man in London,” while in France he is despised. In England, where the actress “Mlle Oldfield” had been buried in Westminster Abbey, Adrienne Lecouvreur would have found her tomb “among wits, kings, and heroes,” but in France her “body was thrown into the sewer.”9 Voltaire drew the largest possible conclusions from this contrast: England is free, France a land of slaves, England is bold, France the victim of superstition. Though personal in feeling and hysterical in tone, Voltaire’s rage exemplifies the close ties between the arts, the artist, and the Enlightenment.
Yet the incident was more a survival than a foretaste. Rather like eighteenth-century men of letters, eighteenth-century artists enjoyed their own recovery of nerve, which was, on the whole, unprecedented.10 I say, “on the whole,” for while the artists’ struggle took the same direction as that of the writers, and had the same goal, it was much less decisive. Alexander Pope’s and Samuel Johnson’s declarations of independence had the trumpetlike clarity of a revolutionary manifesto; in the arts, independence was declared more often and less firmly, and besides, there were artists who persisted in preferring dependence to autonomy.
While the social emancipation of the artist had begun in the Renaissance, and while seventeenth-century artists had made contributions to it, the social revolution initiated in the Italian cities early in the sixteenth acquired irresistible momentum only in the eighteenth century. Renaissance artists had revived antique notions about divine madness and the privileged position of the creative process. They had exacted respect for their individuality, which they defined as respect for their creative genius, their financial needs, and their oddities: late in the sixteenth century there were even complaints that painters who were by nature neither melancholic nor eccentric came to affect both melancholy and eccentricity, because these were the trademarks of the fashionable artist. The combat between Michelangelo and his patron, Pope Julius II, had the epic stature of a battle of giants; in the seventeenth century, Bernini re-enacted Michelangelo’s career on a somewhat lower level, patronizing his highly placed patrons, while Salvator Rosa assiduously cultivated his prickly genius and claimed, in language anticipating late-eighteenth-century artists, that he painted solely for his own satisfaction and only when he was seized by creative rapture. And from the beginning of the seventeenth century, artists had tried to stabilize their situation; they showed their works to call attention to their particular talents, and organized themselves into academies that would free them from medieval guild restrictions, raise their prices, enhance their social status, and honor their claim to be practicing a “liberal art.” But these efforts were fitful and relatively futile. The legendary careers of the divine Michelangelo and the only slightly less divine Bernini could furnish no guides for more mortal artists: these men were too extraordinary to invite emulation. Rubens, diplomat, humanist, entrepreneur, a genius of legendary energy and versatility, was similarly beyond envy; he seemed more like a natural force than a practical model. Rosa, with his outspoken cranky campaign for artistic independence, was a lonely and admittedly eccentric outsider, with little influence and no direct descendants. Exhibitions were few, unorganized, and usually held to celebrate a saint’s day or a historic local event rather than an artist. Dealers were for the most part exploiters of lesser talents. As soon as he could afford to do so—that is, as soon as he found a patron—a promising painter or sculptor left his dealer, never to return. By the 1650s, the French Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture was well organized, generously endowed, and under august protection, but it substituted a new slavery in place of the old; the Paris Academy defeated the restrictive guilds in the name of royal authority, established a monopoly for selected artists, trained students in one style—the style approved at Court—and tied the artist to absolutism. “While dignity and freedom were the motto of the struggle in the Cinquecento,” writes Nikolaus Pevsner, “it was now dignity and service.”11 Academies were not enough; what was needed was a shift in ideals and conditions, and both were provided in the age, and partly through the efforts, of the Enlightenment.
The relations of the eighteenth-century artist to his publics, much like his relations to ideas, were extraordinarily diverse. They depended not solely on the wealth of potential customers, dominant social attitudes, the vagaries of taste, or the efficiency of the censor—though they depended on these as well—but on the very medium in which he worked: the painter of humble genre scenes or the craftsman who built furniture in a small shop was in a sense freer than the church architect or the ambitious muralist, who had to find extensive commissions and was often enslaved for years to a single customer. And freedom was by no means an unambiguous advantage. As Dutch painters discovered to their pain a century before the others, the artist without a regular patron was usually indentured to unscrupulous dealers, and dependent not on the whims of one man, but on the whims of many. It is notorious that Jan Steen had to make his living as an innkeeper, that Hobbema got an income from buying a privilege on the wine excise, and that Rembrandt prospered only so long as his style coincided with the taste of the wealthy burghers who were his customers. When he moved into his magnificent last phase, he saw desirable commissions go to other, lesser painters and went bankrupt. If anything, the market was more capricious than, say, an art-loving cardinal. Dr. Richard Mead, a pioneer in public health in London and among the most generous and discriminating bourgeois patrons in the eighteenth century, owned Rembrandts, Poussins, Titians, all in quantity, and commissioned Watteau, when he was in England in 1719, to paint two pictures for him. But when Mead’s collection was sold upon his death in 1754, a historical painting by Carlo Maratti realized £183, while Alderman Beckford picked up the two Watteaus for £42 and £52/10 respectively—hardly confirmation of the commonplace that the free play of the market was favorable to the prosperity of artists and the purification of taste.
While freedom was always risky, servitude was often rewarding. Not all patrons were tyrants, and it was possible to find room for maneuver within the system of patronage. Popes, dukes, religious orders, and wealthy amateurs often paid artists munificently and often, if not always, gave them satisfactory latitude. Besides, a patron with good taste and sufficient funds could initiate an aesthetic revolution; he could, quite literally, afford to be adventurous. English eighteenth-century architecture perhaps owes more to Lord Burlington’s infectious enthusiasm for Palladianism as to the speculative builders who threw up houses in the major cities after the 1760s, more intent on making immediate profits than architectural history.
It is therefore not surprising that patronage should survive into the eighteenth century and find outspoken defenders. Giambattista Tiepolo spent his long and productive life in the service of great patrons, including the prince-bishop of Franconia and the king of Spain, and each of his major commissions kept him occupied for extended periods: he spent three years decorating the Residenz in Würzburg and eight years doing frescoes for Charles III’s palace in Madrid. Handel was one of the few artists to benefit from the taste of the Hanoverian kings. And Franz Joseph Haydn was handed from one princely Esterhazy to another almost as though he had been a favorite horse—and was, for the most part, happy and prolific. It was only when he first visited London, a free man and a social lion, that an alternative presented itself to him: “How sweet is some degree of liberty!” he wrote from England in 1791. “I had a kind prince, but was obliged at times to be dependent on base souls. I often sighed for release and now I have it in some measure.… The consciousness of being no longer a bond servant sweetens all my toil.”12 But the habit of submission was hard to break: Haydn did not settle in London, as he might have, but returned to his masters.
Just as it is impossible to draw a line between slavery and freedom, or to define unambiguously the environment congenial to artistic enterprise, so it is impossible to distinguish clearly between a patron and a customer. There were many types of patrons: kings, courtiers, bishops, and speculators; local aristocrats or visiting Englishmen; sacred institutions that could exact loyalty through spiritual pressure, and private individuals who had no inducement but money13; imperious magnates who practically owned an artist for some years, and rather less wealthy amateurs who commissioned a few works and then kept a tenuous hold on the artist they patronized by recommending him to their friends. Nor was it simply a matter of rank or class; while bourgeois art lovers took an increasingly commanding part in the world of eighteenth-century painting and theater that part was neither new nor exclusive. Wealthy commoners had bought paintings and sculptures and commissioned buildings in sixteenth-century Florence and seventeenth-century Paris, and in the age of the Enlightenment clerics and aristocrats often competed with merchants or physicians for the same work of art, in the same market. What happened in the eighteenth century was not that the patron was replaced by the public, or the aristocratic by the bourgeois customer, but that wealthy and acquisitive amateurs traveled more than ever, that artists finally established their claim to be differentiated from mere artisans, and that their opportunities for displaying their works—in a few private houses thrown open to the public, in rudimentary museums, and in exhibitions sponsored by the French and English academies—greatly increased. And, as the artists’ public multiplied and their social visibility increased, their status improved. In Rome, in 1750, the academy officially laid it down that artists were subject to no guild, since their work belonged among the “artes liberales,”14 and a few years later the Venetian official and patron Andrea Memmo reminded himself in a private memorandum that painters were eccentrics who must be freed from all subservience: “It is right that the imaginative side of painting should be exercised freely and with nobility; genius should not be fettered in the practice of the fine arts. That is why they were called liberal.”15 This was the new tone, soon to become dominant. Whatever the artists’ preference in style of life—and they varied in the age of the Enlightenment as they had varied before—the realities of the century pointed, ambiguously yet firmly enough, toward independence. Much unlike writers, to whom the advantages of freedom were almost self-evident, many painters, sculptors, and architects had to be dragged into the marketplace of modernity.
THE MODEL OF MODERNITY—partly idealized by the philosophes, partly a reality—the first country to offer public concerts and grant knighthoods to mere face painters, was England. It was England’s liberalism to actresses, after all, that had made Voltaire ashamed of his France, England’s lionizing a mere musician that had shown Haydn an alternative to serfdom.
The openness of Englishmen to the arts was not new. For centuries the English had freely imported styles and artists, adapting what they borrowed and rewarding what they enjoyed. It was a virtue born of necessity: through the seventeenth century, England did not produce enough talented or fashionable musicians and sculptors to satisfy domestic demand. But the English transformed foreign styles so skillfully that after a time they were widely taken, and proudly displayed, as characteristically English. Wren and Vanbrugh translated Continental into English baroque in their buildings, Sir James Thornhill employed French and Italian techniques in his majestic murals celebrating the Glorious Revolution.
The domestication of foreign artists matched the domestication of foreign styles. Van Dyck, born in Antwerp and schooled in Italy, settled in England in 1632 and was knighted; a little later, Pieter van der Faes, a Dutch painter, re-emerged in England with a new name and new dignity as Sir Peter Lely; the German portraitist Gottfried Kniller, who followed Lely in power, honors, and strategy, became Sir Godfrey Kneller. And there were many others—sculptors, composers, and architects as much as painters—who settled in England and made their fortunes there.
Beginning early in the eighteenth century, with the emergence of native-born talents in painting and increasing willingness to employ native-born architects, this openness changed its character. But it did not diminish. Foreigners continued to come to England to prosper and to become more English than the English: George Frideric Handel never regretted his transplantation; and the leading English sculptors of the age, who populated colleges and Westminster Abbey with busts of distinguished scientists and poets, were all foreign-born. Scheemaker and Rysbrack were from Antwerp, and the famous Roubiliac, who sculpted Newton for Trinity College, came from Lyon. And what the English did not learn from the foreigners, whom they welcomed and assimilated, they learned on their travels or by studying foreign works of art that had found their way to England. Gainsborough, that most English of painters, was influenced by the French engraver Gravelot, the landscapes of Ruisdael, and the stately portraits of Van Dyck; Reynolds’s three-year stay in Italy was decisive in shaping his taste. Lord Burlington’s elegant buildings, which for some years dominated English architecture, were tributes not merely to Roman antiquity and the English genius of Inigo Jones, but also to Palladio’s cool villas—Burlington’s English Palladianism was English, but it was Palladian as well. Even Hogarth, with all his xenophobic railing and all his spirited denials, patterned his highly successful conversation pieces on Dutch genre paintings. English talent continued to need, and to be fertilized by, foreign inspiration. “The ENGLISH are, perhaps, greater philosophers,” David Hume noted, with the detachment of the Scot and the cosmopolitanism of the philosophe, “the ITALIANS better painters and musicians; the ROMANS were greater orators: But the FRENCH are the only people, except the GREEKS, who have been at once philosophers, poets, orators, historians, painters, architects, sculptors, and musicians.”16
By the time this was published—in 1742—Hume’s judicious generosity, like the British willingness to borrow and capacity to absorb, was a sign not of backwardness but of confidence. Early in the century, when that confidence was still untried and uncertain, English writers had felt compelled to make some improbable claims for the relationship between England’s liberties and England’s supposed pre-eminence in the arts: in 1710 Lord Shaftesbury had denied the French, “that airy neighbouring nation,” the “high spirit of tragedy”; that spirit, Shaftesbury maintained in defiance of all evidence, “can ill subsist where the spirit of liberty is wanting.” England, on the other hand, where the muses still “lisp as in their cradles,” is destined to greatness in the arts because it has undergone the glorious revolution and secured its “hitherto precarious liberties.”17 Two years later the Spectator noted with sublime self-importance that “No Nation in the World delights so much in having their own, or Friends or Relations Pictures”—a boast (or complaint) that was being made in other countries at the same time. But beyond that, the Spectator claimed that “Face-Painting is no where so well performed as in England,” because, it seemed, of the “beautiful and noble Faces with which England is confessed to abound,” and the “Encouragement, the Wealth and Generosity,” that the “English Nation affords.”18 Continental philosophes like Voltaire, Anglomaniacs from policy as much as from conviction, were inclined to be indulgent with such English conceit, if only to goad their own countries into improving the artists’ lot. But in the 1740s, when David Hume examined the question again, such cultural chauvinism was mainly in the hands of truculent patriots like Hogarth. Hume, in addition to stating flatly that foreigners excelled Englishmen in the arts (which was disturbing enough), could argue (and this was even more disturbing) that artistic excellence often emerged in unfree nations. Modern France, he wrote, “scarcely ever enjoyed any established liberty, and yet has carried the arts and sciences as near perfection as any other nation,” while modern Rome “carried to perfection all the finer arts of sculpture, painting, and music, as well as poetry, though it groaned under tyranny, and under the tyranny of priests,” and Florence “made its chief progress in the arts and sciences, after it began to lose its liberty by the usurpation of the family of MEDICI.”19 His candor suggests that the British no longer needed to boast. Their country was, after a century of turmoil, at last enjoying political stability, religious peace, international security, and economic expansion. The governing oligarchy—a loose coalition of peers, squires, and a few leading merchants, their power based on land and exercised in local and national government—found that they could now turn their attention to peaceful pursuits; they built magnificent houses, and adorned them. Sir Robert Walpole, responsible more than anyone else for this tranquillity, was himself a collector of discriminating taste, generous habits, and unquenchable appetite: his Titians, Rembrandts, and Poussins rivaled those of Dr. Mead’s collection in London.
This oligarchy, immensely wealthy and ready to pour its wealth into houses, gardens, paintings, and sculpture, assumed leadership in guiding taste, and produced a cultural revolution—less by design than by default. The influence of the Court on the arts markedly declined, mainly through royal indifference. If the king did not say, “I hate bainting and boetry”—it has been variously attributed to George I and George II—the Georges by and large acted as if they did. The artists themselves did not repudiate the Court; when Frederick Prince of Wales died on March 20, 1751, Reynolds, with unashamed egotism, professed himself “extremely afflicted” because, he wrote, the “Prince of Whales,” certainly “would have been a great Patron to Painters.”20 And when George III agreed to lend his name to the Royal Academy in 1768, and endowed it with five thousand pounds, Reynolds, its first president, was neither proud enough nor stupid enough to refuse.
But whatever prestige still attached to royal patronage, it was no longer indispensable, while the ruling oligarchy—which was indispensable to artists—was, by eighteenth-century standards, remarkably open, almost democratic, and left the road to independence unobstructed. At a time when there were neither museums nor public galleries, Dr. Mead opened his splendid collection of paintings to students, and liberally entertained visiting artists—including foreigners. Lord Burlington was at once the munificent patron and egalitarian associate of the artists he supported: William Kent, whom he met on his first visit to Italy and converted from a mediocre painter into a fine architect, became Burlington’s intimate friend, for all his low origins, limited education, and provocative impudence to his betters. Lord Chesterfield, it is true, criticized Burlington for rather lowering himself “by knowing the minute and mechanical parts of architecture too well,”21 but then Chesterfield was a snob.
In this new atmosphere, artists soon learned to deal with their most highly placed patrons with ease and dignity. When Thomas Gainsborough refused, in the 1760s, to execute a commission for Lord Hardwicke, he did so with some polite and even obsequious phrases, but he refused22; and Capability Brown, who came from a Northumbrian hamlet and began as a humble gardener on a local estate, knew before long what the world owed him: “He writes Lancelot Brown, Esquire, en titre d’office,” Lord Chatham wrote of him, he “shares the private hours of the King, dines familiarly with his neighbor of Sion”—that is, the Duke of Northumberland—“and sits down at the table of all the House of Lords.”23 Not even Hogarth—the bellicose social critic who never forgot, and never let anyone else forget, his modest origins and his great merits—found it possible to start a class war in England. Hogarth vigorously satirized the “connoisseurs,” the wealthy, often titled amateurs who spouted neoclassical commonplaces and adored the French and Italian masters; and this self-proclaimed “war”24 was doubtless part of his battle for independence. But he did not disdain painting conversation pieces for the rich and the noble, or accepting lucrative commissions for altarpieces; in 1746 he offered to dedicate his March to Finchley to King George II, and most of his life he showed grudging respect for neoclassical hierarchies by trying his hand at grand historical subjects—“very impudently, or rather presumptuously,” as Sir Joshua Reynolds, who did not much care for Hogarth, rather severely put it.25 Even Hogarth, the radical, continued to have some respect for the traditional social and artistic hierarchies. The burdens of the past, it seemed, were not merely pains but also pleasures.
The perfect specimen of the new man in English art was Joshua Reynolds—Sir Joshua Reynolds after 1769. He is of special interest here because he was, as Falconet was a philosophe among sculptors, a philosophe among painters. True, devotion to work, social ambitions, literary aspirations, a shrewd sense of money were not the monopoly of the little flock. But in Reynolds they had an emotional intensity, took an intellectual form and acquired a social significance that gave them the meaning they had, say, in Voltaire. Reynolds associated with Christians more easily than Voltaire ever could; when he, with Dr. Johnson, founded his Club in 1764, he eventually included among its members modern pagans like Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith, although most of its members were firm Christians like Samuel Johnson himself, Bishop Percy, and Edmund Burke, and uneasy believers like James Boswell. But then, in eighteenth-century England the little flock was less firmly organized than elsewhere, less visibly differentiated from the larger culture, and integrated into the enlightened atmosphere of the day: it was this in part, after all, that made England into the model for envious philosophes from France or Prussia. Yet, on the supreme question of religion, Reynolds quite clearly belonged with Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon: much to Boswell’s regret, he was not a Christian but a Stoic. And the dialectic that defines the other philosophes—loss of religious faith, admiration of the ancients conquered by a decisive assertion of independence—defines Reynolds as well. Much as he respected the grand style, much as he accepted the hierarchies in painting, which placed historical subjects above portraits and representative above individualized figures, Reynolds knew that he excelled in the last of these genres and that his countrymen, in any event, preferred it to all else. Fuseli, who knew his Englishmen well, remarked that there was “little hope of Poetical painting finding encouragement in England. The People are not prepared for it. Portrait with them is everything. Their taste and feelings all go to realities.”26 Reynolds’s taste and feelings, whatever his theory, also went to realities. He derided the “moderate attempts” he had made, as instances not of what he thought best, but of what he could do best, and late in life he scolded himself for failing to imitate his favorite master, Michelangelo: “I have taken another course, one more suited to my abilities, and to the taste of the times in which I live.”27 To choose to exercise one’s profitable talent rather than to obey an exalted tradition was, despite Reynolds’s self-critical undertone, a willful, even proud choice, characteristic of enlightened men in the eighteenth century and revolutionary in its implications.
We can read Reynolds’s life, then, as an intelligent and persistent attempt to realize the ideals of the artist as philosophe, a life carefully planned and wholly successful. Born in 1723 into a respectable but notably unprosperous family of clergymen and schoolmasters, Reynolds displayed and developed his talents early, studied portrait painting with Thomas Hudson and rapidly rose to become the most sought-after portrait painter in England: by 1755, he had more than a hundred sitters, and by 1759, he raised his prices to keep his work within bounds. He could afford to: he was already making six thousand pounds a year. Much like Voltaire, he had a marked capacity for earning, enjoying, and using money; as soon as he could, Reynolds bought a coach, which symbolized the status he had gained through his talents. As his pupil James Northcote suggests, Reynolds’s “chariot,” splendidly ornamented and ostentatiously driven about, was intended to “give a strong indication of his great success, and by that means to increase it.”28 Yet work had intrinsic value for him as well; like the other philosophes, Reynolds made a cult of work and derived profound satisfaction from it. When he was still a young painter he discovered that he was “the happiest creature alive” at the easel29; and later he put his discovery into a piece of advice, sententious perhaps but wholly sincere: “Whoever is resolved to excel in painting,” he wrote, “or indeed any other art, must bring all his mind to bear upon that one object, from the moment he rises till he goes to bed.”30 But he was not without a certain rebellious humor: in 1751, during his all-important Italian stay, he painted a group of English Connoisseurs in Rome, which satirized at once the English amateur on the grand tour—a creature about whom Reynolds felt much as Hogarth did—and one of his favorite classics, Raphael’s School of Athens. And in 1776 he parodied the grand style—his own—with a portrait of Master Crewe as Henry VIII, showing a four-year old boy dressed, and posturing, in imitation of Holbein’s celebrated portrait.31 Such lighthearted parodies should not be made to bear too much weight, but they suggest forcibly enough that neoclassicist though he was, Reynolds was a free man. In his later years he was to put his freedom to good use, in his writings on aesthetics.
For Reynolds was more than a painter. Fulfilling a characteristic Enlightenment ideal, an ideal the Enlightenment had borrowed from the Renaissance, Reynolds was eminently sociable, and tried to be eminently literary. No flattery flattered him more than to be told that he was a good writer. As soon as he was established, he sought out prominent politicians, actors, and literary men, to shine in their circle as he shone, effortlessly, in his own. When James Boswell dedicated his Life of Johnson to Reynolds—it was only one of the many books dedicated to him, for Reynolds was an assiduous patron of writers—Boswell singled out Reynolds’s temper, politeness, conversation, and “that enlarged hospitality which has long made your house a common centre of union for the great, the accomplished, the learned, and the ingenious.”
Doubtless his “enlarged hospitality” gave Reynolds real pleasure. But it was also a social strategy, part of his effort to secure his dignity as an artist, and with this, the dignity of all artists. The very shape of his sociability was an assertion of self-esteem and a demand for the esteem of others. He did not want to be known as a pedant—and he defined a pedant as a man who can profitably associate only with his fellow craftsmen because he can talk only about his own craft—but as a man of the world, a learned artist, a philosopher. His literary friends were his friends for disinterested reasons, but they were also proof of his respectability; his literary productions, in which he took great and just pride, were another. When, after several false starts, the Royal Academy was finally founded late in 1768, Reynolds was its logical, indeed its inescapable first president: under his presidency the Academy became a fortress of respectability. Exclusive, prosperous, and from 1780 adequately quartered in its own rooms at Somerset House, it organized fashionable exhibitions, sought out deserving talent, and between 1769 and 1790 gave Reynolds an attentive audience for his Discourses.
Reynolds’s Discourses were the formal counterpart to his sociability. They urged students of art to learn the principles of neoclassicism, take the road to independence through hard work and alera observation, keep respect for the great masters—Reynolds melodramatically ends the last of his Discourses with “the name of—MICHAEL ANGELO”32—and, perhaps most important of all, remember the dignity of their calling. Painting, he insisted, belonged to the “Polite Arts”; it had “beauty for its object,” and a beauty that was “general and intellectual.” It has been “my uniform endeavour, since I first addressed you from this place,” Reynolds begins his Seventh Discourse, “to impress you strongly with one ruling idea. I wished you to be persuaded, that success in your art depends almost entirely on your own industry; but the industry which I principally recommended, is not the industry of the hands, but of the mind. As our art is not a divine gift, so neither is it a mechanical trade. Its foundations are laid in solid science: and practice, though essential to perfection, can never attain that at which it aims, unless it works under the direction of principle.”33 The association between the intellectual and social aspects of the artist’s life and the distinction between rational art and manual artisanship could not be drawn more clearly than this.
English artists could only prosper in such a climate; Reynolds’s influence radiated out from painting to other arts as well. His friend Dr. Burney was among the first musicians to be admitted to polite company as an equal; Reynolds marked this social conquest when he called Burney “both a Philosopher & a Musician.”34 And his friend Garrick found it possible, as Reynolds and Dr. Johnson were happy to note, to make acting respectable. But the painters profited most: in the 1780s Gainsborough could confidently ask, and expect to get, 160 guineas for a full-length portrait, and Romney was earning over 3,500 guineas a year. And Reynolds outdid them all: in the last dozen years of his active career he asked 50 guineas for a head, 100 guineas for a half-length, and 200 guineas for a full-length portrait. When he died in 1792, he left a fortune of well over a hundred thousand pounds, and was buried in splendid ceremony at St. Paul’s, with three dukes, two marquesses, three earls, and two barons as his pallbearers. It was a funeral to impress any philosophe, even a French philosophe: no Frenchman practicing the liberal arts in the eighteenth century, except possibly Voltaire, had amassed such a fortune and commanded such prestige; no Frenchman, not even Voltaire, had been laid to rest with such pomp.
In France, the burden of the past was more magnificent, and, through its very magnificence, more oppressive, than anywhere else. The Golden Age of Louis XIV loomed, a gigantic presence, over the Silver Age of his successor. The habits that had governed it—authoritarianism, centralization in the Court, condescension of patron to artist—were tenacious, and its dominant aesthetic tradition proved to be as persistent as the social attitudes. Artists responded by resigning themselves to the system, by cynically bending it to their purposes, or by sullen revolt.
The revolutionaries themselves conceded that no one could hope to rival the masterly tragedies of Corneille and Racine; Voltaire, who tried, knew better than his most enthusiastic admirers that his own work was inferior to its models. Molière’s comedies had no eighteenth-century rivals; even Rousseau, who deplored their effect on their audience, found them admirable and thought that Molière’s successors lacked his “genius and his probity.”35 Contemporary plays, Diderot said late in life, are “detestable,” and cannot compare with the theater of an earlier day.36 The fables of La Fontaine, the libretti of Quinault, the eloquence, if not the theology, of Pascal, Bourdaloue, and Bossuet, remained unattainable, ideal, luminous ornaments of a culture whose richness was a reproach to the eighteenth century. “The time will not come again,” Voltaire wrote, “when a duke de La Rochefoucauld, author of the Maximes, upon leaving the conversation of a Pascal and an Arnauld, goes to the theatre of Corneille.”37 Voltaire’s overwhelming popularity, even among those who distrusted his character and disliked his ideas, is in a sense a symptom of French cultural pessimism: the cultivated public was thirsty for at least one living giant.
In the arts in which the rococo style dominated—in painting and, to a lesser degree, in architecture, sculpture, and poetry—the old models were less forbidding, but the situation, more fluid, was also less clear. Voltaire, who almost singlehandedly sought to rescue French poetry from its prosaic phase, conceded that “the beaux-arts, which had given France such superiority over other nations, have badly decayed,” and he was compelled to offer, as an instance of “a small number of works of genius,” Saint-Lambert’s mediocre and derivative Saisons.38 Other observers, like d’Alembert, agreed with him: the need for poetic reform was as glaring as the absence of reformers.
The state of French painting was, if anything, even more muddled than that of poetry, and self-appraisals alternated between unjustified satisfaction and unjustified despondency. At the end of the seventeenth century, the French Academy of Painting had witnessed its own version of the battle between the ancients and the moderns, in which one misunderstood seventeenth-century master, Rubens, had been used to discredit another seventeenth-century master, Poussin, equally misunderstood. This triumph of color over design produced, at least for a while, a certain painterly freedom, and brought forth one real master, Watteau. But in the hands of second-rate academicians the new freedom soon became the new orthodoxy. “We have not had a great painter since we have had an académie de peinture,” Voltaire wrote in 1735 to the abbé d’Olivet, and while the observation ill conceals the tremulous insecurity of an aspirant to the Académie française addressing a member, Voltaire’s diagnosis was not without point.39 True, the philosophes had moments of euphoria: in 1765, Diderot claimed that the brilliant collection of paintings displayed in the Salon of that year could have been assembled only in France, and two years later he still thought it easy enough to find “about twenty” talented painters in France. But also in 1767, contemplating the French scene from a wider perspective, he lost his buoyancy: if one looks at the paintings of “Rubens, Rimbrand, Polembourg, Teniers, Wovermans,” he told Falconet glumly, one must mourn their art as lost, and find the decadence of contemporary painting depressing.40
Of course, as solemn reformers, willing to sacrifice even their sensuality to their moralizing urge, the French philosophes were better equipped to deplore the failings than to enjoy the virtuosity of contemporary painting. Rococo struck them as irresponsible and immoral; it was court art, and, though some of them were assiduous courtiers, courtly art offended the philosophes’ professed social ideals. Thus they could not take pleasure in Fragonard, even though Fragonard’s greatest patron, the abbé de Saint-Non, was a radical intellectual who admired Voltaire and Rousseau, and though some of his other patrons, far from being courtiers, were wealthy and discriminating roturiers. Nor could they appreciate Watteau, whom they mentioned only to dismiss. Instead, they concentrated their scorn on Boucher, whom they saw as a panderer feeding the jaded sensuality of Louis XV. “Well, my friend,” wrote Diderot to Grimm in 1765, “it is at the moment when Boucher has stopped being an artist, that he has been named premier peintre du roi.”41 The implication was inescapable: in France, the best were being neglected, while the servile were gathering honors and commissions.
Their diagnoses, far from paralyzing the philosophes, stirred them into action. Voltaire, whose pessimism about the cultural possibilities of his day and concern for the social aspirations of his fellow artists were almost obsessive and became almost proverbial, matched his gloom with his energy, and did all he could in his life and in his art to falsify his predictions.42 And the other French philosophes followed Voltaire in this, as in so much else. Eighteenth-century art was like eighteenth-century politics: the English, who had had their revolution, consolidated it, and thus appeared, in the age of the Enlightenment, to be more conservative than they were; the French, who were moving toward revolution, failed to see it clearly, and were therefore more radical than they knew. And the Germans, who could not even dream of revolution, had to begin at the beginning.
Germany found the burdens of the past more poignant and often more distasteful than they were for Englishmen or Frenchmen, for they were not domestic burdens. German artists and writers suffered under a double slavery: they were yoked to a rigid social system and to a foreign neoclassicism. “That multitude of polite productions in the FRENCH language, dispersed all over GERMANY and the NORTH,” David Hume observed in 1742, two years after Frederick II had ascended the Prussian throne, and while Lessing was a schoolboy, “hinder these nations from cultivating their own language, and keep them still dependent on their neighbours for those elegant entertainments.”43 Hume was right, but he took effect for cause: Germans remained dependent not because the French had invaded them, the French had invaded them because the Germans were dependent. And, much to the artists’ disadvantage, German society imitated not merely French styles, but French authoritarianism as well. While philosophers grumbled and great princes sneered, petty princes postured as little Louis XIVs; they built French castles, kept mistresses in the French style, imitated French fashions, and borrowed prestige by importing French painters and actors. Francomania was the anticomania of eighteenth-century Germany.
France was everywhere, in large matters and small. When Balthasar Neumann, the most gifted German architect of the age, had completed his drawings for the Residenz of the prince-bishop of Würzburg, his patrons obliged him to take his plans to Paris that he might secure the approval, and incorporate the suggestions, of two leading French architects. When Germany princes built their châteaux, they organized them in the French fashion, placing their bedrooms at the end of a long flight of rooms, to make themselves accessible only to favorites at their levées. When German states founded academies of art, they gave them French names, imposed on them French rules, and associated with them as many Frenchmen as they could find. Obviously, to be German was low, unfashionable, barbarian.
This conduct was less voluntary than it appeared to be. Even more than Italy, Germany in the age of the Enlightenment was a geographical expression, with its three thousand Imperial Knights and its three hundred often tiny states. These units were in general too small, too poor, and too ill-governed to sustain any kind of domestic culture, too hostile to one another, for religious or dynastic reasons, to make up a common cultural territory. Cities were small—even flourishing Frankfurt had only thirty-five hundred inhabitants at mid-century, when Goethe was born there—and in general dependent on some ruling family. There were too few squires and financiers able, and too few princes willing, to form independent centers of taste or sources of commissions. Some of the larger states in southern Germany, like Bavaria, found themselves powerless to prevent, and in fact invited, the invasion of baroque culture from neighboring Hapsburg territories. And the state dominating the north, Prussia, was crippled by severely limited resources: its soil was barren, its raw materials were scanty, its territories were scattered and indefensible. Much of Prussia’s national income, therefore, went to the army and, after the Seven Years’ War, to rural and urban reconstruction. There was no place in eighteenth-century Prussia for any taste but the king’s taste.
That taste was French. To a large extent, Frederick was less the shaper of his culture than its symptom and its victim; Lessing, for one, candidly admitted in 1760 that if the German drama was in desperate straits, this was “perhaps not wholly and simply the fault of the great, who fail to give protection or support. The great do not like to busy themselves with things in which they anticipate little or no real progress.”44 Yet, however restricted Frederick’s choices might have been, he did nothing to foster and everything to stifle domestic talents. If, for some reason, a Frenchman or a French style lost favor with him, he was replaced by another foreigner or another foreign style. When Voltaire came to Prussia in 1750, ostensibly to stay, he did not find it necessary to revise any of the current clichés about the poverty of the culture around him. “The language least spoken at court is German,” Voltaire observed in August 1750. “Our language and literature have made more conquests than Charlemagne.” And two months later, he revived a cruel old joke: “German is for soldiers and horses.”45 In fact, at Potsdam, Voltaire was witness to and an instrument of the realization of a self-fulfilling prophecy: King Frederick II, a perverse patriot who loved his country but despised its civilization, eloquently deprecated German culture and did nothing to invalidate his verdict. He insisted on the French language for his entourage, his academy, and his poetry—his denunciations of German culture were, of course, in French. True, music, in which the king took an abiding interest, was enjoying a minor domestic renaissance: visitors testified to the king’s proficiency on the flute, to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s talents as a composer and as the king’s accompanist on the clavier, and to the competence of local chamber groups, orchestras, and opera companies. But music was unique: Frederick’s most famous building, the charming palais in Potsdam which Knobelsdorff built after the king’s designs, was pure rococo, mainly French in inspiration, and bore the appropriate name Sans-souci; when, after Knobelsdorff’s death, Frederick’s taste in architecture shifted, it moved from the French to Italian neoclassicism and English Palladianism. The same was true in painting: Frederick amassed an impressive collection of modern French painters—Watteau and Boucher, Lancret and Chardin—and then, in later years, collected other masters, also foreign, Rubens and Correggio. And his court painter was Antoine Pesne, a Frenchman who had settled in Berlin in the days of Frederick William I. No German school of architecture or painting could grow in such a chilly climate.
Prussian literature and learning faced the same cold hostility. Again the king set the tone. He loved Racine above all other poets: he once told d’Alembert that he would have preferred writing Athalie to winning the Seven Years’ War,46 an unexceptionable sentiment for an enlightened monarch, but also the pathetic confession of a Prussian who could never quite repress the wish that he had been born a Frenchman. Not surprisingly, the Prussian theater consisted in the main of low farces, feeble occasional pieces celebrating a wedding or a victory, or translations from the French. When in the 1770s enterprising producers put on plays by Lessing and the young Goethe, the king responded to these efforts with an essay, De la littérature allemande, in which he foresaw the day when Germany would have its own classics, but warned that the day had not yet come, remained pointedly silent about some of the best German writers of his time, and maligned Goethe’s bold Goetz von Berlichingen as a “revolting imitation of bad English plays”47—the deadly verdict of a belated French neoclassicist.
It was in full accord with these tastes that Frederick surrounded himself with French men of letters, some distinguished, some mediocre, all French. He invited more to his court than were willing to come—Diderot, deeply suspicious of the “tyrant,” would not stop on his way back from his visit to Catherine II; and d’Alembert, though willing to enter into an active correspondence with Frederick, refused to become director of the Prussian Academy. Had they all accepted his call, Prussia would have become, not the modern Athens (as Voltaire called it in some of his more complaisant moments) but a German Paris. When Frederick II quarreled with Voltaire in 1752, the irreparable breach was, despite all of Frederick’s much-publicized contempt for Voltaire, a great defeat, not for the poet, but for the king. Naturally enough, visiting French littérateurs made no effort to correct Frederick’s bias; among his closest associates was the marquis d’Argens, an agile and versatile literary errand boy, who had said in print that France had for many years produced the greatest artists in the world, so superior to the Italians that Italy envied France.48 He did not find it necessary to say that Frenchmen were superior to Germans; that went, literally, without saying.
D’Argens was, among other things, director of the philosophical section of the Prussian Academy. For decades, certainly until the 1770s, that Academy was dominated by Frenchmen: its first permanent president was Maupertuis, its first prize-winner was d’Alembert, its chief concerns were set by French philosophy. This was not an accident: the Academy—or Académie—was the king’s creation and creature; he took a persistent interest in its lectures, prizes, and members. Revived and reorganized in 1744, after it had been allowed to lapse under Frederick William I, the Académie des sciences et des belles lettres de Prussie was, therefore, aptly named; it was designed to foster literature and learning in Prussia, but it seemed perfectly plain, at least to the king, that it was not Prussians who would foster them. Moses Mendelssohn—whose application to the Academy the king had vetoed on the sole ground that he was a Jew—spoke not from spite, but from intimate knowledge of the Prussian cultural scene, when he lamented in 1767: “The unfortunate love for French literature robs German literature of all hope for a better future.”49 It was ironic: the king who had captured the imagination of German poets with his cultivation and his victories did nothing for his real admirers and instead courted venal flatterers. He permitted Klopstock to emigrate to Denmark, and refused to employ Winckelmann and Lessing, although both were eager to be employed. In 1751, Klopstock noted in the Introduction to his Messias that “The King of the Danes has given the author of the Messias, who is a German, the leisure he needed to complete his poem.” Lessing quoted these pointed words in a review, and added, even more pointedly: “An excellent testimony to our time, which will doubtless reach posterity. We do not know if everyone sees as much satire in it as we do.”50 But as the years went by, Frederick continued to furnish as much material for this kind of remark—the savage sarcasm of the rejected lover—as he had at the beginning of his reign.
But this, whatever self-satisfied French travelers might think, was not all one could say about German culture. Germany experienced other foreign influences—Dutch genre painting, Italian frescoes, English poetry—and besides, some small courts, too sensible or too poor even to try imitating the French, like some prosperous Free Cities, encouraged indigenous art. Frankfurt’s patrician art collectors—bankers and lawyers and men of leisure—accumulated splendid private collections of antique coins, seventeenth-century etchings, and, most significant of all, the works of living local painters. Leipzig, where Lessing attended the university, was a lively city with an active (if, fearful of the censor, cautious) intellectual life, with enterprising publishers and wealthy art-loving bourgeois. And yet, in 1740, the French littérateur Mauvillon, who was observing the German scene from Brunswick, impolitely challenged his hosts to name a single German endowed with creative spirit, a single poet worthy of an international reputation—Nommez-moi un esprit créateur sur votre Parnasse; c’est-à-dire, nommez-moi un poète allemand qui ait tiré de son propre fond un ouvrage de quelque réputation! Je vous en défie.51 When Lessing set about to respond to this challenge, he was not without domestic resources, but the difficulties in his way, as he knew, would be daunting.
For Lessing and his associates, the greatest and most infuriating obstacle was the servile attitude of German patrons, German artists, and German critics to their foreign, especially their French, masters. But this servility had greater uses than the impatient and imperious reformers of the high Aufklärung could imagine. It was a matter of giants standing on the shoulders of dwarfs, and ruthlessly trampling them: in the 1730s, the academic aesthetician Johann Christoph Gottsched had poured out lectures, periodical articles, and learned treatises dedicated to the purification of the German language and the German theater through one panacea—the imitation of French neoclassicism; in the 1750s, Lessing could afford to adopt Gottsched’s aims while denigrating his methods and derivative philosophy as the work of a “learned charlatan.”52 Gottsched’s rigid and unimaginative neoclassicism—its tiresome insistence on rules and hierarchies, and its equally tiresome refusal to rescue anything from the rude popular drama or speech of his time—doubtless deserved the ridicule it received. Gottsched was a pedant—the epithet has forced itself on more than one historian; his naïve confidence that masterpieces could be constructed from prescription as though they were machines built from plans marks him as a stranger to the conditions for artistic creativity. At the same time, Gottsched’s earthbound, energetic crusades aimed at the right target: as a true Aufklärer, he wanted Germans to use their own reason; he wanted them to develop a pure and flexible language; he wanted them to take the theater seriously. Persistently attacking and persistently attacked, he prepared the public for controversy over aesthetic principles; he prepared the public, in other words, for Lessing. As there were philosophes who found it convenient to deny the contributions of Christians to their thought, so Lessing denied Gottsched. But without him, Lessing’s task would have been even more difficult than it was.
In her De l’Allemagne of 1811, Madame de Staël would characterize Germany as the land of poets and thinkers. Seventy-five years before, it was a land of thinkers who hoped to stamp poets out of the ground. The problems of practice—the absence of a real German theater, the small size of the German reading public, the relative impotence of German art lovers—drove writers into theory: “The comparative isolation of German critics from concrete literature,” René Wellek has observed, “goes a long way to account for their intense preoccupation with general aesthetics.”53 In 1730, Gottsched published his Kritische Dichtkunst, a doctrinaire collection of prescriptions for the writers of poetry and plays that foundered under the weight of moralizing, philistine readings of the classics, and lifeless rules; it annoyed, among others, two bellicose Swiss critics, Bodmer and Breitinger, who came forward as the champions of imagination against reason, metaphor against prosiness, Milton against Boileau, and who in 1740 incorporated their views in a counter-manifesto provocatively entitled Kritische Dichtkunst.
The confrontation of these two parties produced a noisy but not a great debate. Since the adversaries had much in common—the Swiss, like Gottsched, rejected bombast and the German baroque, and both sides had an excessively high opinion of the effects of theory on practice—their controversies were often marginal, often confused, and wholly inconclusive. Yet Bodmer and Breitinger called attention to the inadequacy of Gottsched’s system and the limitations of his taste, and, by stigmatizing his Cartesianism, offered respectability to sentiment and to imagination in a culture united in a worship of reason that France and England had outgrown. In their defense of the passions, the Swiss critics were sensitively responding to new forces that would further confuse, but also enrich, the German literary scene: the yearning nature poetry of Haller, the pathetic, sentimental, mystical poetry of Klopstock, the versatile work of Gellert, fabulist, novelist, poet, part rationalist, part pietist—the German galley slave (as Voltaire might have said) was rattling at his chains. “The literary epoch into which I was born,” as Goethe felicitously put it, “grew from its predecessor by means of contradiction.”54
Lessing knew this from the beginning. “A just and well-founded criticism,” he wrote as a very young man, “is an indispensable office in the world of learning. It frightens the miserable scribbler away from his pen, it compels the mediocre writer to make an effort, it warns the great man not to spare himself, and to publish nothing imperfect, nothing in haste. It spreads good taste across the land.” And he added: “Without criticism the arts would not flourish so greatly in France.”55 As a true philosophe Lessing was perfectly willing to struggle, without resentment or embarrassment, for the emancipation of German culture with the aid of the French, or, more precisely, one Frenchman: as long as the Frenchman was Diderot, Lessing could regard the French invasion of Germany as a good thing. It was a reasonable judgment; both, after all, were engaged in the same task—to rescue the best of the past, and throw off its burdens.
1 William Hogarth: The Analysis of Beauty (1753; ed. Joseph Burke, 1955), 62.
2 For Lessing and Winckelmann see Justi: Winkelmann und seine Zeitgenossen, 3 vols. (5th edn., Walther Rehm, 1956), I, 21; for Montesquieu: “De la manière gothique,” in Œuvres, III, 276–82, and “Essai sur le goût,” in ibid., I, part 3, 620; for Turgot: Tableau philosophique des progrès, in Œuvres, I, 234; for Hume: “Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing,” Works, III, 241; for Rousseau: “Lettre sur la musique françoise,” in Œuvres complètes, ed. G. Petitain, 8 vols. (1839), VI, 144. See also Diderot to Falconet (beginning September 1766?). Correspondance, VI, 320–1; and to the same (June 15, 1766). Ibid., 213, 214, 219.
3 Spectator, No. 62; I, 268. See also No. 70; ibid., 297–303.
4 Zick’s painting has been reproduced in Michael Levey: Rococo to Revolution: Major Trends in Eighteenth-Century Painting (1966), 155. For Goya see ibid., 202.
5 Quoted in Remy G. Saisselin: “Neo-Classicism: Virtue, Reason and Nature,” in Henry Hawley: Neo-Classicism: Style and Motif (1964), 5. While Algarotti here singles out architecture, his observation applies to all the arts.
6 Anne Betty Weinshenker: Falconet: His Writings and His Friend Diderot (1966), chap. iii.
7 Salon of 1765; Salons, II, 207.
8 Weinshenker: Falconet, chap. iv.
9 “La mort de Mlle Lecouvreur, célèbre actrice,” in Œuvres, IX, 370; Lettre XXIII, Lettres philosophiques, II, 159; Voltaire to Thieriot, May 1, 1731. Correspondence, II, 174.
10 See above, chap. i and chap. ii, section 1.
11 Nikolaus Pevsner: Academies of Art, Past and Present (1940), 109.
12 Karl Geiringer: Haydn: A Creative Life in Music (edn. 1963), 121.
13 “Two different types of patron, one with the spiritual authority that came from having a saint as founder, the other with money.” Francis Haskell: Patrons and Painters: A Study in the Relations Between Italian Art and Society in the Age of the Baroque (1963), 65.
14 Pevsner: Academies of Art, 114. This rhetoric, though hardly the reality, goes back to the seventeenth century.
15 Haskell: Patrons and Painters, 330 (the document from which this passage is quoted is reprinted in full, in the original Italian, in ibid., Appendix I, 386–7).
16 “Of Civil Liberty,” Works, III, 159.
17 “Advice to an Author,” Characteristics, I, 141–3.
18 Spectator, No. 555; IV, 496. A little more sardonic than this, Hogarth thought that portrait painting was particularly popular in England because the English united vanity with selfishness. Basil Williams: The Whig Supremacy, 1714–1760 (edn. 1952), 374.
19 “Of Civil Liberty,” Works, III, 158–9. In the face of this conclusive argument, artists who were also ideologists in behalf of freedom continued to link times of artistic greatness with political liberty. And Winckelmann insisted that the Egyptians had produced bad art because the country was unfree and artists degraded; Greece had produced great art as soon as, and only as long as, it was free: “Art, which as it were had been given life by freedom, must necessarily droop and fall after its loss”—which came with the death of Alexander the Great. Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764; edn. 1934), 332.
20 Reynolds to Miss Weston (1750). Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. Frederick W. Hilles (1929), 12. That Reynolds was not above flattering a patron is evident from his correspondence; see for one instance his letter to the Hon. William Hamilton, British ambassador to Naples, March 28, 1769. Ibid., 20–3.
21 Quoted in Peter Quennell: Hogarth’s Progress (1955), 44.
22 “Mr. Gainsborough presents his humble respects to Lord Hardwicke, and shall always think it an honour to be employed in anything for his Lordship, but with respect to real views from Nature in this country he has never seen any place that affords a subject equal to the poorest imitations of Gaspar or Claude.… Mr G. hopes that Lord Hardwicke will not mistake his meaning, but if his Lordship wishes to have anything tolerable of the name of Gainsborough, the subject altogether, as well as figures &c., must be of his own brain.” Ellis Waterhouse: Gainsborough (1958), 15.
23 Dorothy Stroud: Capability Brown (2d edn., 1957), 43.
24 This is the word Hogarth himself used to Hester Lynch Piozzi; see Joseph Burke: “Introduction,” to William Hogarth: The Analysis of Beauty, xiii.
25 Sir Joshua Reynolds: “Discourse XIV,” Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (1959), 254.
26 Quoted in Nikolaus Pevsner: The Englishness of English Art (edn. 1964), 31.
27 Reynolds: “Discourse III,” Discourses, 52; “Discourse XV,” ibid., 282.
28 Quoted in Sir Joshua Reynolds: Portraits, ed. Frederick W. Hilles (1952), 149.
29 Reynolds to his father, Rev. Samuel Reynolds (July 1742). Letters, 3.
30 Reynolds to James Barry (1769)—the two painters were obviously still on good terms then. In the same letter, Reynolds urged Barry to go to Rome and see the Sistine Chapel: “It is there only that you can form an idea of the dignity of the art, as it is there only that you can see the work of Michael Angelo and Raffael”—evidently the quality and the status of art were inseparable in Reynolds’s mind. Ibid., 16–18.
31 These paintings are reproduced in Pevsner: Englishness of English Art, 69, 70.
32 “Discourse XV,” Discourses, 282.
33 “Discourse VII,” ibid., 117.
34 See Roger Lonsdale: Dr. Charles Burney: A Literary Biography (1965), 479–80.
35 Lettre à M. d’Alembert sur les spectacles, ed. M. Fuchs (1948), 60.
36 See Est-il bon? Est-il méchant?, ed. J. Undank (1961), 172, 180, and editor’s introduction, 65.
37 Siècle de Louis XIV, in Œuvres historiques, 1012.
38 See Précis du siècle de Louis XV, in ibid., 1570–1; see also above, 103–4.
39 November 30, 1735. Correspondence, IV, 192. But he sounded that way even after he was a member of the Academy; see the catalogue of painters appended to his Siècle de Louis XIV, in Œuvres historiques, 1217.
40 See “Introduction” to Salons, I, 20; and letter to Falconet (May 15, 1767). Correspondance, VII, 57.
41 Salon of 1765; Salons, II, 76.
42 See below, 250–1.
43 “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences,” Works, III, 196.
44 Letter LXXXI, February 7, 1760, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, in Schriften, VIII, 218.
45 Voltaire to Madame Denis, August 24 (1750). Correspondence, XVIII, 131; and to the Marquis de Thibouville, October 24 (1750). Ibid., 188. My attention was drawn to these passages by Adrien Fauchier-Magnan: The Small German Courts in the Eighteenth Century (1947; tr. Mervyn Savill, 1958), 30–1.
46 See Wilhelm Dilthey: Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin (4th edn., 1957), 103.
47 De la littérature allemande …, in Œuvres de Frédéric le grand, ed. J. D. E. Preuss, 31 vols. (1846–57), VII, 125.
48 Weinshenker: Falconet, 31 n. For Frederick and the philosophes, see below, 483–7.
49 Quoted in Ludwig Geiger: Berlin: 1688–1840. Geschichte des geistigen Lebens der preussischen Hauptstadt, 2 vols. (1892–3), I, 464.
50 Das neueste aus dem Reiche des Witzes, May 1751, Schriften, IV, 401. Some time in his early years, Lessing wrote a prose draft for a satire (never completed), which is as political as anything he ever wrote. It is addressed “To Maecenas,” and laments the disappearance of great and literate patrons; modern patrons (which is to say, Frederick of Prussia) fall short. “A king may indeed govern me; let him be more powerful than I am, but let him not imagine that he is better.” Schriften, I, 149.
51 Erich Schmidt: Lessing: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Schriften, 2 vols. (2d edn., 1899), I, 58–9.
52 Letter LXV, November 2, 1759, Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend, in Schriften, VIII, 178.
53 A History of Modern Criticism, 1750–1950, I, The Later Eighteenth Century, 144.
54 Dichtung und Wahrheit, in Gedenkausgabe, X, 285.
55 Schmidt: Lessing, I, 184.