‘The Enlightenment’ marks the eighteenth century as a period heavily invested in ideas. Salon culture developed through the taste and social initiative of women during the Rococo period in the courts of France, Austria and Germany. These women were known as femmes savantes, or learned women. In addition to art, the salons propagated Enlightenment ideas that rejected superstition and favoured provable theories based on scientific methods. Empiricism flourished, coming out of the seventeenth century achievements in science, most notably those of Britons Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and John Locke (1632-1704). Their insistence on tangible data and empirical proof changed the course of ideas.
In France, the philosophes helped to spread rational ideas based on reason into the areas of church and state. They believed that through the progress of ideas, there existed a possibility for the perfection of mankind. Gathering and ordering knowledge was part of the Enlightenment project. Accordingly, Denis Diderot (1713-1784) edited the first encyclopaedia (thirty-five volumes, 1751-1780) in an attempt to systematically record all existing knowledge. Diderot also became the first art critic by publishing his commentaries on the official French Salon exhibitions of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Voltaire (1674-1778) wrote against the despotic rule of kings and the hegemony of the church. Later, revolutionary thinkers would recall his seminal ideas. Natural history and zoology were catalogued by the Comte de Buffon (1707-1778), while in Sweden, Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) created a comprehensive classification of plants.
Worldwide, the eighteenth century marks the start of the ‘modern’ period in which a self-conscious awareness of the present in relation to past begets a preoccupation with newness, or being current. Americans in the colonies were also noted for their commitment to Enlightenment ideas, most notably Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. Scientific inventions flourished as much as social inventions, and the Industrial Revolution began in England in the 1740s. It was spurred on by research into steam power, electricity, the discovery of oxygen, and mechanical advances in technology, including the first use of iron for a bridge in 1776.
A renewed interest in classical antiquity was fuelled by the discovery and excavation of Herculaneum (1738) and Pompeii (1748), as well as the growing trend of aristocrats to make a ‘Grand Tour’ of travel through Europe, but Italy in particular.
The American (1775-1783) and French (1789-1792) Revolutions also helped to create an appeal for a new style: Neoclassicism. The neoclassical style is characterized by moral content, strong, clear compositions, and often appeals to patriotic virtue. Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) filled the power gap in the revolutionary chaos by ascending to power and crowning himself emperor of France in 1804. He too, embraced the neoclassical style as it created a symbolic system to bolster his authority, and he particularly favoured connections to the Roman Empire in his expansionist phase of military conquest.