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Chapter 1

A Time of Transition

The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution fostered curiosity about nature, society, institutions, human relations, and the past. Instead of relying on inherited ideas, intellectuals sought a concrete and rational understanding of phenomena based on experience and facts. This initiated an age of exploration concerned with human physiognomy, psychology, and values, wtih natural entities and their causes and significance, and with a desire to construct an accurate picture of ancient times. Focus on contemporary human conditions accompanied this empirical mindset, giving rise to conflicting ideas about the role of tradition and hierarchies in nature and society.

Readings:

Black, Jeremy. The British Abroad: the Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century. Stroud: The History Press, 2003

Boime, Albert. Art in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1800. Chicago and London: University  of Chicago Press, 1987

Bowron, Edgar Peters and Joseph J. Rishel, eds. Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century. Exhibition catalogue. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2000

Bryson, Norman. Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981

Conisbee. Philip. French Genre Painting in the Eighteenth Century. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2007

Craske, Matthew. Art in Europe, 1700-1830. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997

Crow, Thomas. Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985

Diderot, Denis. Diderot on Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995

Eitner, Lorenz. Neoclassicism and Romanticism 1750-1850, vol. 1: Enlightenment and Revolution. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1970

Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980

Gaehtgens, Thomas. Joseph-Marie Vien, peintre du roi, 1716-1809. Paris: Athena, 1989 (in French)

Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: The Science of Freedom. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996

Goodman, John and Thomas Crow, eds. Diderot on Art, 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996

Haskell, Francis and Nicolas Penny. Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture, 1500-1900. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981

Israel, Jonathan. A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009

Potts, Alex. Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994

Pressly, Nancy L. The Fuseli circle in Rome: early romantic art of the 1770s. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 1979

Roche, Daniel. A History of Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600-1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000

Rosenblum, Robert. Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967

Wilton, Andrew and Ilaria Bignamini, eds. Grand Tour: The Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century. Exhibition catalogue. London: Tate Gallery, 1996

Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Writings on Art, David Irwin, ed. London: Phaidon, 1972