Beyond Theory: Discovering the Aufklärung in Images from the Old Reich

       Note: This article was originally written in 2022 as part of an Oxford history course and was published in the Oxford University History Society Journal (OUHS Journal)

          “Noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” is a phrase familiar to any student of the art of the Enlightenment. It originated with Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a German antiquarian whose Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst from 1755 – following excavations at Pompeii – is considered central to the founding of art history and, more specifically, Neoclassicism.[1] Winckelmann was most affected by his encounter with the ancient statue Laocoön and His Sons unearthed in Rome in 1506.[2] The mythological Trojan figure suffers intensely as serpents attack him and his children, yet – opposed to the Baroque ideal of expressions of passion and emotional intensity – Laocoön’s countenance reveals calmness and self-restraint. In admiration of the figure’s “great and composed soul,” Winckelmann sought to elevate classical art as aesthetic paradigm.[3] Periodization by art historians places Neoclassicism as the defining art of the Enlightenment, having developed both in response to new ideas and in reaction against the excesses of the Rococo and Baroque styles. It prioritized line, the “emblem of reason,” over color, favored scenes from ancient Greece and Rome, like that of Laocoön, and emphasized symmetry and balance cultivated through mathematically derived proportions.[4]

            Winckelmann is one among many German thinkers who philosophized about art in the Age of Enlightenment. Baumgarten, Lessing, Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Schiller, Schlegel, Mendelssohn, and Herder must also be counted among the profoundly influential figures to the development of art history and aesthetic theory.[5] It is not surprising, therefore, such men feature prominently in historical literature on the Enlightenment in German-speaking Europe – an Enlightenment that has been both recognized and more positively appraised in the historiography since the 1960s.[6] And yet, despite the plethora of texts by Aufklärung figures concerning art and aesthetics, visual evidence itself remains scarce in analyses of the German Enlightenment.

In the subsequent text, the case of the German Enlightenment will be analyzed to elucidate how historians employ – or avoid – images to make their arguments. An existing, rich literature on the art history of the period remains rarely consulted by cultural, political, and intellectual historians of the Aufklärung. Historians who do take images into account, moreover, tend to incorporate the material as illustrative, rather than constitutive, of an a priori definition of the Enlightenment derived from written texts. While there are advantages to that approach, the few examples in which the visual is the centerpiece and starting point of an investigation into the Aufklärung are particularly valuable. Such a ‘pictorial turn’ reveals a different character of the German Enlightenment. Rather than a dogmatic, rational, and secular movement diametrically opposed to Romanticism and Sturm und Drang, it can be interpreted as a federal movement which embraced sentimentality and sought progress within the traditional structures of the Holy Roman Empire and religious institutions along the lines of the English Enlightenment.

The challenge of interpreting images is obvious – while they are inherently designed to communicate, they nevertheless remain “irredeemably mute.”[7] First in the twentieth century, according to historian Peter Burke, did cultural theorist Aby Warburg attempt to develop a formalized method to interpret art. The Warburg School, then, sought to distill the meaning out of an image’s content through iconography, the identification of the visual content, and iconology, the analysis of the meaning embodied in that content.[8] In this text, iconography will encompass both meanings in line with how most contemporary art historians employ the term. Burke identifies critiques of the Warburg approach: practitioners are at risk of discovering in images what they already expect to be there, and their logocentrism privileges content over form.[9] A strict analysis of the form of a piece of art, however, is also at risk of subjective interpretation that misses cultural codes intended by the artist or which would have been understood by contemporaries. Ultimately, as will be demonstrated, the most successful method to parsing out the relationship between the Aufklärung and the visual is defined by an appraisal of both content and form that includes sufficient connecting details. As art historian Michael Baxandall remarks, relating ideas and pictures properly demands such details, for otherwise “such connections cannot stand at all and are better not invoked.”[10]

Indeed, in many instances images are not invoked when the German Aufklärung is evaluated. Historian Maiken Umbach[11] and art historian Daniel Fulco[12] have both lamented how the relationship between the pictorial and the philosophical discourse of the Enlightenment remains insufficiently explored. The absence may be partially explained by the surfeit of written evidence which is more easily understood and explained than the ambiguity of images. It is revealing that in 2017, when historian Avi Lifschitz asked four other historians about specific characteristics of the German Enlightenment, he was greeted with references to books, poetry, publishers, universities, theologians, and philosophers, but not to artists, architects, or images.[13]

German architecture in the Age of Enlightenment is one realm that does attract significant academic interest. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Germans constructed palaces styled after Versailles across the Holy Roman Empire: from Kassel and Stuttgart to Berlin and Vienna.[14] Yet while these buildings have attracted much scholarly attention, only infrequently have historians ventured into the uncertain terrain of connecting these buildings with the Aufklärung, preferring to identify politics and prestige as motivating factors behind their construction. Christian Benedik, for example, notes how German princes constructed opulent palaces to vie for foreign thrones,[15] and Tim Blanning asserts that the Würzburg Residenz was built to announce the arrival of the Schönborn family onto the imperial political stage.[16] Neither author explicitly references the Enlightenment, and any connection is only implied. Benedik, for instance, cites an argument by the early Enlightenment thinker Johann Christoph Sturm in which Sturm claims buildings should reflect the status and worth of their inhabitants.[17] Blanning, meanwhile, describes how Eberhard Ludwig of Württemberg designed Ludwigsburg “in the van of modernity,” organized by rational lines and open to all denominations: it served as an “island of toleration and enterprise.”[18]

            The link between the visual and Enlightenment ideas is also largely eschewed in analyses of material culture in the Holy Roman Empire. Philip Mansel’s study of changing dress patterns in European courts, for instance, does not make any explicit argument linking the new patterns with Enlightenment discourse. He exposes how the expensive and refined habit habillé, “French dress,” spread throughout the German courts until the 1760s, when it was largely replaced across Europe by the frac and military uniform.[19] Both new forms of garb might have been connected to novel ideas: as Mansel mentions, but does not explore in depth, the cheap, one-cloth frac blurred class distinctions while the military uniforms so popular among monarchs revealed the new role of rulers as servants of the state.[20] Michael North and Pamela Selwyn’s book on cultural consumption in the Age of the Enlightenment, too, shies away from defining a clear relationship between Aufklärung discourse and material culture.

Where North and Selwyn do mention the Enlightenment, however, their definition of the movement is not constituted by the objects themselves, but by canonical literature on the concept. Thus, when they describe how both men’s and women’s fashion became more austere in the 18^th century, for instance, they designate the evolution as in line with the enlightened writings of Goethe and Justus Möser concerning the importance of simplicity in dress.[21] This tepid link between fashion patterns and enlightened content is an example of an iconological approach that depends on lexicographic content to explain an object’s presumed meaning. And it is more explicit in other literature on the German Enlightenment which sees art as embodying and representing one unitary idea.

Unlike in the work of Blanning and Benedik, the Würzburg Residenz and Ludwigsburg Palace are explicitly linked to Aufklärung ideals in Daniel Fulco’s analysis. Indeed, when Tiepolo painted the Allegory of the Planets and Continents in the Würzburg Residenz, he was articulating Enlightenment thinking, claims Fulco. According to this interpretation, the representations of Asia, America, Africa, and Europe in the fresco’s cornice allude to stadial theories of civilization drawn from Enlightenment philosophy.[22] Fulco bolsters his argument by linking – however insufficiently – Tiepolo’s patron, Prince-Bishop Carl Philipp von Greiffenclau, to such philosophy. Based on Greiffenclau’s interest in the arts, his scholarly pastimes, and his facility with foreign languages, “it is reasonable to conclude” that the Prince-Bishop “could have read about Enlightenment theories of civilization” espoused by Locke, Montesquieu, and Lafitau.[23]

When discussing Ludwigsburg, too, Fulco identifies the Aufklärung first in written text before discovering it in the visual. Noting how Leibniz, building on Pufendorf’s ideas, argued that sovereigns should strive to be wise and virtuous caretakers of society, Fulco then assesses how that idea is reflected in the evolution of frescoes in the Holy Roman Empire.[24] With this interpretation in mind, Fulco emphasizes the contrast between Carlo Carlone’s The Victory of Virtue (Merit) with the Glorification of the Arts at Palais Daun-Kinsky from 1716-17 and his Gloria dei Principi at Ludwigsburg Palace from 1731-33. The former depicts the patron, Count Wirich Philipp, as an ancient Roman general in the heavens surrounded by personifications of the arts and learning in the ceiling’s two side vaults.[25] In the latter, however, patron Duke Eberhard Ludwig’s military prowess is deemphasized, and the arts and sciences are instead positioned at the composition’s center. As Fulco explains, the shift is one example of the conscious displacement of iconographic themes in the fresco programs ordered by nobles of all ranks in the Holy Roman Empire that took place in the 1720s.[26] His interpretation identifies a cultural transformation informed by the Enlightenment in which rulers integrated Leibniz’s theory and began to underscore their cultural beneficence and philanthropy, rather than their martial virtue, as a path to and index of princely power.[27]

A unitary vision of the Enlightenment is therefore a precondition to uncovering the iconographical meaning of the frescoes identified by Fulco. According to this vision, a ruler exhibits his enlightened nature by cultivating art and knowledge – a pursuit that leads to stability, reason, and rationality.[28] Other historians adopt a similar Warburg School approach to analyzing visual culture in the German Enlightenment. Amir Minsky, for instance, contends that Daniel Chodowiecki’s illustrations, published in popular Prussian journals and calendars in the eighteenth century, are best synthesized as images of the “enlightened male bourgeois,” defined in enlightened literature as a patriarch tasked with ameliorating social conditions through education, charity to the poor, and other civic engagements.[29] In a similar manner, Semjon Dreiling finds the Aufklärung in Hamburg’s St. Michael’s Church, reconstructed after a fire in the late eighteenth century. To Dreiling, the Enlightenment is found in Hamburg’s laws and in the texts of the church’s sermons: it meant order, scientific progress, and equality before God. The church’s architectural simplicity and the standardized, more hygienic gravestone layout embody those principles, thus reflecting the ideals of the Enlightenment.[30]

            In these past examples, the content contained within the visual is explained to be illustrative of the Aufklärung but the image itself is not taken as a starting point for the investigation into what the Enlightenment meant in the minds of the artists or patrons. By instead beginning with the visual and allowing it to guide one’s understanding of what the German Enlightenment comprised, a more accurate image of the Aufklärung can be painted. Such a method does, however, risk descending into mere subjective interpretation that renders any conclusion unconvincing. Sufficient details connecting one’s interpretations of the meaning behind an image’s content and form is therefore crucial. Ultimately, the most successful way by which historians can make use of visual evidence when discussing the German Enlightenment is by analyzing the visual as a starting point for culture, not its end product.

            Matthew Martin’s assessment of a porcelain epergne in Zwettl, the “Zwettler Tafelaufsatz,” begins with the visual to draw conclusions about the Aufklärung. The table centerpiece was created in 1768 as part of a multimodal Baroque celebration of Abbot Rayner Kollmann's jubilee at the Cistercian monastery of Zwettl in Lower Austria.[31] Beyond this information, however, there are no written sources to guide one’s reading of the porcelain centerpiece, so Martin’s analysis relies heavily on visual analysis. The range of porcelain figures includes representations of architecture, astronomy, literature, and drama in addition to four larger, central figures depicting the four cardinal virtues: temperance, prudence, justice, and fortitude.[32] In addition to these, Martin draws attention to the figure placed at the center – the “Porzellanerzeugung,” a curious, self-referential depiction of porcelain figures making additional porcelain figures.

            What is the connection to the Enlightenment? To answer this, Martin notes that the addition of figures representing the secular disciplines to the cardinal virtues suggests a more complex iconographical program which would have been understood by contemporaries.[33] The implication is a selective acceptance of the Enlightenment and of secular learning within the context of a Catholic monastery. Further pointing to this interpretation is the location of the figures away from the privacy of Zwettl’s library. In fact, they were meant to be displayed in a space designated to formal court ceremonies where Abbott Kollmann negotiated and defended the monastery’s place in the wider empire.[34] Therefore, according to Martin, the epergne was designed to defend the ecclesiastical state’s institutional power by demonstrating the monastery’s commitment to secular, enlightened pursuits.

            The fact that the epergne is made of porcelain, meanwhile, leads Martin to a further insight. Historian Suzanne Marchand has noted that porcelain as a material embodied the values of enlightened science.[35] Indeed, Winckelmann championed its more austere, purely white form as exemplifying Neoclassicism, and porcelain’s popularity boomed in the second half of the 18^th century. Roman emperors and mythological figures were the most popular productions, followed by dynastic portraits and, later, by intellectuals such as Voltaire.[36] But in addition to exemplifying the triumph of investigative chemistry and the Enlightenment, Martin notes that porcelain simultaneously was regarded as a divine alchemical gift.[37] The medium, then, elucidates the ideals of a Catholic Enlightenment present in Austria: it acknowledged the value of secular learning in the world of monastic scholarship and affirmed the role of the monasteries as spaces where engagement with Enlightenment learning took place. The prominence of the Porzellanerzeugung, moreover, further bolster’s Martin’s interpretation of porcelain’s significance to the epergne’s meaning.

            By making the visual central to his analysis, Martin is able to present Abbot Kollmann’s understanding of, and reaction to, the Aufklärung. Yet as compelling as his analysis is, its bold claims about the nature of the Catholic Enlightenment necessitate stronger source material to be fully convincing. No indication is given as to what Kollmann personally believed or accomplished, and the amount of supervision he had over the details of the porcelain epergne is never outlined. Porcelain may have meant a union of enlightened ideals and religious doctrine to some, but did it to Kollmann? Does this case plausibly give insight into a broader Catholic Enlightenment? Martin’s analysis, like Fulco’s argument connecting Greiffenclau and the Enlightenment, would benefit from more specific evidence.

            Maiken Umbach’s examination of Leopold III Friedrich Franz’s estate at Wörlitz contains specific evidence and thus best demonstrates how the visual should be employed to define the German Enlightenment. Franz’s small state of Anhalt-Dessau lacked the bureaucratic apparatus to produce written policy guidelines or record strategic political decisions.[38] Nevertheless, an analysis of Wörlitz, the setting of the first Neoclassical architecture and the first English-style landscape garden in eighteenth-century Germany, reveals how Franz understood and responded to the Aufklärung. Before delving into Wörlitz, however, Umbach details encounters between Franz and Enlightenment thinking. Between 1763-1785, Franz embarked on at least four extended study trips to England where he befriended aristocrats like the earl of Shelburne.[39] Inspired by Shelburne’s agricultural improvements, promotion of scientific research, and implementation of religious reform, Franz would bring the Enlightenment to his land: he introduced clover-based crop rotation, educational reforms at the newly founded Philantropin in the spirit of English dissenting academies, and new commercial enterprises, including a workshop producing Chippendale-style furniture.[40]

            Wörlitz, then, was Franz’s masterpiece. Deliberately designed with public access for didactic purposes, the estate featured a meandering trail guiding visitors across the garden. Buildings at the site reflect enlightened ideals, from a public library to a permanent geographical and ethnological exhibition housed in the so-called Forster pavilion.[41] Yet the visual, too, reveals the Aufklärung. An impressive model volcano amazed onlookers with its artificial lava created by elaborate firework displays and glowing, red-tinted glass. In addition to acting as an allusion to Pompeii, Umbach notes that the volcano’s location next to the Villa Hamilton, named after English diplomat and vulcanologist Sir William Hamilton, suggests a deeper meaning.[42] Specifically, it acts as a statement on Franz’s position in the Neptunist-Volcanist debate concerning the geological genesis of the earth. Volcanists favored a belief in the constructive potential of sudden events and unorthodox change to Earth’s geology while Neptunists contended that a gradual deposition of sediment from a world ocean was most responsible for rock formation. English intellectuals generally adhered to the former view, which came to be associated with ideas of an experimental Enlightenment to enact progressive reforms, while German intellectuals largely subscribed to the latter view, which became associated with both orthodox religion on the one hand, in the sense that it aligned with the idea of a divine plan, and Prussian-style enlightened absolutism on the other hand, which centrally planned progressive reforms in advance of their implementation.[43] Franz learned of the debate in 1775 after visiting an exhibit at the British Museum and the volcano thus symbolizes his agreement with the Volcanist position and his belief that the volcanic process served as a model for enlightened improvements.[44]   

Visitors to Wörlitz also encounter a labyrinth, and after journeying through narrow winding paths past sculptures of German sentimental poets and moralizing quotations, they reach an archway with the inscription: “Let reason guide you in your choices.”[45] The true exit is concealed at the far end of a dark path, and most would be attracted to a brightly lit Greek sculpture of Leda and the swan at the labyrinth’s center. More than mere Neoclassicism or rococo pornography, the sculpture is a sentimental image of betrayed innocence and depicts the moment immediately after Leda tries to protect a swan from being attacked by an eagle, when the swan (Zeus) rapes her.[46] Leda is deceived just as visitors are deceived in their search for the exit, yet Umbach asserts that the design is not prescriptive in its meaning. Rather, the layout, sculptures, and inscriptions merely serve as triggers to subjective associations that seek to stimulate emotions, something central to moral improvement and enlightened learning.

The landscape garden is a space for individualized, sentimental experience and gives crucial insight into Franz’s conception of the Aufklärung. At one point, visitors reach the Elbe River where they confront a wide vista that places a Synagogue next to a Church and poplar trees.[47] According to Umbach, the juxtaposition stimulates reflection about religious coexistence and tolerance. Wörlitz, then, facilitates an emotional experience that does not imply a romantic irrationalism opposed to the Enlightenment; rather, the sentimentality was conceived as fundamental to inciting moral improvement and to the advancement of society.

In the final analysis, Umbach concludes that Wörlitz’s appeals different senses and sensitivities, and its synthesis of different models, convey that experimental, pragmatic, and empirical quality of the kind of Enlightenment that Franz had appreciated in England.[48] Thus, her investigation provides new insight into the nature of the German Enlightenment: Wörlitz questions negative assumptions about the Enlightenment’s dogmatic rationalism and it integrates the irrational and sentimental into a self–reflexive and self–critical Enlightenment ideology. Umbach’s incorporation of details connecting Franz directly to Aufklärung discourse, moreover, renders her conclusions more convincing than those of Martin.

To many contemporaries, Wörlitz captured the Enlightenment’s essence more succinctly than any of the hundreds of books and articles on the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ published in the 1770s and 1780s.[49] Winckelmann likewise identified the Enlightenment in the visual, namely in the piercing eyes of Laocoön. Historians seeking to capture that essence today would thus benefit from going beyond merely analyzing texts about aesthetics to engaging with the visual on its own terms. Iconographical interpretations rely too heavily on lexicographic content to grasp the complex interplay of meanings at work in images: a ‘pictorial turn’ starting with the visual as constitutive of the Aufklärung, by contrast, has much to offer. Although the German Enlightenment was the focus of this work, a ‘pictorial turn’ would correct our understanding of the nature of the Enlightenment more broadly. Goethe once said, “All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.”[50] Historians would do well to heed those words, to venture, from time to time, away from the gray and into the preserved glimpses of green.

Bibliography

Ahnert, T, Grote, S, D'Aprile, IM, Décultot, E, and Lifschitz, Avraham. "The German Enlightenment." German History 35 (2017): 588–602.

Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Beiser, Frederick. Diotima's Children: German Aesthetic Rationalism from Leibniz to Lessing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2010. Accessed January 3, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Benedik, Christian. “Die Architektur als Sinnbild der reichsstaatlichen Stellung.” In Das Reich und seine Territorialstaaten im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Wolfgang Schmale and Harm Klueting, 97-112. Vol. 10. Geschichte Und Kirchengeschichte Zwischen Mittelalter Und Moderne. Münster: Lit Verlag Münster, 2004.

Blanning, Tim. The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Burke, Peter. Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. Picturing History Series. London: Reaktion Books, 2001.

Dreiling, Semjon Aron. “Tod und Aufklärung in Hamburg.” In Hamburg: Eine Metropolregion zwischen Früher Neuzeit und Aufklärung, edited by Johann Anselm Steiger and Sandra Richter, 743-754. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2015.

Duarte, Luiz. “The Vitality of Vitalism in Contemporary Anthropology: Longing for an Ever Green Tree of Life.” Anthropological Theory 21, no. 2 (June 2021): 131–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499620923546.

Fulco, Daniel. Exuberant Apotheoses: Italian Frescoes in the Holy Roman Empire. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 

Mansel, Philip. “Monarchy, Uniform and the Rise of the Frac 1760-1830.” Past & Present, no. 96 (1982): 103–32. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650512.

Marchand, Suzanne L. Porcelain: A History from the Heart of Europe. Princeton University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvt9k0rk.

Martin, Matthew. “Porcelain and Catholic Enlightenment: The Zwettler Tafelaufsatz.” Eighteenth-Century Life 45 no. 3 (2021): 116–134. doi: https://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2102/10.1215/00982601-9273020

Minsky, Amir. "Home Is Where the Heart Is: The Rise of Emotional Spaces in the German Late Enlightenment." Eighteenth-Century Life 45, no. 3 (2021): 88-115. muse.jhu.edu/article/803894.

North, Michael, and Pamela E. Selwyn. "Material Delight and the Joy of Living": Cultural Consumption in the Age of Enlightenment in Germany. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.

Umbach, Maiken. "Classicism, Enlightenment and the 'Other': Thoughts on Decoding Eighteenth-century Visual Culture." Art History 25, no. 3 (2002): 319-40.

________. “Visual Culture, Scientific Images and German Small-State Politics in the Late Enlightenment.” Past & Present, no. 158 (1998): 110–45. http://www.jstor.org/stable/651223.

Vaughan, William. German Romantic Painting. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

Whaley, Joachim. "'Wahre Aufklärung Kann Erreicht Und Segensreich Werden': The German Enlightenment and Its Interpretation." Oxford German Studies 44, no. 4 (2015): 428-48.