Enlightenment

Enlightenment. C18 French (later European) intellectual climate in which belief in reason as a means to ensure human progress was combined with a questioning of tradition and authority, the systematic collection and categorizing of facts, and the study of nature on a scientific basis. In German-speaking countries it was called the Aufklärung. Its architectural manifestations were a reaction to Baroque and Rococo, the adoption of Rationalism and therefore a return to the principles of Classicism. International Neo-Classicism began to be established in the French Academy in Rome, and led to a growing severity, prompted by writers such as Laugier: it was also sustained by the growth of archaeology, which gave a solid basis upon which it could develop. Winckelmann and others drew attention to the art of Ancient Greece, while French scholars argued for even greater severity which led to the beginnings of Egyptology after 1798. In addition, C18 investigations and explorations encouraged sympathetic appropriations of other than European cultures, made manifest in a growing eclecticism, often expressed in the design of fabriques in landscaped gardens, one of the finest being Wörlitz in Sachsen-Anhalt (late C18), by Erdmannsdorff, Eyserbeck, and others. So the Enlightenment also influenced the design of Picturesque gardens, and the jardin anglo-chinois was more than fashion, for it suggested an admiration for English resistance to Absolutism, and the cultivation of a civilized, ironic detachment, leading to an attempt to give visual expression to a wide range of ideas and themes.

Bibliography

Etlin (1994a);
Picon (1992);
V (1987);
D. Watkin (2004)