Classicism, Enlightenment and the ‘Other’: thoughts on decoding eighteenth–century visual culture

Cultural historians have been slow to respond to the pictorial turn. They often find images too ambiguous to use as sources in their own right. This problem is aggravated by two characteristics shared by early modern and postmodern visual culture: both transgress boundaries of genre (such as the text/image divide), and both tend to be notoriously fluid and plural in terms of their ‘message’. The nineteenth–century Idealist notion of ‘art’, by contrast, celebrates unity of style and content, and tolerates multiple meanings only where they can be resolved in dialectical synthesis. This legacy continues to prevent us from understanding visual evidence which conforms to neither requirement. Drawing on readings of the contemporary landscape art of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Cy Twombly, this article proposes a new approach to visual culture of pre–Idealist periods, for which ambiguous allusive fields and transgressions of genre were constitutive. The eighteenth century’s use of classical culture is a case in point, here exemplified by a close reading of the multi‐layered trope of Arcadia. The conclusions that emerge from this reading call into question negative assumptions about the Enlightenment’s dogmatic rationalism which have dominated historiography from Romanticism to postmodernism. The ‘image–texts‘ of the eighteenth century destabilized hegemonic rationality without promoting its opposite, instead integrating the ‘other’ into a self–reflexive and self–critical Enlightenment ideology.