Professor Jennifer Milam

How interesting this age has become, causing so many artists to sigh. For a few days the countryside is abandoned; Paris comes to life; all classes of citizens come to pack the Salon. The Public, natural judge of the fine arts, already pronounces its verdict on the merit of paintings that took two years of labour to produce. Its opinions, at first tentative and uncertain, quickly acquire stability. The experience of some, the enlightenment of others, the extreme sensibility of one party and the good faith of the majority are finally able to produce a judgment all the more equitable in that the greatest liberty has presided there. The rise of the art critic is one of the most significant changes to the history of artistic reception. It is bound up in a broader understanding of the Enlightenment as process, rather than strictly as an intellectual movement. Debates about the definition of beauty, the origins of good taste and the social value of the arts occupied the Enlightenment¿s intellectual leaders - Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Montesquieu, among others - but their theories did not inform an artistic movement. There is no Enlightenment style, and to seek out a set of criteria by which certain works of art could be claimed as a product of the Enlightenment is fraught with difficulty. It is far more productive to consider how encounters with art, occasioned by the public exhibition of paintings and sculpture at the Salons, offered opportunities through which individuals could claim ¿enlightenment¿ and thus opened up the discourse on art to a wider range of opinions and judgements that further questioned the relationship between art and society. Enlightenment was conceived as a state of mind in the reception of art, cultivated in opposition to received positions of authority in matters of taste.

If the subject matter of intellectual history is the study of past thoughts, the intellectual history of the visual arts and music may be characterised as the study of past thoughts as they were expressed visually and aurally. Yet this is not always how an intellectual history of art and music has been practiced. More attention is often paid to verbal texts about art or music, rather than to the visual or the aural per se. If we accept that ideas can have visual and aural, as much as verbal form, then the histories of art and music are significant repositories of thoughts of individuals and networks of individuals (creative artists, patrons, institutions) within a given culture and period. But the ways in which those thoughts are articulated as aural or visual ¿texts¿, and the ways in which they can be accessed by those who seek to understand them, will be specific to each art form, and represent a distinctive kind of intellectual activity in each field.

My focus in this article is on a small group of German theorists, designers and patrons who thought extensively about the relationship between national identity and garden design: Christian Hirschfeld, Prince Franz von Anhalt-Dessau and his wife Luise, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Prince Pückler. These garden enthusiasts knew one another through personal contact or their writings, and they responded to and developed their ideas in relation to the newly framed creative enterprise in German lands of ¿garden-landscape-art¿. What they shared was a conviction that garden forms affect feelings, with the role of the garden artist to determine paths that would alter and diversify the visitor¿s experience of place. This essay explores how spontaneous emotions, elicited by movement through the garden, were linked with a growing sense of patriotism that contrasted with cosmopolitan judgments in the writings of Hirschfeld, Pückler, and Goethe.

An emerging cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth century bolstered the search for the foundations of a shared humanity across the boundaries of different cultures, which was one of the central aspects of Enlightenment thought. Similar ideas and principles transformed the traditions of European garden design in the second half of the eighteenth century with William Chambers's writings on Chinese gardens suggesting aesthetic values that both paralleled and rivalled those found in the English gardens of his contemporaries. In 1771, Catherine the Great translated Chambers's Designs of Chinese Buildings (1757) into Russian, which led to the creation of the largest complex of chinoiserie in any eighteenth-century European garden. Taking as my focus the gardens of Tsarskoye Selo, I explore the tensions between cosmopolitanism, exoticism, and imperialism in Russian garden design under Catherine the Great.