ARTH 500
Clark Visiting Professor Seminar: Eros and Enlightenment Spring 2018
Division I
Cross-listed
This is not the current course catalog

What would it mean to consider eighteenth-century art through the lens of the period’s evolving discourse on love? The explosion of a novel-reading public; the Enlightenment’s often nervous inquiry into the sentiment of love and its status in relation to the equally unstable category of friendship; the ubiquitous presence of Cupid, even in such unexpected contexts as financial literature: these and other phenomena suggest that eros played a central yet complicated role in eighteenth-century self-imaginings. At a time when personal choice began gaining traction as a legitimate foundation for conjugal union–gradually superseding parental decree–love was considered indissociable from such equally fraught domains as trust and risk. Drawing on the collection of the Clark, we will think critically about the ascendancy of genre painting and the category of the rococo, giving special attention to case studies like Boucher, Fragonard and Greuze; the growth of artworks depicting the signing of marriage contracts; the importance of epistolary practice and the vogue for love letter pictures–a theme that we will consider in connection to the expansion, in a period of globalizing capitalism, of a paper culture.