Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art since the Age of Exploration by Mary D. Sheriff

Author:Mary D. Sheriff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2010-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

4

Travel and Cultural Exchange in Enlightenment Rome

CHRISTOPHER M. S. JOHNS

In a highly optimistic society that believed in its own perfectibility through reason, rational debate, and empirical research, western Europe in the eighteenth century convinced itself that its destiny was to bring enlightenment to the four corners of the planet. In numerous allegories of the four continents of the world, Europe sits enthroned, scepter in hand, bejeweled, usually crowned, and looking serenely imperious out and over the other three continents still benighted by superstition, primitivism, Islam, and general backwardness. Giambattista Tiepolo's Four Continents stair house fresco at the episcopal Residenz in Würzburg in German Fran-conia, executed in 1751–53, is a celebrated, characteristic case in point (fig. 4.1). Reified as a calm queen, Europe is surrounded by musicians, ecclesiastical dignitaries and numerous emblems of “culture,” broadly defined. Below, to the viewer's right, a figure in livery sits atop a large cannon amid other weapons. In early sketches for the enormous fresco this figure was not included. In a middle stage of the fresco's development, the weapons were positioned alongside a young boy, and the painting as executed presents us with a portrait of the building's architect, Balthasar Neumann, still accompanied by military ordnance.1

The inclusion of weapons and a male figure as the substructure on which Europe rests cannot be an accident. The rapidly expanding colonial empires of western Europe were established and maintained by force of arms. But even more fundamental is the tacit recognition of European technological superiority vis-à-vis the other parts of the world. That technological

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