of reason, enlightenment and progress. The present anthology is premised on the belief that they do not. However, by the same token, the philosophy of Enlightenment seems neither to have been as enlightened as its protagonists thought themselves, nor as their successors systematically made them out to be through the institutions of education and other forms of cultural reproduction over the next two hundred years.
But at the same time, some other voices can, by contrast, be seen to be beginning the long haul of breaking out of a restricted, solely Graeco‐Roman sense of the lineage of European culture. One of the key instances of this in respect of art, in the then‐emergent field of art history, can be found in the interchange between Winckelmann and Herder: the former doing much to establish the conventional sense of a specific and independent European tradition rooted in the example of classical Greece; the latter, in his posthumous ‘memorial’ to Winckelmann, disputing that account and introducing an early example of cultural relativism into the history of art.
In similar fashion to the situation we noted in the Introduction to Part I, the registration in eighteenth‐century European art of all these changing ideas is manifold, but subordinate. Explicit images of the wider world are relatively few. The work of William Hodges and other artists of the Cook voyages to the Pacific, notably Sidney Parkinson and John Webber, is exceptional. But none of them have loomed large in the canon, at least until recently when Hodges has received some of his due. India is the site of the majority of such representations, which are for the most part profoundly inflected by the presence of the East India Company, and behind it, the shadow of the British state. Apart from individual portraits, some of the most complex representations of these cross‐cultural encounters can be found in the work of Johann Zoffany and the Irish painter Thomas Hickey.
In a different register, the world also leaks into representations of life in the metropolis, in instances such as the presence of black servants. Within the normative family portrait or conversation piece, however, such figures are for the most part as marginal within the image as Hodges and Hickey have been to the canon.
The experience of today’s post‐colonial, multicultural societies ill‐prepares one to understand a Europe in which people of non‐European descent formed only a small minority. It is true, of course, that during the eighteenth century there were considerable numbers of black servants to the well‐to‐do, some of them freed slaves, some of whom achieved prominence. In Britain, these included Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, as well as Samuel Johnson’s manservant Francis Barber. Some, though few, made it into art. Hogarth’s representations of black people, mostly servants, are famous, and many other aristocratic portraits feature black retainers. But people of non‐European heritage were less evident than they are today, and those who achieved notice, even more so. A figure such as ‘Dido’, the daughter of an English sea‐captain and an African slave woman, came to enjoy the status of cousin to Lady Elisabeth Mansfield, niece of the Lord Chief Justice, whose later judgement in the Somerset case proved such a benchmark for race relations in Britain. Dido is represented in an enigmatic portrait as being on apparently equal status with her cousin. Anyone of ‘rank’, or even patronized by a person of rank, could become a temporary celebrity. The Polynesian Mai (‘Omai’), who came to England with Joseph Banks after Cook’s first voyage, was one such, and had his portrait painted by no less a figure then Joshua Reynolds. The Chinese artist Tan Chit Qua, who maintained a successful career as a ‘face‐painter’ to the fashionable in places like Bath, was included by Zoffany in his collective portrait of the Royal Academicians.
Beyond the genre of the portrait, European landscape painting also registered, to a degree, the impact of the world beyond Europe. In particular, a sub‐genre of the ‘colonial picturesque’ has been recently canvassed, which seems to have functioned as a way of normalizing strange and often threatening landscapes, as well as the alien presence of Europeans in them, for an audience at home in the imperial metropole. On the whole, however, both the burgeoning colonies and the people in them, on whom the primitive accumulation of metropolitan wealth in large part depended, are a presence but yet do not loom large in eighteenth‐century European art.
Arguably, the most significant and widespread images of the wider world occur in the form of allegorical representations of the Four Continents. No English country house is complete without its female busts of Europe – classically robed and helmeted – Asia, America and Africa, distinguished by exotic headdresses and, in the case of the last at least, not infrequently bare‐breasted. The culminating image of this subject is surely, however, not a sculpture but the enormous ceiling painting by Tiepolo in the palace at Würzburg: a teeming depiction of exotic animals, equally exotic foreign merchants, and a cornucopia of trade goods that threatens to spill down the walls into the viewer’s own space. It is, furthermore, not just ‘fine art’ that we need to be looking at during the eighteenth century: the greatest impact of the wider world can be felt not in ‘fine art’ but in European design. ‘Chinoiserie’ is felt across the continent in a multiplicity of aristocratic houses in the form of pavilions, bridges, screens, wallpaper, ceramics, furniture and even, as at Claydon in England, a whole ‘Chinese’ niche for sitting in and drinking tea. For the European upper classes, the world was growing closer, in every possible way.
IIA The Orient in Fact and Fancy
IIA1 Antoine Galland (1646–1715) Preface to d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale
Barthélemy d’Herbelot de Molainville (1625–95) was the foremost French Oriental scholar active during the reign of Louis XIV. His magnum opus was the Bibliothèque Orientale, an encyclopaedia‐like compendium of knowledge of Eastern civilizations, their dynasties, laws, religion, culture and literature. In 1692, Antoine Galland, also an Oriental scholar who, unlike d’Herbelot himself, had actually travelled in the Levant, became his principal assistant. When d’Herbelot died in 1695, before the project was completed, Galland took it over and saw it through the press. For publication, Galland contributed a synoptic preface which gave an overview of the book’s aims and scope. The Bibliothèque was a work of synthesis, its 8,000‐plus entries drawing on existing Islamic commentaries, including that of Hajji Khalifa (also known as Katib Celebi), an Ottoman historian and bibliographer whose Kashf al‐Zunun itself listed over 14,000 works. Though compiled by d’Herbelot in the late seventeenth century, and published by Galland in 1697, the Bibliothèque in many ways looked forward to the eighteenth century: although critical of Mohammed its bias was secular rather than religious, with an overall intention of humanizing rather than demonizing Islam. For the historian Alexander Bevilacqua, the Bibliothèque was not only ‘the most ambitious and wide ranging European reference work’ of its day, but it also ‘formed the basis of what eighteenth‐century Europeans knew about Islamic letters and history’. Influential on figures as diverse as Jones and Gibbon (cf. IIA9 and IIC14), it maintained a ‘wide cultural resonance’ into the nineteenth century, affecting both Byron and Goethe (cf. IIIB3 and 5). The present extracts are taken from the ‘Discours pour server de preface’ to the Bibliotheque Orientale, Paris 1697, unpaginated. They have been translated for this volume by Chris Miller.
Monsieur d’Herbelot, having already mastered, in addition to Latin and Greek – two languages the possession of which is, in our society, generally considered to justify the title of Man of Letters – Hebrew, Chaldaic and Syriac, next acquired a thorough knowledge of the Arabic, Persian and Turkish languages, which formed the foundation of the great project that he had set himself, that of clearing his path toward a knowledge of the history, laws, customs, mores, religions and sects, both Christian and Muslim, of all the peoples dispersed in the three parts of our Continent who speak them.
To that end, he read the great number of books written in each of these three languages, which he found in the Bibliothèque du Roy or in the Florence library or had acquired on his own behalf. To satisfy his curiosity, he was bound to familiarize himself with these three languages; since Arab
