The Age of Enlightenment
The eighteenth century in Europe and North America is often called the Age of Enlightenment, a period which placed great faith in the idea of human perfectibility. Reason was seen as the basis of all knowledge and indeed of larger notions of human growth and of existence itself. Knowledge was categorized and ordered; scientific exploration boomed; and the first dictionaries, encyclopedias, and museums for organizing and displaying information were created.
In the visual arts, the Age of Enlightenment took shape in a rediscovery of the art of the ancient world. Archaeological investigations (most notably the 1748 excavation of Pompeii) provoked a revival of interest in Greek and Roman artistic techniques, styles, and subject matter - along with a renewed taste for classical philosophy. These antique sources greatly influenced Enlightenment philosophers and statesmen such as Voltaire, Rousseau, and Jefferson, as well as artists throughout Europe.
The re-use of antique forms - in painting, architecture, poetry, even fashion - was thought to convey nobility of feeling along with a sense of control and order. At the same time, the eighteenth century saw an explosion of interest in genre scenes (subjects drawn from everyday life) and in comedic forms of satire.
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Giovanni Francesco CostaItaly, (?) -1773 . Veduta del Palazzo de' NN: H.H.: Pisani . 1750 . Etching
. 1972.10
Bequest of Andrew C. Lawson
The Vedute, or views of Venice, were a fashionable series of engraved urban scenes carried out by Costa (and other artists, including Canaletto). The views showed the homes and haunts of well-to-do Venetians in a distinctive, rigorous perspective.
Like Canaletto's, much of Costa's style traces to his work as a designer of stage sets, and, in Costa's case, as an architect. Costa worked with many of the most influential Italian Neoclassicists of his time, including the architect Andrea Palladio, for whom he designed the frontispiece of his seminal book, The Five Orders of Architecture (1746).