Beautifully illustrated and well-balanced perspective

books:

	• Panorama of the Enlightenment (Getty Trust Publications: J. Paul Getty Museum) Dorinda Outram Getty Publications, 2006 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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About 60 watts of light

For an American reader, the chief attraction of Dorinda Outram's "Panorama of the Enlightenment" is its German orientation. Whether this gives a distorted overview of the period is a question.

We generally are presented with the Anglo-French perspective, and this seems right in the long context: The goals of the Enlightenment were realized -- to the extent they were realized -- in the English- and French-speaking areas. The Aufklarung, as the Enlightenment was called in the German states, fizzled out with the failure of the Forty-eighters.

Although this volume is part of a series of "Panoramas" of historical periods published by the J. Paul Getty Museum, it comes across more as a "Byways of the Enlightenment."

This is not just an artifact of Outram's excessive time spent in Wuerttemburg and Potsdam, compared to London and Paris (with hardly a word for Edinburgh, Philadelphia or Amsterdam), but of her penchant for uncovering what might be called the domestic side of the Enlightenment.

It is nice that so many artworks of the era can still be visited in Wuerttemburg but that is partly a testimony to Wuerttemburg's marginal significance, then and since. But I would not have thought anyone could have written 300 pages (well, OK, 100 pages and 200 pages of pictures) on the Enlightenment without mentioning Capability Brown.

For someone who knows little about the Enlightenment, this volume will give a distorted picture. For anyone who knows rather a lot about it (in the Anglospheric sense), it will provide a better balance than they usually get. Chacun a son gout, as the French say.

The other part of the "byways of the Enlightenment" approach is more attractive. Outram may skimp on gardening, but she delves into the importance of masked balls -- not a topic usually thought of as central to the Enlightenment, although she makes a case for it.

In a short text, obviously she can only skim off the cream of the Enlightenment. These "panoramas" are picture books with a fig leaf of commentary. The display of the pictures -- which I take to be the main point -- leaves much to be desired.

For one thing, it is absurd to blow up rough engravings with little detail to a full page, while shrinking a colorful, crowded painting to a sixth of a page. The hand of a book designer with little interest in the text is everywhere evident. Isambard Thomas is the culprit.

The possibilities for illustration were enormous, and with the resources of the Getty, could have been exploited to the full. In the outcome, the selection is . . . curious.

Overall, unimpressive. The last few pages, a discussion of what Theodore Adorno, Jurgen Habermas and Max Horkheimer thought about the Enlightenment, could have been dispensed with. But the very last pages, an idiosyncratic list of Enlightenment places that still can be visited, was a clever, welcome addition.

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Beautifully illustrated and well-balanced perspective

This book is another of Thames & Hudson's high-quality "coffee-table" type of publications that is beautifully illustrated. I don't believe there is another highly illustrated book like this that focuses entirely on the Enlightenment, so it fills a noteworthy gap in the literature. More importantly, Dorinda Outram's narrative is a needed antidote to the overbearing imbalance that has existed thus far in the English-speaking literature on the Enlightenment. Far too many books make it seem as if the Enlightenment was strictly a French or English affair, which, as Jonathan Israel has recently shown in his magisterial Radical Enlightenment, is a complete distortion. The reason for this is simple: American and British historians lack the language abilities to incorporate German intellectual history into their work, and there are more English translations of French philosophe literature available to them. The German Aufklaerung, or Enlightenment, was just as rich and dramatic as what was occurring in France and England, and the contributions that German thinkers make just as important to modern history. The Aufklaerung in Germany leads directly to the era of German Idealism, arguably the most significant period in the history of philosophy (including the Greeks). Outram's book gives a very different perspective than the anglocentric and francophile Enlightenment literature, one that is more balanced and accurate of the historical reality. With the stunning illustrations this book represents a much-appreciated contribution to Enlightenment literature.

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The Enlightenment is that crucial, and profoundly exciting, period between the late seventeenth century and the French Revolution. It was the great age of rationalism and tolerance, an age of boundless curiosity about the physical universe and the nature of the human mind, an age that rejected superstition in favor of observation and experiment to arrive at the truth--an age, in fact, that laid the foundations for the world in which we live.
With nearly four hundred illustrations selected from a wide array of sources, the book tells the fascinating story of the men and women of the Enlightenment in their search for definition and redefinition of the values of their time. Included are the range of ideas they explored--from coffee-house conversations to astronomy, from voyages of discovery to the investigation of dreams, from the first dictionaries and encyclopedias to new attitudes on marriage and women's rights. Theirs was an enthralling journey that reflected the intellectual revolution that transformed human consciousness.

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