the “superficial” pleasures of the senses and the deeper joys of moral consciousness. Further to this was
the type and degree of pleasure to be sought, from that of polite refinement to the excesses of luxury and
ostentation; from uncontrolled appetite to its regulation. Shaftesbury’s conflation of art with ethics was a
common idea by the second half of the eighteenth century. For the judge, philosopher and writer Henry
Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782):
A just taste in the fine arts, by sweetening and harmonizing the temper, is a strong antidote to the
turbulence of passion and violence of pursuit. Elegance of taste procures to a man so much enjoyment
at home, or easily within reach, that in order to be occupied, he is, in youth, under no temptation to
precipitate into hunting, gaming, drinking; nor, in middle age, to deliver himself over to ambition; nor,
in old age, to avarice.
(Home, Elements of Criticism, 1762, cited in Solkin, 1993, 169)The “Instrument of Foundation” document of the Royal Academy in London commented that its members
would be “men of fair moral characters” (cited in Saumarez Smith, 2012, 69). To Reynolds, knowledge of
beauty and refined taste could reach so far “... till that contemplation of universal rectitude and harmony
which began by Taste, may, as it is exalted and refined, conclude in Virtue” (cited in Brewer, 1997, 293;
and see Kriz, 2001, 55). And yet there was by the end of the century a growing recognition of the separate
rather than shared spheres of art and morality.
Moral values depended on the interests of dominant social, political and cultural constituencies. In Britain
the moral satires or “modern moral subjects” invented by Hogarth as a distinctively British form of art
were grounded in the values of free will and Protestant reform used to challenge the traditional messages
of continental Catholic art (Simon, 1987, 13). While such art had propagated the belief that the rewards of
virtue might be found in heaven, in Hogarth’s modern narrative series these rewards are to be found in the
contemporary, human world, as a consequence of the just exercise of our free will and impulse toward
selfimprovement, with some additional help from a quasipuritan “providence” arranging the salvation
of souls and the wages of sin in a way made acceptable and understandable to a predominantly Anglican
Britain (Webster, 1979, 34, 48; Craske, 2000, 16, 22–6, 56–63; Haynes, 2006, 9–10). This didactic strain
was linked in Hogarth’s work with imaginative storytelling that combined the virtues of “entertainment”
with the “higher” realm of the ethical, a combination that would have been problematic to those sharing
Shaftesbury’s more patrician style of moralizing. Nor was the relationship between art and religion
unproblematic. Much of the Italian art valued for its canonical aesthetic value was at the same time a
dubious source of “idolatry” or superstition for those committed to more austere Anglican views. Clare
Haynes has analyzed these tensions in depth (Haynes, 2006, 1–13). In Britain, national identity was
defined, from the Reformation, in opposition to the Catholic Church; church ornamentation was, for
example, carefully adapted to specific liturgical traditions (Haynes, 2006, 102–135).
References to human vice and depravity were often secularized in the satirical works of artists such as
Hogarth and Goya, through, for example, scatological, pathological, “foppish” and caricatural
representations of the human body (Craske, 1997, 235–255). This corresponded with an increasingly
critical Enlightenment attitude to religions in general. Poverty, crime and corruption were often associated
in satirical art with the Catholic Church in countries such as France, Italy and Spain. Goya’s monks are
among his most depraved subjects. In mainstream history painting, meanwhile, continental art continued to
rise to governmental challenges to proclaim a more positive Catholic morality (see Chapter 2).
Nationalistic agendas, such as Hogarth’s xenophobia or the French government’s desire to consolidate the
united powers of church and state, played their part in the determination of the moral values to be
promoted (Craske, 2000, 31–33). In secular contexts, a universalizing moral agenda based on the values
of ancient Greece and Rome was championed by many Enlightenment thinkers, but often challenged by an