The eighteenthcentury taste for Oriental themes in art expressed a further indirect means of exploring
moral issues. In inspiring fantasies of “other” cultures and lifestyles, it was attuned to the mode for
sensuous luxury. It resonated with the Enlightenment impulse to examine all conventions, including those
of morality, in an open fashion and celebrated the growing status in thinking on art of the creative
imagination (Chapter 1). For those keen on masquerade, adventure and disguise, Orientalist art provided
an opportunity to explore through the imagination new identities.
Edward Said’s “Orientalism” (1978) established a scholarly tradition of examining critically western
representations of the “East,” especially the Middle East, Islamic peoples and Arab cultures. By
imagining and (mis)representing such peoples and cultures as “other” to themselves, western writers
and artists could turn them into objects of curiosity, fantasy and exoticism, which justified their own
imperial sense of moral superiority while at the same time creating desirable visions of the transgressive.
Although Said subsequently modified his views on “otherness” (Barringer, Quilley and Fordham, 2007,
5), he considered that the “Orient” may be seen as a “semimythical construct” or ideological
generalization (Said, 2003 [1978], xiii) acting through history as a convenient foil to oversimplified
western values such as democracy, enlightenment and modernity. Said identifies the eighteenth century as
a period that prepared the ideological ground for Orientalism as a discrete area of study (cultural,
political and ideological) in the nineteenth century.
The eighteenthcentury Enlightenment broadened, through its travel literature, fictional utopias and
voyages of exploration, earlier identifications of the “Orient” with Islamic lands of the eastern seaboard
of the Mediterranean (unfamiliar and therefore intriguing to many Europeans until the nineteenth century),
and opened them up to include China, Japan, India, Africa (represented in exotic splendor in the “Africa”
ceiling at the Würzburg Residenz by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo), America and even those unfamiliar
aspects of Spain, Russia and Greece mythologized as “primitive” (Michel, 2003, 106; Lemaire, 2013, 7).
The Enlightenment began a trend, for example, in the writings of the historian Edward Gibbon, for
comparing contemporary European experience and values with those of other, older civilizations and,
beyond that, engaged sympathetically with such civilizations. Its writers often applied a scholarly
approach we would now characterize as historicist (seeing a culture from the perspective of its own time)
and humanist (reflective scholarship approached in a spirit of community with, rather than hostility
toward, the cultures studied). Attitudes to the “east” became increasingly secularized. Christian attitudes
toward it were challenged by geographical and historical reference points extending beyond those of the
Bible and were reconstructed as and naturalized within the emergent discipline of anthropology (Said,
2003, 116–121). However, the “Orient” was also viewed at times in a sensationalized way, as a popular
vogue in the late eighteenth century. New developments in knowledge could also produce reductive
perspectives on the east.
Orientalist images could be historically specific and documentary in nature. Many artists strove to
document with some accuracy the costumes, settings and daily life encountered in these regions (Tarabra,
2006, 296; Bindman, Boucher and Weston, 2011b, 79; Lemaire, 2013, 66–76, 118; Ribeiro, 2015, 38–
39). Orientalist painting may be interpreted as one of the outcomes of the Enlightenment’s quest for
critical scholarship (Craske, 1997, 117, 129). Arabic and Persian literature became available in
translation; scientists, explorers and the visits of ambassadorial staff facilitated east–west exchanges. The
letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), wife of the British Ambassador to Constantinople
(presentday Istanbul), were published posthumously in 1763. In France, Enlightenment intellectuals
such as Montesquieu, in his Persian Letters (written in 1721), Voltaire, in Zadig (1747), and Diderot, in
his The Indiscreet Jewels (published anonymously in 1748), wrote works of philosophically inclined
fiction in which the west was “seen” or represented obliquely and often satirically through Orientalist
narratives. Although these narratives were fantasy tales, they took seriously the moral and political