painted more documentary eastern scenes, participated actively as an artist in the construction of such
fictions, dressing himself in a caftan as he worked. The artistic vogue for turqueries coincided with and
was reinforced by social practices such as the masquerade.
Vicarious pleasure in “Oriental” adventure was often based on racial stereotyping and muddled western
thinking. Anthropological understanding of racial difference is thought to have originated in the later
Enlightenment. Earlier in the eighteenth century, western representations of “other” races were often
based on stereotypes or composites: Chinese–Japanese–Indian “hybrids” being symptomatic of the latter.
The stereotypical view of Turks veered in the eighteenth century between that of the brutal warrior and its
counterpart: the languid, sensual man or woman at ease. The court of the Ottoman Empire at
Constantinople was associated in the early part of the century with power, affluence, military valor,
cruelty (e.g.in succession killings), mythic female beauty and a liberal sexuality that nourished western
fantasies. By the end of the century, there was a greater awareness of larger racial groupings; for example,
the inclusion of Turks in the “family” of IndoEuropean ethnicity. For much of the century, however,
loosely defined “Orientals” remained a common fantasy of western art.
Moral Feeling, Moral Looking
If Orientalist art celebrated the “senses,” the development of a cult of “sensibility” created a moralizing
strain of artistic production. In the same way as crude “sensations” or sense impressions were felt to be
inadequate in themselves for the development of cognitive processes, more sophisticated modes of feeling
were theorized, in the eighteenth century, as the basis of our moral impulses. The middle decades of the
century have been characterized as the high point of the cult of “sensibility” (sensibilité) in the sense of
refined moral feelings (Pagden, 2013, 53–78). Manifestations of this movement in art and culture are
often referred to as sentimentalism. Although eighteenthcentury culture, particularly in science and
philosophy, promoted the use of reason, this was not felt to be incompatible with the private cultivation
and public display of emotion; for example, in response to scenes of virtue in distress. In the early
decades of the century “sensations” (of sight, hearing, touch and so on) were regarded as useful empirical
sources not only for the formulation of our more complex ideas and knowledge generally, but also for the
formulation of subtler feelings or intuitions about what was morally acceptable. “Sensations” had an
affective dimension as they were deemed, even in their crudest form, to be “agreeable” or “painful.” This
was acknowledged in the 1736 work, Theory of Agreeable Sentiments (Théorie des sentiments
agréables) by Lévesque de Pouilly. Sometimes the term “sensation” was used interchangeably with other
terms indicating the emotions in general. The term sentiment was normally reserved, however, for
feelings (or mental intuitions) of a more refined nature, qualified or sanctioned by our powers of reason.
It was this kind of feeling that lay behind many of the midcentury pronouncements of critics and the
general public about their moral responses to art.
When the fashion for sensibility was at its height, the viewer’s capacity for “sympathetic imagination” or
for empathy with the figures in paintings and sculptures was very important. The emotions indicated by a
figure’s facial expression, pose or general context could all play a part in activating these channels of
sympathy:
It is the hidden relationship of these different expressions with our own individual states of mind, that
brings sympathy into play.
(Lévesque de Pouilly, 1971 [1747], 74; my translation)Moral “sentiments” were distinguishable from the anarchy and violence of “passion.” Facilitating a