Conclusion
The eighteenth century was poised between centuries of artistic production in which courtdictated and
churchdominated priorities and hierarchies had prevailed, and the nineteenth century, which witnessed
the height of the fashion for Romanticism, when individual creativity and the breaking of conventions
came to the fore. The beginnings and endings of centuries present crude units for analysis. It would be
misleading to “read back” into the eighteenth century the seeds of later developments, as cause and effect
rarely occur in such neatly linear ways. It was certainly, however, a century in which the production and
reception of art underwent many changes. It is sometimes characterized as the period in which modernity
first came into focus, as an expanding art market and art public stole some of the momentum previously
guarded by an elite and shaped changes to the old order. By the end of the century, academies of fine art
remained important in Europe, as did specialization in specific genres and media. Yet the established
statuses of art and artists began to change, particularly as the “lower” genres challenged more
significantly the primacy of grand history painting.
Subjectivity, the awareness of viewers of their own role in the interpretation and assessment of art, was
nourished by a burgeoning literature in art criticism and aesthetics. Many became conscious of the ways
in which art reflected back to them their own values, ideals and desires, although such insights had not yet
attained the sophistication arising from later developments in psychology and psychoanalysis.
Enlightenment writers and artists applied a critical eye to the workings of taste. Ultimately, this led to
unprecedented scrutiny of the moral implications of the act of looking itself.