Empiricism and Rococo Aesthetics: Reclaiming the Enlightenment as a Moment of Liberation

In the introduction to his landmark 1960 study, Art and illusion, E. H. Gombrich exhorts the reader to engage in an experiment in perception: look, he urges, at your reflection in a steamy bathroom mirror. Do you not have the impression that you are confronting yourself face-to-face, natural size? Yet if you trace the outline of your face in the steam, you must observe that your head is precisely only half the size of your head in nature--and indeed, this is a geometrical fact of reflection. Since the mirror is halfway between you and your reflected self, the size of your reflection must always be half your natural size. "But however cogently this fact can be demonstrated with the help of similar triangles, the assertion is usually met with frank incredulity," Gombrich writes. "I cannot have my cake and eat it. I cannot make use of an illusion and watch it." (1) This neat exercise is at once a demonstration in the tradition of eighteenth-century empiricism, and an assertion of its limits. For the pendant of Enlightenment confidence in the predictability and describability of the world, is the uncertainty that emerges when such exercises fail to fully account for natural and perceptual phenomena. Two recent studies of eighteenth-century texts and images by Michael Baxandall and Thomas Kavanagh demonstrate the recognition and celebration of these limits to empiricism that existed even during the heyday of confidence in such empirical powers of observation, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Both authors find Rococo aesthetics plumbing the depths of experiences which elude the light of empirical observation. And at the end of these aesthetic explorations, both authors--one explicitly, the other by example--find a moment of liberation, a place of freedom for the autonomous Enlightenment self. Baxandall's Shadows and Enlightenment is very much in the tradition of eighteenth-century empiricist treatises, and packed with Gombrichian exercises like the one related above. "I am sitting writing out of doors and intend introspection about shadow.... I am on a roughly paved terrace, on a windless day of very strong sun, but under the shade of a lime tree. I am at an angle to the south wall of the house, which is long, two-storeyed, buff-plastered but half-covered by vines of different varieties" (72) (2) Baxandall is trying to observe shadows and their role in aiding his perception of the world, testing the models posited by the theorists he discusses. Indeed, his book takes the form of a conversation with theorists of perception from the eighteenth century to the present on this issue of shadow's role in perception. A discussion of "Molyneux's Problem," a perceptual puzzle that fascinated eighteenth-century empiricists, is followed by chapters on twentieth-century cognitive science, Rococo treatises, an d finally shadow's role in representation. Shadow, Baxandall notes, is both a matter of subjective perception and objective matter "in the world." Shadow plays a basic role in our being able to perceive three-dimensionality in objects, being able to "read" the world with our retinas. But figuring out just how this occurs turns out to be no simple matter. During the eighteenth century, this problem of shadow's role in perception was a major preoccupation for thinkers and theorists. One way to demonstrate your level of education, Baxandall relates, was to discuss with erudition the types and roles of shadow. And yet there were several issues to which this eighteenth-century discussion of shadow was "systematically insensitive" (34). These are such philosophical blind spots as: do we not perceive objects as wholes, rather than as retinally assembled from parts (as eighteenth-century theorists routinely posited)? Don't we also perceive known objects without need of shadow, or even in spite of the distortions shadow can impose? Indeed, isn't shadow much m ore likely to be a hindrance than a help in perception? …