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Abstract
The Enlightenment, with its belief in reason, equality and progress, was crucial to the evolution of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. This article explains how the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) went about exploring this movement and its values through the creation of “The Salon,” a gallery space for intellectual activity – for reflection, discussion, music and events. Displays of busts and books evoke the intellectual and social world of the Enlightenment, while a contemporary commission The Globe embodies the connections between our modern world and that of the past, between Europe and the wider world, between museum objects and abstract ideas.
Notes
1. Creative Research, “Art and Design in Europe 1600–1800.”
2. Habermas, The Structural Transformation; Goodman, The Republic of Letters.
3. Lilti, The World of the Salons.
4. Château du Malmaison, Rueil. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Salon_de_Madame_Geoffrin.jpg (accessed 18 September 2015).
5. https://www.skny.com/artists/los-carpinteros/ (accessed 18 September 2015).
6. Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham.
7. Chester Castle housed a panoptic prison built by Thomas Harrison, which was planned in the 1790s and completed around 1800. https://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/ches/vol5/pt2/pp204-213 (accessed 20 February 2017).
8. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
10. A variety of events have taken place in the Globe, including the following: January – March 2016 “What was Europe,” British Academy funded series of four discussions on early modern Europe; 17 and 24 January 2016 “Drop-in Design” Family Activity: Cabinet of Curiosities –Imagination Station Trolley; 12 February 2016 “Love and Liaisons” event; 26 February 2016 “Talkaoke” at Friday Late (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0noo4KIpck ); 28 February meditation class; 29 April 2016 “Baroque to the Future” Friday Late musical performances; 23 September 2016 performance of “Spode Thirty-one Note Lovesong” by Matt Smith, Ceramics Artist in Residence; 5 May–23 June 2017 concerts by the Royal College of Music on the first three Fridays of the month (https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/MNM6gXPw/royal-college-of-music-concerts-summer-2017).
11. All quotes were condensed to fit the key point relevant on the label. Philosophe. César Chesnau du Marsais in Diderot, L’Encyclopédie (1765), Vol. 12, pp. 511–15.
12. Wilson, Diderot.
13. Sculpture. Etienne-Maurice Falconet in Diderot, L’Encyclopédie (1765), Vol. 14, pp. 834–7.
14. Femme. Antoine-Gaspard Boucher d’Argis, in Diderot, L’Encyclopédie (1756), Vol. 6, pp. 475–6.
15. Schenker: The Bronze Horseman.
16. https://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/236688 (accessed 18 September 2015).
17. Traite de nègres. Louis, chevalier de Jaucourt, in Diderot, L’Encyclopédie (1765) Vol. 16, pp. 532–33.
18. Métier. Diderot, L’Encyclopédie (1765) Vol. 10, pp. 463–65.
19. Fox, The Arts of Industry, pp. 263–75.
20. Hunt et al., The Book that Changed Europe; Hunt et al., Bernard Picart.
21. Label written by Lucy Trench, 2015.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lucy Trench
Lucy Trench was Lead Educator on the Europe 1600-1815 Galleries project at the V&A from 2010 until 2015 when she took up a post as Head of Interpretation at the Science Museum. In 2017, she is Project Director for Masterplan Phase One in the National Railway Museum, York. Phase One, £20 million, will comprise a redisplay of the Great Hall, a new interactive gallery and storage solutions for over 10,000 objects ranging from locomotives to tea sets. She is also author of The Victoria and Albert Museum (2010, with an introduction by Mark Jones).