The Dangerous Goddess

Abstract

The criticism of the visual arts in early eighteenth-century Britain was largely framed in the terms of the republican discourse we have come to describe as civic humanism.¹ Its founding texts are a pair of essays written around 1710 by Shaftesbury: an account of his design for the painting of The Choice of Hercules by Paolo de Matthaeis, and a brief letter on the function of the fine arts; and in addition to these, he wrote an extensive draft of a major treatise on painting which he did not complete.² According to Shaftesbury, the primary function of the fine arts was moral and rhetorical: their task was to persuade the citizen to wish to perform acts of public virtue in defence of the political republic. If, and only if, they were successful in this task, were they to aspire to perform the subsidiary but much-valued function, of presenting the civic spectator with images of an ideal beauty by which he might be polished as well as politicised. The fine arts, then, are charged first to produce a citizen with the rough integrity of a Cato, and then to polish him until he shines like Cicero. The danger, of course, is that it may be imagined that this order of priorities could be reversed, and that the beautiful forms displayed by painting and sculpture will be valued more highly than the ‘Virtue’ and ‘laudable Ambition’ they should inspire (Turnbull 128). An art whose first priority is to make Cato fit for the salon may make Cicero unfit for the senate.