What is Enlightenment? My project attempts to answer this question by interpreting images of the Enlightenment age, from pamphlets and coins to book illustrations, diagrams and maps to paintings, sculptures and room furnishings. It analyses those images as visualizing designs of the Enlightenment project and, in this sense, as self-images. While conventional research on the Enlightenment, and even more so its public image, is one-sidedly shaped by the assumption that it was a culture of reason and argumentation based on written texts, the planned book takes a methodologically innovative turn in order to do justice to the suggestive power of Enlightenment’s self-projections in 18^th-century societies, which where still largely shaped by visual communication.

The central hypothesis is that images played an indispensable role in the formation of the programme understood as ‘Enlightenment’, in its sensual persuasiveness and its communication to society, and in the formation of a movement that defined itself thereby. In fact, empirical evidence suggests that the programmatic usage of Enlightenment images preceded the usage of Enlightenment terminology (‘lumières’, ‘éclairer’, ‘to enlight­en’, ‘Aufklärung’, ‘i lumi’ etc.). Methodologically, a useful tool is provided by the recently much-discussed concept of ‘social imaginations’. It assumes that ideas shared in a larger or smaller group are fundamental to social dynamics and that these ideas can be grasped as ‘imaginations’ of often striking visuality.

The leading question is one that has been developed from the agenda of Enlightenment research (which is in itself multi- and interdisciplinary), as well as from a contemporary desire to understand the Enlightenment’s legacy for us. The project necessarily has an image-theoretical, media-reflexive and media-comparative side: What contribution did image media make, be it intentional or effective, to the modelling and propagation of Enlightenment and on the basis of which characteristics were they able to do so? The analysis proposed here aims to do justice to the media diversity of the 18th century, and will therefore be able to build bridges between the historical Enlightenment and our present age which is shaped by visual media again. Such bridges promise to be more substantial than the easy invocation of the Enlightenment as a buzz-word.

See Daniel Fulda: Identity in Diversity: Programmatic Pictures of the Enlightenment. In: Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 45, 1 (2022), S. 43–62, open access: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1754-0208.12781

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