Volume 36, Number 5 · March 30, 1989
The Dark Legacy of the Enlightenment
By Garry Wills
The Image of the Black in Western Art Volume IV: From the American Revolution to World War I, Part 1, Slaves and Liberators
by Hugh Honour
Harvard University Press, 379 pp., $50.00
The Image of the Black in Western Art Volume IV: From the American Revolution to World War I, Part 2, Black Models and White Myths
by Hugh Honour
Harvard University Press, 306 pp., $50.00
The Enlightenment, bearing the name it did, was ill-equipped to deal with dark-hued human beings. Seeking to make all things perspicuous to reason, that historical movement shied from the opaque. Thomas Jefferson, who admired translucent things (like his own house), criticized the black cheek for its lack of blushes. This inability to express shame indicated to him that there was none to be expressed. Only a bungling-workman God would have prisoned up a feeling inside people who could not convey that feeling visually. Thus a black's 'ardour after his female' lacks 'a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation'—the subtler forms of emotion that can be registered on paler skin, a kind of superior page for the writing of the human story.
Review, 3440 words
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