Art & Politics during the Hispanic Enlightenment
Assistant Professor Leslie E. Todd – ARTH 352, Fall 2025
The University of the South
[Please note: This website is a work in progress through December 2025.]
Enlightened Despotism:
an authoritarian or absolutist government that implements Enlightenment ideologies as a means to enhance their power
About the course
This is an advanced art history course that begins with an introduction to the origins of the Enlightenment and its unique iteration in the Spanish empire. Enlightenment ideals of order, knowledge, education, rationalism, and modernization seamlessly folded into and guided Spanish reform efforts in the eighteenth century. Unique to Spain, the Enlightenment thus became a policy of the state in which imperial renovation was framed within the context of the new intellectual movement’s ideologies. Bourbon political power on the Spanish throne has thus been characterized as an ‘enlightened despotism.’ The Enlightenment, particularly the brand of enlightened despotism promoted by the Bourbons, transformed art and art institutions in the Hispanic world. Despite the ideals of ‘enlightened despotism,’ in actuality colonialism as the larger cultural system in which art functioned was an ongoing and complex process that involved negotiation, resistance, reconciliation, and manipulation of new and old art forms. In this course, we explore the processes of change and how a new intellectual movement—framed under specific political goals—was and was not accepted and both did and did not change art in Spain and its colonies.
See the linked pages below to explore how students conceived of connections across the semester.
