Enlightenment thinkers condemned Rococo art for being immoral and indecent, and called for a new kind of art that would be moral instead of immoral, and teach people right and wrong, which was to be guided by science and reason.

Scientific experiments like the one pictured below, for example, were offered as fascinating didactic shows to the public in the mid-eighteenth century. In Joseph Wright of Derby’s painting A Philosopher Giving A Lecture at the Orrery (1765), we see the demonstration of an Orrery, a mechanical model of the solar system that was used to demonstrate the motions of the planets around the sun—making the universe seem almost like a clock.

In the center of the Orrery is a gas light, which represents the sun (though the figure who stands in the foreground with his back to us block this from our view); the arcs represent the orbits of the planets. Wright concentrates on the faces of the figures to create a compelling narrative.

With paintings like these, Wright invented a new subject: scenes of experiments and new machinery, and the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution (think cities, railroads, steam power, gas and then electric light, factories, machines, pollution). Wright’s fascination with light, strange shadows, and darkness, reveals the influence of Baroque art.

Denis Diderot, Enlightenment philosopher, writer and art critic, wrote that the aim of art was “to make virtue attractive, vice odious, ridicule forceful; that is the aim of every honest man who takes up the pen, the brush or the chisel’ (Essai sur la peinture).