What is The Enlightenment?
Enlightenment is a period when the lights come. It means like a reborn from a darkness period. Enlightenment comes after France Revolution and after Renaissance era. It happens in the 17th until 18th century. The feeling of enlightenment are cheerful and full of happiness. The enlightenment was a philosophic movement of the 18th century marked by a rejection of traditional social, religious, and political ideas and an emphasis on rationalism. Before The Enlightenment era, it was a darkness time. It full of darkness. Darkness is everywhere. It’s because of France Revolution.
The thinkers of the Enlightenment, influenced by the scientific revolutions of the previous century, believed in shedding the light of science and reason on the world, and in order to question traditional ideas and ways of doing things. The scientific revolution (based on empirical observation, and not on metaphysics or spirituality) gave the impression that the universe behaved according to universal and unchanging laws (think of Newton here). This provided a model for looking rationally on human institutions as well as nature.
From http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/ says that: The Enlightenment is the period in the history of western thought and culture, stretching roughly from the mid-decades of the seventeenth century through the eighteenth century, characterized by dramatic revolutions in science, philosophy, society and politics; these revolutions swept away the medieval world-view and ushered in our modern western world. Enlightenment thought culminates historically in the political upheaval of the French Revolution, in which the traditional hierarchical political and social orders (the French monarchy, the privileges of the French nobility, the political power and authority of the Catholic Church) were violently destroyed and replaced by a political and social order informed by the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality for all, founded, ostensibly, upon principles of human reason. The Enlightenment begins with the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of the new science progressively undermines not only the ancient geocentric conception of the cosmos, but, with it, the entire set of presuppositions that had served to constrain and guide philosophical inquiry. The dramatic success of the new science in explaining the natural world, in accounting for a wide variety of phenomena by appeal to a relatively small number of elegant mathematical formula, promotes philosophy (in the broad sense of the time, which includes natural science) from a handmaiden of theology, constrained by its purposes and methods, to an independent force with the power and authority to challenge the old and construct the new, in the realms both of theory and practice, on the basis of its own principles. D’Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes his eighteenth century, in the midst of it, as “the century of philosophy par excellence”, because of the tremendous intellectual progress of the age, the advance of the sciences, and the enthusiasm for that progress, but also because of the characteristic expectation of the age that philosophy (in this broad sense) would dramatically improve human life.
Look at this painting.
It is a painting of the enlightenment era. It called “Liberty of France“.
As you can see in the painting, it is about France Revolution. The style of that painting is a combination of dark and light. We really can know that the meaning of that painting is telling about France Revolution. Where the persecution is really happen. You can see that the woman is bring the flag of France. The characteristics of France revolution paintings are heavy, strong, brave, full of energy, dynamic composition, and dramatic.
The Enlightenment encouraged criticism of the corruption of the monarchy (at this point King Louis XVI), and the aristocracy. 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.
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).
These new ways of thinking, combined with a financial crisis (the country was literally bankrupt) and poor harvests left many ordinary French people both angry and hungry. In 1789, the French Revolution began. In its first stage, all the revolutionaries ask for is a constitution that would limit the power of the king.
Ultimately the idea of a constitution failed, and the revolution entered a more radical stage. In 1792, Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette, were beheaded along with thousands of other aristocrats believed to be loyal to the monarchy.
References:
http://marxisttheory.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/liberty-the-enlightenment.jpg
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/
http://smarthistory.khanacademy.org/1700-1800-Age-of-Enlightenment.html
Visual Cultures 
