From Picturesque Gardens to National Monuments: A Genealogy of the Cult of "Great Men"

This paper seeks to historicize the idea of a national hero by tracing the concept back to its eighteenth-century origins in picturesque landscape gardens. With the gradual, uneven shift from Enlightenment absolutism to bourgeois civil society, artists, architects, and landscape designers were tasked with creating memorial gardens to so-called "great men" as an alternative to the dynastic commemoration of emperors, kings, and princes. As an entry point, I examine William Kent's Temple of British Worthies at Stowe and Johannes Wiedewelt's memorial grove at Jægerpris, which were dedicated to national heroes from British and Scandinavian history respectively. I argue that the iconographic program of these memorial spaces provided a radically different mode of aesthetic experience, distributing the act of viewing across a sculptural group in a landscape rather than centering it on a singular, autonomous statue. In addition, Kent's and Wiedewelt's sculptures represented a new vision of historical change, one that was not exclusively driven by political leaders, but also by artists, poets, and scientists. After situating the notion of "great men" in the eighteenth-century landscape tradition, the paper turns to two post-revolutionary national monuments: the French Pantheon and the Bavarian Walhalla. These purportedly secular temples, I contend, were testing grounds for re-thinking the place of outstanding individuals in both society and history. Rather than draw a straight line from the Enlightenment to the present, this paper asks: how is this eighteenth-century idea of a national hero being set to new kinds of ideological work in the current resurgence of nationalism?