ABSTRACT
Giandomenico Tiepolo's New World hints at the other side, the hidden content of what Bonnefoy christened le grand reve. To an extent, Enlightenment itself was a critique of 'the great dream' as religious, faith-based construct in which the post-Renaissance world could be conceived and experienced as the product of god-given harmony and order. In a sense, however, Enlightenment was also its own grand reve, and it is this that was coming into view around the period of its late eighteenth-century crisis. If Enlightenment survived and adapted itself to its great crisis, this also led, in the nineteenth century, to a major cultural parting of the ways, the effects of which are still with us. On one hand was the 'new confinement' identified by Foucault, the medicalisation and technologisation of emotion and experience. On the other hand, in a refusal to be confined, was the Romantic and psychoanalytic discovery of a madness at the core.
