Enlightenment:

Rococo, Neoclassicism, Romanticism

Unit 4: Later Europe and America

DATES / HISTORY / KEY PERIODS

1650-1850: Agricultural Revolution
1694-1778: (Voltaire) Science/Technological Improvement
1700-1790: Height of the Atlantic Slave Trade
1712-1778: (Rousseau) Nature alone must be society's guide; 1762 wrote Social Contract
1713-1784: Diderot organized and edited 52 volume French encyclopedia
1715: Death of Louis XIV brought a resurgence of aristocratic life
1720-1722: Last Outbreak of Bubonic Plague in Europe
1730: Rococo Ends
1755: Samuel Johnson composes the first English dictionary
1756-1763: Seven Year's War (Great Britain vs. France)
1765-1783: American Revolution
1789-1799: French Revolution; brings about an interest in the Greek ideal of Liberty and democracy.
1800: Neoclassical Ends
1803-1815: Napoleonic Wars; Napoleon is crowned and sees himself as the new "Caesar"; heavily inspired by Roman Empire
1830: Romanticism Ends
1837: First Photograph (Daguerrotype)

KEY ART MOVEMENTS

Rococo & Neoclassical: Patronage and Artistic Life

Upon the discovery of Pompeii in 1784, Rome was seen as a hub of tradition and artistic culture but not of progress. This find inspired the first art history book, The History of Ancient Art, written by Johann Winckelmann in 1764. Winckelmann criticized Rococo as decadent, and celebrated the ancients for their purity of form and crispness of execution.
Art academies began to spring up around Europe and the United States, with artists being trained in the proper classical tradition according to the Academy. Part of this training sent artists to Rome to study ancient works firsthand.
The French Academy showcased selected works in a biannual or annual event called the Salon (named for the Salon Carré in the Louvre where it was held). Art critics and judges would scout out the best of the current art scene and accept only a few for public viewing at the Salon.
History paintings with either historical, religious, or mythological subjects were the most prized. They were followed by portraits, landscapes, genre paintings, and then still lives.
The Grand Tour = Under the guidance of a connoisseur, the tour visited Naples, Florence, Venice, and Rome. The goal was to immerse tourists in the lessons of the ancient world and perhaps collect antiques or buy a contemporary artwork.

Rococo (1700-1750)

Historical Background:

After the death of Louis XIV, the court at Versailles began to diminish. Power was left in the hands of French nobles versus the king.
Rococo is a departure from the Baroque interest in royalty and takes on more aristocratic interest in decorating Parisian townhomes.
While the French were most noted for Rococo, it was also active in England, central Europe, and Venice
Inspired by Peter Paul Ruben's use of color to create form and modeling

Painting:

Shuns straight lines; curvilinear and delicately rounded forms
Flagrantly erotic and sensual
Pastel hues with spontaneous brushwork
Contain playful scenes of love and romance with over sexual overtones
Figures are slender and often seen from the back; their forms are clothed in shimmering fabrics
Set in bucolic settings like park benches or downy meadows; gardens are rich with plant life and flowers dominate
Fête galante = features the aristocracy taking long walks or listening to sentimental love songs in garden settings
Used in more domestic settings for private viewing

Neoclassicism (1750-1815)

Historical Background:

Late 18th century = age of the Industrial Revolution. Populations boomed as mass production, technological innovation, and medical science marched relentlessly forward.
Enlightenment = philosophers and scientists based their ideas on logic and observation, rather than tradition and folk wisdom.

Painting

Stories from great epics of antiquity spoke meaningfully to 18th century painters
Mythological or Biblical scenes were painted with a modern context in mind
Symmetrical compositions with linear perspective leading the eye into a carefully constructed background
Invisible brushwork and clarity of detail

Sculpture

During the Industrial Revolution, mass production of metal caused the price of bronze to drop and the price of marble rose. Because it was felt that the ancients preferred marble (and unpainted marble at that), it maintained an authoritative appeal.
Neoclassical sculpture was seen as a continuance of an ancient tradition.
Sculptors moved away from figures wrapped in ancient robes to more realistic figural poses in contemporary drapery.

Architecture

Books written by the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio became sources for Neoclassical artists and architects. The books emphasized symmetry, balance, composition, and order.
Greco-Roman columns with their appropriate capitals appears on facades of houses.
Pediments crown entrances and top windows.
Domes grace the center of homes, often setting off gallery space.
Interior layouts are nearly or completely symmetrical with rectangular rooms mirroring one another.
Each room is decorated with a different theme, some inspired by the ancient world.

Romanticism (1789-1848)

Historical Background:

While the French Revolution instilled the spirit of liberty, equality, and fraternity all throughout Europe and into North and South America, it ultimately led into the chaos of the Reign of Terror and eventually the Napoleonic Wars.
Romantics espoused social independence, freedom of individual thought, and the ability to express oneself openly. This was manifest not only in the political battles of the day, but also societal changes in general education, social welfare, and newfound expression in the arts.
Romantics reacted against the Enlightenment by arguing that one should trust your heart, and not your head.

Romanticism: Patronage and Artistic Life

Traits of the Romantic artist = troubled genius, deeply affected by all around them, tempermental, critical, and always exhausted. They seek pleasure in things of greatest refinement and was a product of the extremes of human endeavor. Ex: JWM Turner liked to be tied to the deck of a ship in a storm so that he could bring a greater sense of the "sublime" to his paintings. Stereotypically, Romantic artists were loners who fought for important causes like Delacroix who painted political works and Goya who understood that human folly exists on the side of the villain and hero alike.
Romantics enjoyed a state of melancholy (gloomy, depressed, and pensive mindset that is soberly thoughtful). Romantics also championed the antihero, or a protagonist who does not have the typical characteristics of a hero and often shuns society while rarely speaking, but does great heroic deeds.

Painting

Artists were impressed by the "sublime" in art and disdained the ordered, symmetrical, logical, and scientific qualities of the Enlightenment.
Artists aimed to create the fantastic, the unconscious, the haunted, and the insane. Some artists visited asylums and depicted their residents while others painted the underside of the subconscious state even a hundred years before Sigmund Freud.
The invention of photography had an enormous impact on painters, which led to some artists fleeing painting because they felt their skills could not match the precision and speed of a photograph. Others believed that pictures could be a great aid in a painter's work.
Artists were caught up in revolution, both European and American. The fight for Greek independence was particularly galvanizing for European intellectuals. Political paintings became important, expressing the artist's solidarity with a social movement or political position.
Even landscape paintings had political agendas, with Thomas Cole answering criticism on how Americans had polluted their land due to the Industrial Revolution.

Revival Architecture

19th century architecture is characterized by a revival of nearly every style of the past. Historicism and yearning for past ideals fueled a reliance on the old, the tried, and the familiar.
The Middle Ages represented a time when religion was more devout and sincere and life was more centered around faith. Modern living, it was felt, was corrupted by the Industrial Revolution. People were nostalgic for medieval ruins that when they were non handy, they had ruins built so that Romantic souls could ponder the loss of civilization.
While Medieval art was the favorite theme to revive, Egyptian, Islamic, and even Baroque architecture was updated and grafted onto structures that had no connection with their original inspiration.
Bath houses in England = Islamic; opera houses in Paris = Baroque; office buildings in the United States = Gothic; George Washington monument in Washington D.C. is Egyptian obelisk.
The use of iron became more important but it hid under the skin of the building itself, with some using it on the exterior in combination with glass.

Unit Vocabulary

ACADEMY = Established during the Renaissance and widespread by the seventeenth century, academies were artist-run organizations whose aim was to improve the professional standing of artists as well as to provide teaching.

CAPRICCIO = Capriccii, or fantasy scenes, were a popular form of landscape painting in the eighteenth century. Frequently they incorporated recognizable buildings or archaeological monuments in arrangements not meant to be topographically accurate.

DRY POINT = an engraving technique in whcih a steel needle is used to incise lines in a metal plate. The rough burr at the sides of the incised lines yields a velvety black tone in the print.

GRAND TOUR = the principally 17th- to early 19th-century custom of a traditional trip through Europe, with Italy as a key destination, undertaken by upper-class young European men of sufficient means and rank (typically accompanied by a tutor or family member) when they had come of age (about 21 years old). The custom—which flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transport in the 1840s and was associated with a standard itinerary—served as an educational rite of passage.

HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL = a group of artists who share the same philosophy, work around the same time, but not necessarily together

EXEMPLUM VIRTUTIS = (Latin: “example of virtue”). An model of virtuous behavior worthy of emulation. Neoclassical artists presented exempla virtutis (pl.) from ancient history as uplifting moral messages for the art-viewing public.

FETE GALANTE = a genre of painting popular in France from the early 18th century, characterized by the depiction of figures in pastoral settings. Fête galante paintings are an important part of the Rococo period of art, which saw the focus of European arts move away from the hierarchical, standardized grandeur of the church and royal court and toward an appreciation for intimacy and personal pleasures.

MANIFEST DESTINY = In 1845 the United States is destined, by God, to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the continent.

ODALISQUE = A female slave in an oriental harem. The odalisque was adopted as a subject by a number of French artists in the 19th and 20th centuries, most famously by Ingres (whose 1814 Grande Odalisque is in the Louvre, Paris), and was usually shown nude or semi-nude, reclining in a voluptuous manner.

PASTEL = In color science, pastels are essentially tints of other colors created by adding white.

SALON = The Salon, or rarely Paris Salon , beginning in 1667 was the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Between 1748 and 1890 it was arguably the greatest annual or biennial art event in the Western world.

THE SUBLIME (ROMANTICISM) = The theory of sublime art was put forward by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful published in 1757. He defined the sublime as "an artistic effect productive of the strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling."

Resources

FRENCH

BRITISH

SPANISH

NORTH AMERICAN