The Origins of Neoclassicism
The example of ancient virtue, especially Roman virtue of the early days of the Republic, provided an alternative for the French politicians to the current decline in the social standards of the nobility. Italy was already part of what was called The Grand Tour, taken by well-heeled Europeans, especially the British, who wanted to visit their origins. The Roman ruins were especially compelling as crumbling lessons of morality. Roman virtue was more than a dream, for Rome–ancient Rome–had become the climax point of every Grand Tour. Scholars and tourists inspected the ruins, and artists, such as Hubert Robert and Canaletto, responded to the demand for Italian vistas with view paintings. Archaeologists explored and discovered the remains of classical civilizations and these recoveries were made available to the public and to artists through carefully engraved reproductions. Antiquity, from the reading of Homer to the use of the ancient as a suitable subject for artists, became the order of the day from the mid-Eighteenth Century on. Pompeii (1748) and Herculaneum (1738) were being excavated, a process that continues to this day.
Spurred by the discovery of a perfectly preserved ancient civilization, there was a fortuitous confluence between reason, antiquity and science that pitted these new ideas against those of the ancien régime, now equated with immorality, decadence and superstition. In addition to this moral divide there is a social and gender divide as well in which men are equated with reason and women with decadence and frivolity with a consequent loss of power for women. In England, Lord Shaftesbury linked art that appealed to the senses to taste and to the feminine and called for art that was elevated morally, masculine, based in nature and in truth. Sir Joshua Reynolds in his lectures to the Royal Academy echoed these ideas, which severed the female from the future that changing social and economic forces were incurring. Reynolds called for a celebration of grand themes and the exclusion of the detail and of decoration in the arts. Although two women were included among the founding artists of the Academy, women would have to wait two hundred years before another female would be invited to join. The artist was to be male and was to be an educator of the people and high art was to be moral. So-called minor or genre artists, such as William Hogarth in England and Chardin in France, ranked lower than history painters, were not only crowd favorites but also dignified labor and ordinary life and criticized those who were not decorous in their behavior. Women, after the Neoclassical painter, Angelica Kauffmann, who was a member of the Royal Academy, were relegated to the genres of still lives and portraiture and were not allowed to attend the art academies.
Preference for classical art was articulated by Johann Winckelmann, the first modern art historian, who recommended copying the ancients in order to study nature more thoroughly. In 1755, Winckelmann, the secretary and librarian to Cardinal Albani in Rome, published Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture, which was an attack on Rococo and an assertion of the superiority of the art of the Greeks. Winckelmann established the idea that art was created within a particular cultural and social context. The writer concluded that the temperate climate of Greece and the Athenian emphasis on outdoor sports (in the nude) fostered ideals of noble calm and simplicity. Using Cardinal Albani’s collection of antique art, Winckelmann wrote his History of Ancient Art in 1764 in which he conceived of the development of Greek art in successive phases within a political, social, and religious context. Winckelmann put forward the idea that art evolved within a society in a theological fashion, reaching a peak of perfection. For the art historian, the peak was the art of Classical Greece, and the modern artist could do no better or no more than to emulate the Greeks.
Two years later, an Englishman, Sir William Hamilton, envoy extraordinary to the court of Naples, published a four-folio volume of antiquities as a result of his participation in excavations. Although the text was in English, the illustrations were of great influence on Josiah Wedgwood, John Flaxmann, Henry Fuseli, Jacques-Louis David, and Jean-August Dominique Ingres. Continuing his efforts to revive interest in ancient art, Hamilton published another set of folios, illustrated by Johann Heinrich Tischbein in 1791. This burgeoning historicism allowed identification with an ancient past that could be understood in relation to contemporary political goals. To Europeans, Rome was far more accessible as the source of ancient art. Greece, dominated by the Ottoman Empire, was cordoned off, making it difficult to travel to the territory. Actual ancient Greek was virtually unknown to most Europeans. But in a remarkable act of cultural imperialism, an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, a native of Scotland, Lord Elgin, convinced the Sultan in charge of the Parthenon to allow him to take all the sculptures to England. The Athenians were using the stones of the Parthenon to build their own houses and the building was being slowly dismantled. But Elgin was not interested in the building; he wanted the sculptures, because the French wanted the sculptures.
Due to the shifting alliances during the Napoléonic wars, the French were shut out of Greece long enough for Elgin to spring into action and was granted permission to acquire the art of the Parthenon. The Muslims in charge did not care about Western relics and watched while the priceless works of art were removed from the building and shipped to England. Even at the time of these actions, cries of “vandalism” could be heard, but Elgin claimed he was protecting the sculptures for their own good. The cost of removing the sculptures and transporting them to England was astronomical and bankrupted the family. The British government, which eventually acquired the sculptures, never paid Elgin back for his troubles. The English public was stunned at the realism of these actual works by the workshop of Phidias himself. It would take years before the artists could reconcile the abstraction of the Greek vases, illustrated by Tischbein, and the physicality of the “Elgin Marbles” still on view in the British Museum today.
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