Posts Tagged ‘Neoclassicism’

Jan
01
2010

French Romanticism: The Historical Context

French Romanticism: The Historical Context

Neoclassicism was a historicist revival of an ancient style that acquired political and social implications during a time of turbulent change.  Calm and serene, Neoclassicism lent itself well to noble subject matter that depicted the ideals the French public should emulate.  Despite the classical harmony of Neoclassicism, the style was developed during a decade of chaos.  Ironically, Romanticism, which in contrast, was a dramatic and dynamic style matured during a decade of peace and calm. The Romantic artists looked back to the Napoléonic age of empire and glory with disappointment and depression that they had been born too late to participate in the great adventure.  Although these artists challenged the Salon system that maintained the status quo and the academic style, they did so in a society that was busy turning back the clock of liberalism. Under Napoléon, traditional powers were reinstalled, an emperor took the place of a king, the Catholic Church was restored, and the Code Napoléon, while an efficient legal structure, set the cause of equality back for decades to come. Napoléon reinforced the backward look to his regime by adopting the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne as his model to reinforce the concept of “France,” which was a “modern” nation with a long tradition.  On the other hand, Napoléon fought “wars of liberation” to spread the French Revolution over Europe and wound up presiding over an Empire. Once a force of the “liberation” of Europe, the Grande Armée became a force of conquest, control, and occupation, all in the name of “freedom.”

Romanticism, in France, evolved out of Neoclassicism’s grand manner as Napoléon’s artists responded to commissions that demanded glorification of his military adventures and martial victories.  But the building of an empire was often a dark and dirty business.  Hiding beneath the mask of glory was a very real cost in human life and suffering that demanded a new and sometimes uncomfortable realism. Jean-Antoine Gros glorified Napoléon but could not ignore the reality of war.  The growing unease with Napoléonic wars can be traced through the works of Baron Gros.  From Napoléon at Arcole (1796) to Napoléon at the Pesthouse of Jaffa (1804) and Napoléon at Eylau (1806).  In the decade, the depiction of Napoléon had gone from heroic young leader to noble healer to solemn general leading his horse slowly among the dead.  Gros and the other Napoléonic artists could not resort to classical allegory and were forced, by their Emperor’s demands, to represent the contemporary era. Current events seemed far more relevant than ancient deed from an antique past.  Any lessons the classical era might have had seemed meaningless in the face of modern times of industrialization and total war.  The break between Neoclassicism and Romanticism can be clearly seen in the time when France dominated the Continent and plunged Europe into ten years of war.  While many artists continued to explore the possibilities of the Neoclassical, artists such as Gros were drawing a distinctive dividing line between Neoclassicism and Romanticism—the new interest in the contemporary and a new concern with one’s own time.

The age of Napoléon was a great age for art and for artists in France.  The Emperor threw himself into a well-organized orgy of looting the cultural heritage of Europe.   He stripped European nations of their patrimony and brought thousands of art treasures, large and small, significant and less well known to Paris and installed them in the Louvre, now a public museum.   The challenge to Neoclassicism from new artists and unfamiliar art was part of the origin of Romanticism.  To be able to see actual paintings by Rubens, his bold brushwork, his bright colors, his restless and dynamic forms was a revelation to French artists.  To the new Romantic generation, the French academy ceased to the sole source of artistic ideals.  The French people accepted, as their due, this artistic tribute from other countries.   They had few moral qualms about the wholesale stripping and transportation of European culture to Paris.  In addition to the unprecedented availability of Continental art, the fall of the French aristocracy had brought a number of important private collections to the market.  Most of this art found its way to England, where it was safe from Napoléonic looting.  But the looted collections added to the Louvre were returned to their countries of origin, with the exception of a few prize Italian works, still in France.

After the fall of Napoléon in the first abdication of 1814 and the final fall in the second abdication of 1815, France returned to a conservative political mode. Napoléon himself had certainly been reactionary when it came to women and the lower classes and he reinstated the Catholic Church, bringing back religious traditions, albeit under state control.  His successor, the Bourbon monarch, Louis XVIII did little to change the France Napoléon left behind, continuing his policy of inviting the émigrés back and restoring the old order, while opening the doors to men of merit.  Louis agreed to a constitutional monarchy, modeled after that of Britain, while his successor, Charles X, chafed under such restrictions.  Although the French people had nostalgic memories of Napoléon, they had little patience with the simple-minded kind and revived the old revolutionary fervor in the “July Days” of 1830.  Charles X was summarily overthrown in a few short days, called “Days” as a reflection of the “Days,” also in July when the first Revolution began in another July in 1789.  The next king who stepped into the vacant throne, Louis-Philippe, was careful to not repeat the mistakes of Charles X and called himself the “Citizen King.”  During the span between Napoléon and Louis-Philippe, Romanticism in France and its counterpart, the avant-garde, was created.

Near the conclusion to his classic history, The Age of Napoléon, J. Christopher Herold quoted Napoléon,

“’Greatness has its beauties, but only in retrospect and in the imagination’: thus wrote General Bonaparte to General Moreau in 1800.  His observation helps to explain why the world, only a few years after sighing with relief at its delivery from the ogre, began to worship him as the greatest man of modern times. Napoléon had barely left the scene when the fifteen years that he had carved out of world history to create his glory seemed scarcely believable. Only the scars of the war veterans and the empty places in the widows’ beds seemed to attest the reality of those years, and time soon eliminated even these silent witnesses.  What remained, in retrospect and in the imagination, was legend and symbol.”

The generation of Romantic artists who matured under the reign of Louis XVIII and Charles X had to be content with a petit revolution and regretted not having experienced the true glory of life under Napoléon.  Artists, such as Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, spent their early careers dealing with the contemporary. Géricault who, like Gros, measured the Napoléonic wars with two paintings of dashing French cavalry officers, both resplendently dressed, but each portrait of a warrior was very different.  The Charging Chasseur (1812) and the Wounded Cuirassier (1814), separated by two short years, span the gap between the glory years just before the disastrous Russian campaign and the year of defeats at the hands of the Alliance of European armies.  Part of a transition generation between David and Delacroix, Gros and Géricault swerved away from the Davidian tradition of heroic Neoclassicism, as seen in Napoléon Crossing the Alps, and into a hybrid of Romanticism combined with realism, overlying classicism.  Under the reign of Louis XVIII, artists were not bound to producing propaganda and were freed from Napoléonic censorship. Géricault pointedly criticized the new and incompetent government with his Raft of the Medusa, seen in the Salon of 1819.  The theatricalized scene, which included a young Delacroix, posing on the raft, was dramatically Romantic, contemporary, and political.  Arriving at the end of France’s time of glory and honor, Géricault’s Raft revealed how dangerous and how forceful art, freed of the dictates of the state, could be.

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Dec
11
2009

The Artistic Revolution in France

The Artistic Revolution in France

Two social events would impact artists and art, especially in France.  The first event was the French Revolution, which forced artists to choose between King and Country and eliminated the traditional patrons, the Church and the aristocrats.  The second event was a long, ongoing process: the rise of the middle class as a group that would dominate economically and politically and thus constitute a new buying public for art.  In the decades before the French Revolution, the middle class had made itself known to the artists.  Although impressed by history painting, this class was interested in domestic themed art for middle class interiors.  In addition to being pushed by new collector demands, the artist was increasingly beholden to the opinions of art critics.  Any artist who wished to succeed in the Salon had to go through a set of educational and professional motions, including the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Prix de Rome and recognition in the Salon by the established powers—-the State, the Church, and the wealthy patrons.  The French Revolution upended the state-based system of educating and rewarding artists, but only for a time.  During the Revolution, artists either participated in propagandizing the aims and ideals of the cause or risked being denounced and imprisoned.  One of the most important painters for the French Royal family,  Jacques-Louis David,  proved to be an agile and adroit political opportunist and quickly turned his coat and put himself in the service of the Revolution.  He even went to far as to sign warrants which led to the imprisonment of his colleagues while he designed and built huge works of public art, rather like the Rose Bowl floats of today, that advertized the Revolution and awed the spectators.  At the end of the worst part of the Terror, David joined his imprisoned colleagues in the Luxembourg Palace.  He was lucky not to have been beheaded as were his sponsors.  David’s pupils, Jean-Antoine Gros and Anne-Louis Girodet Roussey de Trison, were able to ride out the Revolution in Italy, safely away from the changing fortunes of artists unwise enough to play politics.

David emerged from prison somewhat chastened but quickly attached himself to the next rising star, Napoleón Bonaparte, already a patron to Gros.  The end of the Eighteenth Century was an age of hero worship and Napoleón rewarded those who worshiped him.  Once sanity returned and stability replaced civil war and chaos, the new régime, the Directory quickly restored the system of art education, complete with the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the Rome Prize, and all of the academic rules and regulations that, if followed, would lead to Salon success.  But the demands upon the artist had changed.  The old patrons were gone and new powers awaited the artists.  The state under Napoleón embarked upon nearly two decades of propagandistic art, celebrating the new Emperor and his court. Neoclassicism, already an important style before 1789, had been employed as the style of the Revolution by David, who was now the most important artist of the Empire.  Responding to the needs of the new heroes, Neoclassicism retained its carefully classical style—-clear outlines and cool colors and balanced composition—-but was dramatized by exciting narratives suitable to an age of glory and conquest.

It is here, in these military narratives, that the germs of Romanticism can be discerned.  Early Neoclassicism did not favor diagonals and action and motion, but under the Emperor, excitement and drama ruled.  That said, the official style of the Empire was given over to the same traditional role as had always been expected of artists—–supporting the established powers.  Although during these Napoleónic years, ideas of Romantic aesthetics from Germany were imported to France, art-for-art’s-sake and artistic freedom were still in the future.  The artists had to please new masters, the Emperor, the Salon jury, and the bourgeoisie.  Most of all the artist had to conform to the Salon system itself, now refined and more important than ever.  By the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, a new power, the middle class, the bourgeoisie, was firmly in social, economic, and political power, despite the comings and goings of various emperors and kings.  This middle class was an art-loving class.  They knew little about art but knew that they like to be entertained.  Thousands came to art exhibitions called Salons that were state-run and state-supported advertisements for academically trained artists.  The Salon was the only avenue of economic opportunity for the French artist who needed to make a living.  Scheduled for every year or every other year, depending on which régime was in power, the Salons were huge exhibitions drawing from artists around the world.  The French public crowded in by the thousands, expecting to be delighted and amused, rather like we are pleased (or not) by contemporary film.

For the French artist, the annual Salon was the one chance to show and to become known.  To be refused—rejected from the Salon—was to be a failure, a refusée, until the following year.  Merely being accepted was not a guarantee of success.  Paintings were hung floor to ceiling and, of course, each painter wanted his/her work to be hung at eye level and not “skied,” that is, hung high, or hung low.  Prominent artists could demand that their works be hung where the public could see them easily.  The most successful painters were those who pleased both the public and the Academy juries.  Sculpture in the Salons adhered to the Neoclassical style but what the audience saw were small-scale works or casts or maquettes for future public projects.  Often the smaller works would be placed upon a crowded table and the sculptors suffered from the same kind of limitations to ideal viewing as the painters.  The Salon was a room of hierarchies that went beyond what the jury liked or not.  History painting reigned supreme, prized because the difficult and didactic compositions, crowded with ancient notables, mostly partially nude, displayed the artist’s erudition and education.  Only an artist educated in the Ecole would be capable of drawing and composing a group of figures.  Only an artist educated in the Ecole would be educated enough to understand the minutia of ancient history.  Other artists, especially women, would be confined, due to lack of education to lower ranking genres, such as genre scenes and portraiture and still lives.  In these years before modern art galleries and collecting, the Salon was the only game in town and artists had little choice but to accept the rigorous rule of a conservative elite, disinclined to be open-minded to new artistic ideas.

But new ideas were already present to those who were alert to such things.  The clash of realism and romanticism was present in the propaganda art of Gros, the blatant eroticism of Girodet, and the offbeat choice of content by Théodore Géricault.  The French Revolution may have ended in yet another oppressive regime under a new Emperor but it had introduced the idea of individual rights and freedom.  Neoclassicism essentially ended with the reign of Napoleón, and an artistic revolution began to emerge.  Denied political rights and freedom, artists began to resist the demands for the status quo from the Salon juries and took a more independent path.  Born of political disillusionment, a new attitude began to take shape.  The artist demanded the right to freedom of expression as an art maker, which, in these early years of Romanticism, played itself out mostly along the lines of style and the way in which materials were handled. Both inside and outside the Academy there was the pressing and urgent quarrel between the Poussinistes (the proponents of line in art and discipline in society) and the Rubenistes (the proponents of color in art and individual freedom in society).

This quarrel was a challenge to the dominance of Neoclassicism and the Salon system, which controlled artists.  But the quarrel was more than stylistic; it was political.  The dominant art form was connected to the dominant social system. These conflicts, no matter how they are labeled, seem to break down into philosophical positions, which seem to extend far beyond any disagreements as to style or subject matter.  Neoclassicism vs. Romanticism is really a conflict about emotion vs. reason, which is really a conflict about which should be supreme in art, color (emotion) or line (reason)?  The question of line versus color is really a political conflict about who should rule, the people  (feelings) or the state (order) were social conflicts concerning democracy vs. the ruling caste. The conflict over individual freedom opposed to the state’s traditional control over the art makers is really a conflict between the lone, romantic genius artist inventing new forms as opposed to the powers of the Academy.  During this era, the beaux-arts had a far more important and prominent place in society than today; and the State government of France kept careful control over artistic production, understanding all too well that an artist could speak directly to the people.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to
Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
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Nov
27
2009

French Neoclassicism: Sculpture and Architecture

French Neoclassicism: Sculpture, and Architecture

In contrast the painterly complexities of the Baroque style, Neoclassical painting was simplicity itself. Contours were not obscured but legible, based upon the elegant and restrained drawing style of the Greek vases.  Composition was solid, classical and stable, based upon basic geometric units. Color, which Winckelmann disapproved of and discounted, was strong but restrained.  Paint was applied flatly, without inflection.  Composition was centered and orderly, presenting the figures in a theatrical manner, so that each character could be seen clearly.   Poses were restrained in gesture yet illustrative, telling the story and furthering the narration. Carefully painted human forms were assembled upon a stage in long frieze compositions resembling sculptural reliefs, betraying their origins in classical sculpture and Greek vases.  The aesthetics, that is the ethical and educative purpose of art, stemmed from the art of the Athenian Greeks, which was public and communal.  Winckelmann’s lesson was that the nobility of Greek art was manifested in the idealizing style, which perfected the human form, indicating the society’s strivings for perfection.  The moral impulse emanated from Republican Rome, imagined as a time of virtue before the excesses of imperialism, following the Age of Augustus. The message of Roman virtue was linked to the stoic “naturalism” of Rousseau who longed for an ideal “primitive” life uncorrupted by sophistication, civilization and urbanism, imagined in his book, Emile.

Neoclassical sculpture could not help but be based upon precedents of Greek and Roman sculptures.  Baroque sculpture, as seen in the works of Bernini, was dynamic, exciting and active, but Neoclassical sculpture returned to the calm grandeur of Greek sculptures with calm poses that were upright, classical postures, free of unrestrained gestures, giving an overall feeling of stillness and poise to Neoclassical sculptures by Antonio Canova.  Not knowing that the Greek sculpture he was viewing were Roman copies, Winckelmann had nothing but high praise for the graceful and restrained Apollo he viewed in the Belvedere of the Vatican.  The marble copies of the Greek bronzes fundamentally altered the Greek originals, and Europeans had little opportunity to view original Greek marble sculptures, until 1806 when Thomas Bruce, Lord Elgin, brought sculptures from the Parthenon to England.  Sold at a loss to the British government ten years later, the “Elgin Marbles” were shocking to Eighteenth Century audiences in their rough and ready realism.  Contrary to assumptions of idealism, actual Athenian sculptures show a deep concern with a realism of details, from copper nipples on male nudes to inlaid eyes to the polychrome surfaces.  The modern vision of classical sculpture and architecture as being pure white is inaccurate and anachronistic.  Classical sculpture and architecture was very brightly colored and adorned with metal details, but the actual appearance of Classical art is not as important as how classicism was reinterpreted to meet the needs of the Enlightenment.

Classical architecture was practical and pragmatic and, prior to Mies van der Rohr, form followed function, and yet Neoclassical architects reimagined classicism as utopian.  Once again, we see the phenomenon of plundering the past and appropriating it for the needs of the present. The Enlightenment with its emphasis on optimism and progress was essentially futuristic or forward looking.  Neoclassical architects attempted to create architectural forms suitable for a new and improved idealized future.  Neoclassical   architecture was based upon simple geometric forms—circle, square and rectangle—universal forms, suitable for utopian dreams of new buildings for a new society.  The extreme simplicity combined with the monumentality gave the visionary buildings an unexpected air of surreality, unhappily present in the mad visions of Nazi architecture.

Architects such as Claude-Nicolas Ledoux used laws of rigid and simple geometry as the visual language of reason. “The circle and the square are the alphabet authors use in the texture of the best works,” remarked Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. In the works of Etienne-Louis Boulée, the circle or square or rectangle was divided into equal parts around omnipotent center, giving his works a rather foreboding totalitarian atmosphere.  Architecture in the Eighteenth Century was seen as being allied to power and repression.  After the fall of the Bastille, on July 14, 1789, the prison was promptly demolished.  Equally hated was the vast visionary project of the customs wall of the Farmers-General that encircled Paris. Ledoux would see his major architectural work, the gate and custom posts of the despised wall, of fall to the mob in July of 1789. Jean-Jacques Leque also created pure architectonic forms, treated them with economy and elegance, but, like his colleagues, he produced architectural visions that could never be realized.  Most of the looming and gigantic buildings of these visionary architects were rendered but never built, and the architecture of the Enlightenment, like the architecture of the Russian Revolution, was doomed to be “paper architecture.”   The concern of these architects with utility arose from nature and its perfect functionality and efficiency, and yet, the very purity and reductiveness of their designs resulted in a kind of hallucinogenic glimpse into an impossible future.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
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Nov
20
2009

French Neoclassicism

French Neoclassicism

History painting was the most elevated form of painting due to the important themes treated by the artists.  The content was the most difficult to paint, for complex compositions with multiple human figures were required to display the artist’s knowledge of artistic techniques and of history itself.  Such knowledge could be gained only at art school where all were taught in an official style, which, by the end of the Eighteenth Century, was Neoclassicism.  History painters were more involved with the ancient and the classical was given immediacy and proximity with the discoveries of Pompeii and Herculaneum beginning with the mid-18th century.  The unearthing (and looting) of a slice of ancient life, preserved in its original state had a revolutionary impact upon the visual arts, from drawing to painting to interior design to architecture.  The clean hard edges of the antique drawing style stood in strong clear contrast to the soft edges of the waning Rococo style.  The Antique Style was coded as simplicity and virtue while the Rococo style was coded as corrupt and decadent.  Joseph Marie Vien took up the newly chic “classical” style and softened its hard edges with Rococo pastel colors and eroticism, easing the French audience into a transitional acceptance of the new style.

Dating from 1760 to 1800, the Neoclassical period begins with an air of expectancy, as though an era is awaiting a Messiah. Diderot yearned for the artist who could correct the excesses of the Baroque and the decadence of the Rococo, but he did not live to enjoy the work of the artist, who would inflict these old styles with the coup de grace, Jacques-Louis David.  Neoclassicism is more than a simply shift in artistic style or in audience taste. Neoclassicism is first a period of response to art of antiquity seen in the art of Joseph Marie Vien and Angelica Kauffmann.  Introducing Neoclassicism to the French in the Salon of 1763, Vien presented a reformed version of the Rococo, meaning that his work is linear, inspired by Flaxmann, but that his content is erotic, inspired by Fragonard.  Kauffmann created genre scenes out of the classical era, domesticating and gendering Roman virtue, celebrating the ethics of women.  From its second stage as a spare and Spartan style of rigor, Neoclassicism’s third state was activated dynamic one, in the service of Napoléon, until it dwindled down to a final stage of a sugary, sentimental, pompous, and empty academic style, demanded by the powers of the Academy of their students.  Neoclassicism, exhausted as a means of communicating powerful ideas, became the academic status quo enforcing the established powers against which avant-garde artists will fight.

At its height, Neoclassicism was the dominant art style, restrained, cool and formal, marked by moralistic themes and perfect for the new forms of government following the fall of the French monarchy.  Inspired by classical antiquity, artists painted with archaeological exactitude, based upon historical research and actual trips to Italy.  The Neoclassical style was one of intellect, an art of perfecting nature and of presenting idealized human forms and exemplary human behavior.  As such, Neoclassicism can be thought of as the application of a theory of aesthetics, as an attempt to re-write social existence, and as a text suggesting a new world of improved human behavior.    Initially, Neoclassicism reflected the interests of the upper class, its passion for collecting the rare and precious antiquities and its need to present an ennobled self-image to a world, increasingly disenchanted with the self-indulgent ways of the aristocracy.  The market orientation of Neoclassicism is most obvious in the early stages of the style with the frozen eroticism of Vien, but this fascination with the eroticized female would be ended by the second stage of Neoclassicism, and heroic men would take the center stage as active and noble subjects.  Monumentality and sober and serious colors, strong shadows and theatrical settings filled with brave men engaged in virtuous enterprises became the preferred style at the end of the Eighteenth Century.  David’s conversion to Neoclassicism in Rome,  as seen in The Oath of the Horatti, 1785, resulted in a style that could serve the needs of his King as well as the needs of the Revolution that followed.  Neoclassicism’s ancient roots rendered it universal and suitable for a multiplicity of causes and purposes.

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Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.
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Nov
13
2009

The Origins of Neoclassicism

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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Sep
18
2009

Podcast 2 Neoclassicism

THE RISE OF NEOCLASSICISM

The origins of  Neoclassicism in art, architecture and interior décor was the excavation of long buried Roman cities, Pompeii and Herculaneum.  A popular correction of the ornamental Rococo style, Neoclassicism became an international style   However in France,  Neoclassical painting became a political weapon against the aristocratic class in France.

 

 

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