Neoclassical and Rococo architectural styles

Art History

The Values of Art:

Neoclassical and Rococo

Artistic styles reflect the values of their times. Much as our world celebrates technology, speed, and innovation, previous periods in Western civilization depicted beliefs and goals of contemporary importance. The Eighteenth Century, in particular, was an age of transition. Europe and its colonies were moving from the last stages of a medieval conscience based on Faith toward a sense of rationalism and scientific discovery that appears more in line with much of today's Twenty-First Century thought. The century began with the rococo and ended with the neoclassical. Ornate, flowing, and boldly passionate, rococo art and decor perfectly captured the precious refinement and glittering grandeur of Europe's ancien regime courts. In a time when kings and princes still ruled by unquestioned divine right, rococo's near-religious ecstasies demonstrated and confirmed these claims to power and influence. Yet, as the century wore on, Western thought would be shaped by new forces that would soon come to question much that had been taken for granted for centuries. In search of models, the philosophes of France, and kindred spirits elsewhere, looked to the reason and order of Ancient Greece and Rome. Their ideas gave rise to a neoclassical style that favored symmetry and order as symbols of a world that would henceforth be governed by rational principles. A new and better world would emerge out of the monuments of the Ancients.

Rococo developed directly out of the earlier Baroque tradition, an artistic style that, in turn, had its roots in Counterreformation attempts to inspire passion for the sacred. Under this scheme, art and architecture were employed to create an emotional, and almost theatrical, experience that would inspire the worshipper. Kings and magnates were glorified and deified - the apotheosis of one or more dynasts being a common theme in Baroque art. Rococo represented a further refinement of the dynamism and often overpowering grandeur of the Baroque. As the violent struggles between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism receded into the past, rulers all over Europe settled down to lives of exquisite elegance and courtly grace. A greater restraint arose from an increasing emphasis on the monarch's private life.

The heavy sculptural forms of the earlier period gave way to delicate curlicues of gold or silver, delicate shapes that mimicked the tendrils of plants. Baskets of flowers, medallions, and other stereotyped ornaments hung suspended from these metallic branches. Frederick the Great's Sans Souci was the image of a great ruler's residence as a mere pleasure pavilion set in a garden. Similar examples proliferated across a now peaceful Germany and throughout the Hapsburg lands and across Europe - as far away even as Sweden and Russia. The Schloss Amalienberg; Rastrelli's fanciful Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo; the Chinese Pavilion at Drottningholm in Sweden - all were typical examples of the cult of rarified manners, exquisite taste, witty banter, and intellectual discussion that had come to characterize the denizens of Louis XV's Versailles and their Parisian salons. The entire Western world was being shaped by the French philosophes - Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, and others - who cultivated a refined style of intellectual discourse amid settings of intimacy and beauty. The rococo ethos symbolized this coming together of worldly knowledge and artistic accomplishment. It was a world of the few and the privileged, but in its promotion of careful inquiry and insightful debate, it was laying the groundwork for another era.

The works of the philosophes quickly turned to an out and out criticism of the status quo. Men like Voltaire and woman like Madame de Stael, pursued avenues of thought that lead directly, in their most extreme versions, to revolution. Diderot's Encyclopedie, and Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language, were examples of the strongly rational spirit that was emerging. Much as Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other Classical thinkers had sought to probe and to understand the mysteries of the natural and human world, so too did the leaders of the Eighteenth Century hope to create a civilization that was based on rational principles and scientific investigation. Turning to examples from the Ancient World, Eighteenth Century artists and architects created works in a neoclassical style that embodied the extreme restraint, studied introspection, and balanced purity of the original Classical forms. England, with its developing democratic institutions, was a leading exemplar of the new outlook, producing such works as Syon House with its rigid Classical symmetry and central plan, and numerous Palladian manor houses, such as Woburn Abbey and Chiswick House. Stripped of the elaborate ornamentation of the rococo, the neoclassical decor featured large expanses of plain white walls, and in painting favored the Roman-inspired themes of David and Ingres - styles that continued standard through the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods. The era's leading minds consciously pursued the links between art and political and philosophical developments.