Why Does The Above Painting Fit The Neoclassical Style - T-Tees - Your Answers Await, Life's Questions Unraveled

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Rococo art grew out of a reaction to the formal grandeur and heaviness of the baroque style. Established in Paris in 1720, the Rococo style was light and whimsy, characterized by soft colors, delicate forms, curving lines, and themes of nature, playfulness, youth, and love. The term, “Rococo,” was derived from the word, “rocaille,” which means pebble, or rock, referring to the ornamental stones and shells used to decorate the fountains of a grotto. The Rococo era is attributed to King Louis XV, who was considered a “perpetual adolescent,” and his mistress Madame de Pompadour, the style authority of France and patron of the movement.

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Neoclassical art, on the other hand, was a revolt against the opulence and gaudy styles of the Baroque and Rococo periods that parallels the political revolts that led to the French Revolution. In an effort to supply a newly invented culture and society with the history and mythology it needed, art students and aristocracy of this period took a Grand Tour to visit recently unearthed ruins and artifacts in Greece and Italy, leading to a revitalization of classical thought. Artists sought to express ideal virtues, teach moral lessons, and improve (or reinvent) society. Characteristics of Neoclassical art included clarity of form, sober colors, shallow space, and timeless classical subjects. Neoclassical artists and architects merged their work with past Greco-Roman ideals, ideas that mirrored what was going on in the social environment of the time, leading up to the French Revolution.

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Rococo

In the early years of the 1700s, at the end of the reign of Louis XIV (who died in 1715), there was a shift away from the classicism and “Grand Manner” that had governed the art of the preceding 50 years in France, toward a new style that we call Rococo. The Palace of Versailles, in its show of decadence and monarchical disconnectedness, was abandoned by the aristocracy, who once again took up residence in Paris. Similarly, the art of this period suggests a similar shift away from the monarchy toward the aristocracy.

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The aristocracy had enormous political power as well as enormous wealth, passed from generation to generation. Many chose leisure as a pursuit and became involved in romantic intrigues. Indeed, they created a culture of luxury and excess that starkly contrasted the lives of most people in France. The aristocracy—only a small percentage of the population of France—owned over 90% of its wealth. The small, but growing in number and influence, middle class grew quickly intolerant of such displays.

The Swing, Fragonard

As with most Rococo paintings, the subject of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing is not very complicated. Inside a lush garden, a young woman in a billowing pink gown glides through the air. Her suspension high above the ground is enabled by a swing consisting of a crimson velvet cushioned seat and a pair of ropes tied around the knobby branches of an enormous tree. On the far right, an older man seated on a stone bench helps operate the device. Using a series of connected ropes, he pulls the swing back to create the momentum necessary to propel the woman forward. As he releases the ropes, she leans back and extends her legs, expelling a tiny pink slipper from her pointed foot. The dainty shoe flies through the air toward a marble statue on the far left. At the base of the large pedestal supporting this sculpture lies a young man. Partially hidden by an overgrown rose bush, he peers wide-eyed up the open skirt of the swinging woman.

Neoclassical

In opposition to the frivolous sensuality of Rococo painters like Jean-Honoré Fragonard and François Boucher, the Neoclassicists looked back to the French painter Nicolas Poussin for their inspiration (Poussin’s work exemplifies the interest in classicism in French art of the seventeenth century). The decision to promote “Poussiniste” painting became an ethical consideration—they believed that strong drawing was rational, therefore, morally better. They believed that art should be cerebral, not sensual.

France was on the brink of its first revolution in 1789, and the Neoclassicists wanted to express a rationality and seriousness fitting for their times. Artists like David supported the rebels through art that asked for clear-headed thinking, self-sacrifice to the State and an austerity reminiscent of Republican Rome. Neoclassicism was a child of the Age of Reason (the Enlightenment) when philosophers believed that we could control our destinies by learning from and following the laws of nature (the United States was founded on Enlightenment philosophy). Scientific inquiry attracted more attention. Therefore, Neoclassicism continued the connection to the classical tradition because it signified moderation and rational thinking but in a new and more politically-charged spirit.

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The Neoclassicists, such as Jacques-Louis David (pronounced Da-VEED), preferred the well-delineated form—clear drawing and modeling (shading). Drawing was considered more important than painting. The Neoclassical surface had to look perfectly smooth—no evidence of brush strokes should be discernible to the naked eye. Neoclassicism is characterized by clarity of form, sober colors, shallow space, strong horizontal and verticals that render that subject matter timeless (instead of temporal as in the dynamic Baroque works), and classical subject matter (or classicizing contemporary subject matter).

Cornelia Points to Her Children as Her Treasures, Kauffman

To the artists of eighteenth-century Europe, it was not enough to simply paint a beautiful painting. Yes, one could marvel at your use of colors, proportions, and how masterfully you draped the fabric on your figures, but this was just not enough. The story that is represented must also improve the viewer and impart a moralizing message. This was a common theme even before the emergence of the Neoclassical trend. When interest in the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean—more specifically Rome—arose in the mid eighteenth century the moralizing theme segued to also include stories from classical antiquity.

The Swiss-born painter Angelica Kauffmann is just one artist to contribute to this genre. Painted in 1785, Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, Pointing to Her Children as Her Treasures, is her subject. Roman architectural influences frame two women portrayed wearing what one can imagine is typical of ancient Roman dress, along with three children, also wearing masterfully draped togas with thin leather sandals. They look like they might have stepped directly off a temple’s pediment.

Born in 1740, Angelica Kauffmann received a first-rate artistic education from her father, who was a Swiss muralist. She traveled through her native Switzerland, Austria, and eventually Italy where she was able to see the work of the ancient artists with her own eyes. She was following in the tradition of the Grand Tour, the educational excursion that many wealthy Europeans took to marvel and study the art, architecture, and history of ancient Rome.

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The Death of Marat, David

By 1793, the violence of the Revolution dramatically increased until the beheadings at the Place de la Concorde in Paris became a constant, leading a certain Dr. Joseph Guillotine to invent a machine that would improve the efficiency of the ax and block and, therefore, make executions more humane. David was in thick of it. Early in the Revolution he had joined the Jacobins, a political club that would in time become the most rabid of the various rebel factions. Led by the ill-fated Georges Danton and the infamous Maximilien Robespierre, the Jacobins (including David) would eventually vote to execute Louis XVI and his Queen Marie Antoinette who were caught attempting to escape across the border to the Austrian Empire.

At the height of the Reign of Terror in 1793, David painted a memorial to his great friend, the murdered publisher, Jean Marat. As in his Death of Socrates, David substitutes the iconography (symbolic forms) of Christian art for more contemporary issues. In Death of Marat, 1793, an idealized image of David’s slain friend, Marat, is shown holding his murderess’s (Charlotte Corday) letter of introduction.

The bloodied knife lays on the floor, having opened a fatal gash that functions, as does the painting’s very composition, as a reference to the entombment of Christ and a sort of secularized stigmata (a reference to the wounds Christ is said to have received in his hands, feet and side while on the cross). Is David attempting now to find revolutionary martyrs to replace the saints of Catholicism (which had been outlawed)?

By 1794 the Reign of Terror had run its course. The Jacobins had begun to execute not only captured aristocrats but fellow revolutionaries as well. Eventually, Robespierre himself would die and the remaining Jacobins were likewise executed or imprisoned. David escaped death by renouncing his activities and was locked in a cell in the former palace, the Louvre, until his eventual release by France’s brilliant new ruler, Napoleon Bonaparte. This diminutive Corsican had been the youngest general in the French army and during the Revolution had become a national hero by waging a seemingly endless string of victorious military campaigns against the Austrians in Belgium and Italy. Eventually, Napoleon would control most of Europe, crown himself emperor, and would release David in recognition that the artist’s talent could serve the ruler’s purposes.