The Classical Ideal

The second half of the eighteenth century in Europe saw the increasing influence of classical antiquity on artistic style and the development of taste. The achievements of the Renaissance from the period of Raphael (1483–1520) to that of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) and Claude Lorrain (1604/5?–1682) served as a conduit for a renewed interest in harmony, simplicity, and proportion, an interest that gained momentum as the new science of archaeology brought forth spectacular remnants of a buried world of great beauty. Giovanni Paolo Panini's Ancient Rome (1757; 52.63.1) is representative of the movement, a tour-de-force painting encompassing many of the monuments in and around Rome, including the Pantheon, the Colosseum, Trajan's Column, the Medici Vase, the Farnese Hercules, and the Laocoön. In the midst of a grand gallery, students copy the great works of antiquity. The Neoclassical style arose from such first-hand observation and reproduction of antique works and came to dominate European architecture, painting, sculpture, and decorative arts.

It was not until the eighteenth century that a concerted effort to systematically retrieve the glories of lost civilizations began. Illustrations of freshly discovered archaeological ruins in Athens, Naples (Herculaneum and Pompeii), Paestum, Palmyra (Syria), Baalbek (Lebanon), and the Dalmatian coast were disseminated throughout Europe in treatises with detailed descriptions, picturesque landscape views, reproductions of frescoes, and measured drawings of temples, theaters, mausoleums, and sculptures. Reports of extensive travel expeditions such as those by Robert Wood, John Bouverie, Giovanni Battista Borra, and James Dawkins, with their Ruins of Palmyra (1753) and The Ruins of Balbec (1757), James "Athenian" Stuart and Nicholas Revett's Antiquities of Athens (1762), and Robert Adam's Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia (1764) broadened the public's historical perspective and stimulated a passion for all things savoring of the ancient past.

Travelers were also important students of Roman and Greek antiquity. In the early eighteenth century, painted visions of Greco-Roman monuments already could be found in continental palaces and English country homes. Soon, persons of culture and sensibility known to the Italians as cognoscenti were descending upon the peninsula to embark on the Grand Tour. In Rome, they were sometimes accompanied by a cicerone, a docent who guided them through the mazes of museums, churches, and marmoreal monuments. Famous artists such as Antonio Canova (1757–1822) and Bertel Thorvaldsen (1768/70–1844) opened their studios where they kept works on display permanently for potential clients. Tourists prized not only souvenir portraits of themselves by painters such as Pompeo Batoni (1708–1787, 03.37.1), hardstone cabinets, or Palladio's Four Books of Architecture with which to furnish their libraries, but also the exquisite ancient objects they encountered. Faced with the threat of the catastrophic dispersal of this legacy, the popes intervened. Cardinal Alessandro Albani's collection of antique marbles was acquired by Clement XII in 1733, despite lucrative offers from abroad. Whereas over the two previous centuries the reigning pope would have bought such treasures for himself and his family, they were purchased for the city of Rome itself and placed in one of the palaces on the Capitoline which Michelangelo had designed. Since excavations were continually disgorging more objects, Clement XIV inaugurated a great museum in the Vatican in 1769, energetically enriched by his successor Pius VI. The Museo Pio-Clementino represents the height of papal patronage of the arts in Rome.

Influential theoretical and historical writings contributed as strongly as the artifacts themselves to a change in taste. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768, 48.141), German archaeologist and philosopher, emphasized the supremacy of Greek art. His major work, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, 1755), extolled the beauty of the Apollo Belvedere in particular. Rejecting the notion that art imitates life, Winckelmann taught that qualities superior to nature are found in Greek art, specifically, "ideal beauties, brain-born images." Such transcendent works, he explained, went beyond mere verisimilitude to capture "a more beauteous and more perfect nature." The concept of ideal forms descended from Platonic texts and had been the theme of commentators since the Renaissance, but Winckelmann's proselytizing won new adherents. "The most eminent characteristic of Greek works," he wrote, "is a noble simplicity and sedate grandeur in gesture and expression. As the bottom of the sea lies peaceful beneath a foaming surface, a great soul lies sedate beneath the strife of passions in Greek figures."

Winckelmann's writings sparked the Greco-Roman controversy in the 1760s, a debate as to the relative superiority of Greek and Roman architecture and ornament, thus drawing attention to an overlooked field. Italian printmaker Giovanni Battista Piranesi's (1720–1778) vast oeuvre of engravings of ancient Roman sites (41.71.1.7.20 ) demonstrates his perception of Roman practicality as an improvement over Greek experiment. Other scholars, siding with Winckelmann, contended that Roman culture was a lesser imitation of Greek mastery of form.

In painting, Anton Raphael Mengs (German, 1728–1779), a Winckelmann protégé and premier peintre to the Dresden court, freely employed classical themes. Notable is his Parnassus (1760–61), showing Apollo surrounded by Muses and commissioned for the Villa Albani (Rome). His Augustus and Cleopatra (1760–61), inspired by Plutarch's Lives, was commissioned by Henry Hoare (1705–1785) for his country house in Wiltshire. British artist Gavin Hamilton (1723–1798) also had recourse to Greek mythology, completing Achilles Bewailing the Death of Patroclus (1760–63), a scene from Homer's Iliad. These artists, together with Joseph-Marie Vien, Benjamin West, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Angelica Kauffmann, made up the first generation of Neoclassical painters. They defined the style with their emphasis on formal composition, historic subject matter, contemporary settings and costumes, rigidity, solidity, and monumentality in the spirit of classical revival. French painter Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) was a student of Vien, having won the Prix de Rome in 1774 to study at the French Academy. In sympathy with the French Revolution, his paintings such as The Death of Socrates (31.45) gave expression to a new cult of civic virtues: self-sacrifice, devotion to duty, honesty, and stoic austerity. In the early 1790s, painter and sculptor John Flaxman (1755–1826) published his spare illustrations for Homer's Iliad and Odyssey (1977.595.53). Using his knowledge of Greek vase painting, Flaxman dispensed with the illusion of space and reduced volumes to unshaded outlines, giving his figures an abstract sense of unreality and weightlessness that appealed to countless fellow artists (09.194.7).

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/neoc_1/hd_neoc_1.htm (2008/01/25)

Architecture

Neoclassical architecture was an architectural style produced by the neoclassical movement that began in the mid-18th century, both as a reaction against the Rococo style of anti-tectonic naturalistic ornament, and an outgrowth of some classicizing features of Late Baroque. In its purest form it is a style principally derived from the architecture of Classical Greece.

Origins

Siegfried Giedion, whose first book (1922) had the suggestive title Late Baroque and Romantic Classicism, asserted later "The Louis XVI style formed in shape and structure the end of late baroque tendencies, with classicism serving as its framework." In the sense that neoclassicism in architecture is evocative and picturesque, a recreation of a distant, lost world, it is, as Giedion suggests, framed within the Romantic sensibility.

Intellectually Neoclassicism was symptomatic of a desire to return to the perceived "purity" of the arts of Rome, the more vague perception ("ideal") of Ancient Greek arts and, to a lesser extent, sixteenth-century Renaissance Classicism, the source for academic Late Baroque.

Many neoclassical architects were influenced by the drawings and projects of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude Nicolas Ledoux. The many graphite drawings of Boullée and his students depict architecture that emulates the eternality of the universe. There are links between Boullée's ideas and Edmund Burke's conception of the sublime. Ledoux addressed the concept of architectural character, maintaining that a building should immediately communicate its function to the viewer.

There is an anti-Rococo strain that can be detected in some European architecture of the earlier 18th century, most vividly represented in the Palladian architecture of Georgian Britain and Ireland, but also recognizable in a classicizing vein of Late Baroque architecture in Paris (Perrault's east range of the Louvre), in Berlin, and even in Rome, in Alessandro Galilei's facade for S. Giovanni in Laterano. It is a robust architecture of self-restraint, academically selective now of "the best" Roman models, which were increasingly available for close study through the medium of architectural engravings of measured drawings of surviving Roman architecture.

Neoclassicism first gained influence in Paris, through a generation of French art students trained at the French Academy in Rome and influenced by the presence of Charles-Louis Clérisseau and the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and in London, through the examples of Paris-trained Sir William Chambers, Clérisseau's pupil Robert Adam and James "Athenian" Stuart, later British architects such as Henry Holland, George Dance, Jr., James Wyatt, Thomas Harrison and Sir John Soane developed the style in Britain. It was quickly adopted by progressive circles in Sweden as well. In Paris, many of the first generation of neoclassical architects received training in the classic French tradition through a series of exhaustive and practical lectures that was offered for decades by Jacques-François Blondel.

At first, in the 1760s and 70s, classicizing decor was grafted onto familiar European forms, as in Gatchina's interiors for Catherine II's lover Count Orlov, designed by an Italian architect with a team of Italian stuccadori (stucco workers). A second neoclassic wave, more severe, more studied (through the medium of engravings) and more consciously archaeological, is associated with the height of the Napoleonic Empire.

In France, the first phase of neoclassicism is expressed in the "Louis XVI style" of architects like Ange-Jacques Gabriel (Petit Trianon), and the second phase, in the styles called Directoire and "Empire", might be characterized by Jean Chalgrin's severe astylar Arc de Triomphe (designed in 1806). In England the two phases might be characterized first by the structures of Robert Adam, the second by those of Sir John Soane.

Spain. - Prado Museum in Madrid, by Juan de VillanuevaSpanish Neoclassicism counted with the figure of Juan de Villanueva, who adapted Burke's achievements about the sublime and the beauty to the requirements of Spanish clime and history. He built the Prado Museum, that combined three programs- an academy, an auditorium and a museum- in one building with three separated entrances. This was part of the ambitious program of Charles III, who intended to make Madrid the Capital of Art and Science. Very close to the museum, Villanueva built the Astronomical Observatory. He also designed several summer houses for the kings in El Escorial and Aranjuez and reconstructed the Major Square of Madrid, among other important works. Villanuevas´ pupils expanded the Neoclassical style in Spain.

Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. - The center of Polish classicism was Warsaw under the rule of the last Polish king Stanisław August Poniatowski. Vilnius University was another important center of the Neoclassical architecture in the Eastern Europe, lead by notable professors of architecture Marcin Knackfus, Laurynas Gucevičius and Karol Podczaszyński. The style was expressed in the main public buildings, such as the University's Observatory, Cathedral and the town hall of Vilnius. The best known architects and artists, who worked in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were Dominik Merlini, Jan Chrystian Kamsetzer, Szymon Bogumił Zug, Jakub Kubicki, Antonio Corazzi, Efraim Szreger, Christian Piotr Aigner and Bertel Thorvaldsen.

Other countries. - Neoclassical architecture was exemplified in Karl Friedrich Schinkel's buildings, especially the Old Museum in Berlin, Sir John Soane's Bank of England in London and the newly built capitol in Washington, DC. The Scots architect Charles Cameron created palatial Italianate interiors for the German-born Catherine II the Great in Russian St. Petersburg: the style was international. Italy clung to Rococo until the Napoleonic regimes brought the new archaeological classicism, which was embraced as a political statement by young, progressive, urban Italians with republican leanings.

Interior design

Indoors, neoclassicism made a discovery of the genuine Roman interior, inspired by the rediscoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which had started in the late 1740s, but only achieved a wide audience in the 1760s, with the first luxurious volumes of tightly-controlled distribution of Le Antichità di Ercolan. The antiquities of Herculaneum showed that even the most classicizing interiors of the Baroque, or the most "Roman" rooms of William Kent were based on basilica and temple exterior architecture, turned outside in: pedimented window frames turned into gilded mirrors, fireplaces topped with temple fronts, now all looking quite bombastic and absurd. The new interiors sought to recreate an authentically Roman and genuinely interior vocabulary, employing flatter, lighter motifs, sculpted in low frieze-like relief or painted in monotones en camaïeu ("like cameos"), isolated medallions or vases or busts or bucrania or other motifs, suspended on swags of laurel or ribbon, with slender arabesques against backgrounds, perhaps, of "Pompeiian red" or pale tints, or stone colors. The style in France was initially a Parisian style, the "Goût grec" ("Greek style") not a court style. Only when the young king acceded to the throne in 1771 did Marie Antoinette, his fashion-loving Queen, bring the "Louis XVI" style to court.

After 1800

From about 1800 a fresh influx of Greek architectural examples, seen through the medium of etchings and engravings, gave a new impetus to neoclassicism that is called the Greek Revival.

The Alexander Column in Palace Square, St Petersburg, Russia, viewed from an open window of the Hermitage Museum in the Winter Palace.Neoclassicism continued to be a major force in academic art through the 19th century and beyond— a constant antithesis to Romanticism or Gothic revivals— although from the late 19th century on it had often been considered anti-modern, or even reactionary, in influential critical circles. By the mid-19th century, several European cities - notably St Petersburg, Athens, Berlin and Munich - were transformed into veritable museums of Neoclassical architecture.

In Scotland and the north of England, where the Gothic Revival was less strong, architects continued to develop the neoclassical style of William Henry Playfair. The works of Cuthbert Brodrick and Alexander Thomson show that by the end of the nineteenth century the results could be powerful and eccentric.

In American architecture, neoclassicism was one expression of the American Renaissance movement, ca 1880-1917. One of the pioneers of this style was English-born Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who is often noted as America's first professional architect and the father of American architecture. The Baltimore Basilica, the first Roman Catholic Cathedral in America, is considered by many experts to be Latrobe's masterpiece.

Its last manifestation was in Beaux-Arts architecture, and its very last, large public projects were the Lincoln Memorial, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the American Museum of Natural History's Roosevelt Memorial.

In Britain, the writings of Albert Richardson were responsible for reawakening an interest in pure neoclassical design in the early twentieth century. Vincent Harris, Bradshaw Gass & Hope and Percy Thomas were among those who designed public buildings in the neoclassical style between the world wars. In the Raj, Sir Edwin Lutyens' monumental city planning for New Delhi marks the glorious sunset of neoclassicism.

Today. - In some rare cases buildings in the United States, such as the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, are still being built in neoclassical style today.
In Britain a number of architects are active in the neoclassical style. Two new university Libraries, Quinlan Terry's Maitland Robinson Library at Downing College and Robert Adam Architects' Sackler Library illustrate that the approach taken can range from the traditional, in the former case, to the unconventional, in the latter case. The majority of new neoclassical buildings in Britain are private houses. Firms like Francis Johnson & Partners specialise in new country houses. Neoclassical architecture is usually now classed under the umbrella term of "traditional architecture" and is practised by a number of members of the Traditional Architecture Group.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_architecture (2008/01/25)

[This article is based on the writings of Hakan Groth, Hugh Honour, David Irwin, Stanislaw Lorentz, Thomas McCormick, Charles-Louis Clérisseau and Mario Praz)

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