Social History of Art, Volume 3

Rococo, Classicism and Romanticism

Arnold Hauser

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134637454
• Edición: 3
• Categoría: Arte
• Categoría: Storia dell'arte

First published in 1951 Arnold Hausers commanding work presents an account of the development and meaning of art from its origins in the Stone Age through to the Film Age. Exploring the interaction between art and society, Hauser effectively details social and historical movements and sketches the frameworks in which visual art is produced.
This new edition provides an excellent introduction to the work of Arnold Hauser. In his general introduction to The Social History of Art, Jonathan Harris asseses the importance of the work for contemporary art history and visual culture. In addition, an introduction to each volume provides a synopsis of Hausers narrative and serves as a critical guide to the text, identifying major themes, trends and arguments.

1.
THE DISSOLUTION OF COURTLY ART

THE fact that the development of courtly art, which had been almost uninterrupted since the close of the Renaissance, comes to a standstill in the eighteenth century and is superseded by the bourgeois subjectivism which, on the whole, still dominates our own conception of art today, is well known, but the fact that certain features of the new trend are already present in the rococo itself and that the break with courtly tradition really takes place in the first half of the eighteenth century is not so generally familiar. For, although we do not enter the bourgeois world before Greuze and Chardin appear, Boucher and Largillière already bring us very close to it. The tendency towards the monumental, the ceremonious and the solemn already disappears in the early rococo and makes room for a more delicate and intimate quality. In the new art preference is given to colour and shades of expression rather than to the great, firm, objective line and the note of sensuality and sentiment is to be heard in all its manifestations. Therefore, although in some respects the ‘Dixhuitième’ is nothing more than the continuation, indeed the consummation, of baroque splendour and pretension, the uncompromising way in which the seventeenth century insisted on the ‘grand goût’ as a matter of course is foreign to it. Even when they are intended for the highest classes of society, its creations lack the grand heroic mould. But, naturally, the art we are dealing with here is still a very aloof, very refined and essentially aristocratic art, an art which regards the criteria of the pleasant and the conventional as more decisive than those of spirituality and spontaneity, an art in which work is performed in accordance with a fixed, universally acknowledged and constantly repeated pattern, and of which nothing is more characteristic than the masterly, though all too often purely external technique of the execution. These conventional elements of the rococo, which derive from the baroque, are only gradually dissolved and replaced by the characteristics of bourgeois taste.

The attack on the baroque-rococo tradition ensues from two different directions, but is based in both cases on the same opposition to courtly taste. The emotionalism and naturalism represented by Rousseau and Richardson, Greuze and Hogarth, is one, the rationalism and classicism of Lessing and Winckelmann, Mengs and David, the other. Both oppose the ideal of simplicity and the earnestness of a puritan outlook on life to the courtly taste for ostentation. In England the transformation of courtly into bourgeois art takes place earlier and is carried out more thoroughly than in France itself where the baroque-rococo tradition continues underground and is still perceptible in the romantic movement. But, at the close of the century, the only important art in Europe is bourgeois. It is possible to differentiate between a progressive and a conservative trend within the middle class, but a living art expressing aristocratic ideals and serving court purposes no longer exists. In the whole history of art and culture, the transfer of leadership from one social class to another has seldom taken place with such absolute exclusiveness as here, where the aristocracy is completely displaced by the middle class and the change in taste, which puts expression in the place of decoration, could not possibly be any clearer.

To be sure, this is not the first time that the middle class appears on the scene as the upholder of taste. As early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a leading position was held all over Europe by an art of a predominantly middle-class character. It was not until the later Renaissance and the age of mannerism and baroque that its place was taken by works in the courtly style. But in the eighteenth century, when the middle class again attains economic, social and political power, the ceremonial art of the courts, which had meanwhile come into its own, breaks up2 again and yields to the unrestricted sway of middle-class taste. It was only in Holland that there was already a middle-class art of high standing in the seventeenth century and one much more thoroughly and consistently middle-class than the Renaissance, which was interspersed with chivalric-romantic and mystical-religious elements. But this Dutch middle-class art remained an almost completely isolated phenomenon in the Europe of the time and, when the eighteenth century established modern middle-class art, it did not link up directly with this earlier manifestation. There could be no question of a continuous development, if only because Dutch painting itself lost much of its middle-class character in the course of the seventeenth century. Both in France and England, the art of the modern middle class had its real origins in social changes at home; these had inevitably to be the basis of the displacement of the courtly conception of art, and the stimulation received from contemporary philosophical and literary movements was bound to be stronger than that from the art of countries remote in time and space.

The development which reaches its political climax in the French Revolution, and its artistic objective in romanticism, begins in the Régence with the undermining of the royal power as the principle of absolute authority, with the disorganization of the court as the centre of art and culture and the dissolution of baroque classicism as the artistic style in which the power-strivings and power-consciousness of absolutism found their direct expression. The ground for this process is already prepared for during the reign of Louis XIV. The endless wars throw the finances of the country into confusion; the public exchequer becomes empty and the population impoverished, since it is impossible to create tax-payers by whippings and imprisonment and economic supremacy by wars and conquests. Even during the lifetime of the roi soleil critical remarks about the consequences of autocracy are heard. Fénelon is already quite candid in this respect, but Bayle, Malebranche and Fontenelle go so far that it has been rightly maintained that the ‘crisis of the European spirit’, the history of which fills the eighteenth century, was in full swing from 1680 onwards.¹ Simultaneously with this tendency, criticism of classicism also gains ground and prepares the way for the dissolution of courtly art. By about 1685 the creative period of baroque classicism has come to an end; Le Brun loses his influence, and the great writers of the age, Racine, Molière, Boileau and Bossuet, have spoken their last or their last decisive words.² The ‘Quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns’ marks the beginning of the conflict between tradition and progress, classicism and modernism, rationalism and emotionalism, which was to be settled in the pre-romanticism of Diderot and Rousseau.

In the last years of Louis XIV’s life the state and the court were governed by the devout Mme de Maintenon. The aristocracy no longer felt comfortable in the atmosphere of gloomy solemnity and narrow-minded piety at Versailles. When the King died a sigh of relief was uttered by everyone, above all by those who expected the regency of Philip of Orléans to bring liberation from despotism. The Regent had always considered his uncle’s administrative system out of date,³ and began his reign by reacting against the old methods all along the line. In the political and social spheres he strove for a renaissance of the nobility, in the economic sphere he favoured individual enterprises, such as that of Law, for example, he introduced a new style in the way of life of the upper classes and made a vogue of hedonism and libertinism. A condition of general disintegration began, which none of the old ties was able to resist. Some of them were reconstituted later on, but the old system was now shattered once and for all. The first act of state of Philip of Orléans was to annul the will of the departed king, which provided for the recognition of his illegitimate children. That was the beginning of the decline of the king’s authority, which, in spite of the continuance of the absolute monarchy, was never to be restored to its former greatness. The exercise of supreme power became more and more arbitrary, but the confidence of those in power became more and more unsettled—a process best described in the often quoted words of Marshal Richelieu to Louis XVI: ‘Under Louis XIV no one dared open his mouth, under Louis XV everyone whispered, now everyone speaks aloud and in a perfectly free and easy way.’ To think of assessing the real power of the state on the basis of government orders and decrees would be, as Tocqueville remarks, a ridiculous error. Sanctions, such as the famous death penalty for the writing and spreading of books against religion and public order, remained on paper. The worst penalty the guilty had to pay was to leave the country, and they were often warned and protected by the very officials whose duty it was to prosecute them. In the age of Louis XIV the whole intellectual life was still under the protection of the king; there was no defence apart from him, much less any defence against him. New protectors, new patrons and new centres of culture now arise; art develops very largely, literature entirely, away from the court and the king.

Philip of Orléans transfers the residence from Versailles to Paris and, by so doing, virtually dissolves the court. The Regent loathes all restrictions, formalities and constraint; he feels really happy only in the company of his closest friends. The young King lives in the Tuileries, the Regent in the Palais Royal, the members of the nobility are dispersed in their castles and palaces and amuse themselves in the theatres, at balls and in the salons of the city. The Regent and the Palais Royal themselves represent the more unrestrained, more fluid taste of Paris, in contrast to the ‘grand goût’ of Versailles. The life of the ‘city’ is no longer subsidiary to that of the ‘court’, it displaces the court and takes over its cultural functions. The melancholy exclamation of the Countess Palatine Elizabeth Charlotte, the mother of the Regent, ‘there is 110 longer a court in France!’, is absolutely in accordance with the facts. And this situation is no passing episode; the court in the old sense has, in fact, now vanished for ever. Louis XV has similar tastes to the Regent, he, too, favours a small society of friends, and Louis XVI likes above all to live within the family circle. Both kings shun ceremony, etiquette bores and annoys them, and although it is still preserved to a certain extent, it, nevertheless, loses much of its solemnity and grandeur. At the court of Louis XVI the dominant tone is one of decided intimacy, and on six days of the week the social gatherings achieve the character of a private party.⁴ The only place where anything like a court household develops during the Régence is the castle of the Duchess of Maine at Sceaux, which becomes the scene of brilliant, expensive and ingenious festivities and, at the same time, a new centre of art, a real Court of the Muses. But the entertainments arranged by the Duchess contain the germ of the ultimate dissolution of court life: they form the transition from the old-style court to the salons of the eighteenth century—the cultural heirs of the court. In this way, the court breaks up again into the private societies out of which it had developed into the centre of art and literature.

Philip’s attempt to restore the old political rights and public functions of the aristocracy subdued by Louis XIV was one of the most important parts of his programme. From the members of the feudal nobility he formed the so-called ‘Conseils’, which were intended to take the place of the middle-class ministers. But the experiment had to be given up after only three years, because the nobles had lost the habit of conducting state affairs and no longer took any real interest in the government of the country. They stayed away from meetings and willy-nilly a return had to be made to the system of Louis XIV. Outwardly, therefore, the Régence marked the beginning of a new turn in the direction of aristocracy, as expressed in the growing rigidity of social barriers and the increasing isolation of the estates, but inwardly it represented the continuation of the triumphant progress of the middle class and the further decline of the nobility. A peculiar characteristic of the social development of the eighteenth century, already noted by Tocqueville, was the fact that, in spite of all the emphasis on the barriers dividing the various estates and classes, the process of cultural levelling could not be halted and that people, who were so anxious to keep themselves isolated from one another externally, were becoming more and more alike internally,⁵ so that in the end there were merely two big groups: the common people and the community of those who stood above the common people. Those belonging to this latter group shared the same habits, the same taste and spoke the same language. The aristocracy and the upper bourgeoisie amalgamated into one single cultural élite, and in so doing the former upholders of culture were giving and taking at the same time. The members of the high nobility did not visit only occasionally and condescendingly the houses where the representatives of high finance and the bureaucracy were guests, on the contrary, they crowded into the salons of the rich middle-class gentlemen and cultured middle-class ladies. Mme Geoffrin brings together in her home the intellectual and social élite of her time, sons of princes, counts, watchmakers and small tradesmen, she corresponds with the Empress of Russia and with Grimm, she is friendly with the King of Poland and with Fontenelle, she declines the invitation of Frederick the Great and bestows the distinction of her personal attention on the plebeian d’Alembert. The adoption by the aristocracy of middle-class patterns of thought and moral conceptions and the intermingling of the highest classes with the bourgeois intelligentsia begins, moreover, precisely at the moment when the social hierarchy makes itself felt more sharply than ever before.⁶ Perhaps there is, in fact, a causal relationship between the two phenomena.

Of all its feudal privileges, the nobility had retained in the seventeenth century only the property rights in its own land and its exemption from taxation; it had ceded its judicial and administrative functions to Crown officials. Ground-rent had lost a good deal of its value because of the steady diminution, before 1660, of the purchasing power of money. The nobility was forced in an increasing measure to sell its property, it became impoverished and decayed. This was certainly more the case in the medium and lower ranks of the landed nobility than amongst the high and court nobility, which was still very rich and regained its influence in the eighteenth century. The ‘four thousand families’ of the court nobility remained the only usufructuaries of the court offices, the high ecclesiastical dignities, the commissioned ranks in the army, the gouverneurs’ posts and royal pensions. Almost a quarter of the total budget accrued to them. The old resentment of the Crown against the feudal nobility had cooled down; under Louis XV and Louis XVI, ministers were again chosen mostly from the hereditary nobility.⁷ But the latter remained anti-dynastic in its outlook all the same, was insubordinate and a source of supreme danger to the monarchy in the hour of peril. It made a common stand with the middle class against the Crown, although the good relations between the two classes had greatly suffered since the beginning of centralization. Previously they had not only often felt themselves menaced by the same danger, they had frequently had common administrative problems to solve, and this had automatically brought them closer together. But the relationship deteriorated when the nobility realized that the middle class was its most dangerous rival. From then 011 the king had to intervene again and again and to reconcile the jealous nobility; for, although he apparently dominated both parties, he had to make constant concessions and show favour now to one now to the other.⁸ A token of this policy of appeasement towards the nobility is also to be seen, for example, in the fact that under Louis XV it was already much more difficult for a commoner to attain a commission in the army than under Louis XIV. Since the Edict of 1781 the middle class had been totally excluded from the army. The situation with regard to high ecclesiastical posts was similar: in the seventeenth century there was still a number of Church leaders of plebeian origin, such as Bossuet and Fléchier, for example; in the eighteenth century that was hardly any longer the case. The rivalry between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie became, 011 the one hand, more and more critical, but, on the other hand, it assumed the sublimated forms of intellectual emulation and created a complicated network of spiritual relationships in which attraction and repulsion, imitation and rejection, respect and resentment, were intermingled. The material equality and practical superiority of the middle class provoked the nobility to stress the unlikeness of their descent and the difference of their traditions. But with the increasing similarity of the external conditions of both classes, the hostility of the bourgeoisie towards the nobility also became more intense. So long as they were excluded from climbing the social scale, it never occurred to them to compare themselves with the upper classes; it was not until the possibility of rising was given them that they became really aware of the existing social injustice, and began to regard the privileges of the nobility as intolerable. In a word, the more the nobility lost of its real power, the more obstinately it clung to the privileges which it still enjoyed and the more ostentatiously it displayed them; on the other hand, the more material goods the middle class acquired, the more shameful it considered the social discrimination from which it was suffering and the more exasperatedly it fought for political equality.

As a result of the great state bankruptcies of the sixteenth century, the middle-class wealth of the Renaissance had been dispersed and was not able to recover during the golden age of absolutism and mercantilism when the monarchs and states themselves were doing the big business.⁹ Not until the eighteenth century, when the world policy of mercantilism was given up and ‘laissez-faire’ introduced, did the middle class, with its individualistic economic principles, come into its own again and although the traders and industrialists were able to derive considerable advantages for themselves from the absence of the aristocracy from business life, big middle-class capital first arose during the Régence and the succeeding period. This régime was in fact the ‘cradle of the third estate’. Under Louis XVI the bourgeoisie of the ancien regime reached the zenith of its intellectual and material development.¹⁰ Trade, industry, the banks, the ferme générale, the liberal professions, literature and journalism, that is to say, all the key posts in society, with the exception of the leading positions in the army, the Church and at court, were in its possession. Commercial activities developed on an unprecedented scale, industries grew, the banks multiplied, enormous sums flowed through the hands of the employers and speculators. Material needs increased and spread; and not merely people like bankers and tax-farmers climbed higher up the social ladder and vied with the nobility in their style of life, but the middle sections of the bourgeoisie also profited from the boom and took an increasing part in cultural life. The country in which the revolution broke out was, therefore, by no means economically exhausted; it was rather merely an insolvent state with a rich middle class. The bourgeoisie gradually took possession of all the instruments of culture—it not only wrote the books, it also read them, it not only painted the pictures, it also bought them. In the preceding century it had still formed only a comparatively modest section of the art and reading public, but now it is the cultured class par excellence and becomes the real upholder of culture. Most of Voltaire’s readers already belong to this class, and Rousseau’s almost exclusively. Crozat, the greatest art collector of the century, comes from a commercial family, Bergeret, the patron of Fragonard, is of still more humble origin, Laplace is9 the son of a peasant, and no one knows whose son d’Alembert was. The same middle-class public that reads Voltaire’s books also reads the Latin poets and the French classics of the seventeenth century and is just as decided about what it rejects as it is in the choice of its reading. It is not much interested in the Greek writers and these now gradually disappear from libraries; it despises the Middle Ages, Spain has become a more or less unknown territory, its relationship to Italy has not yet properly developed, and will never become so cordial as the relations between court society and the Italian Renaissance in the preceding two centuries. The gentilhomme has been considered the intellectual representative of the sixteenth century, the honnête homme that of the seventeenth, and the ‘cultured’ man, that is to say, the reader of Voltaire, that of the eighteenth.¹¹ It has been asserted that one cannot understand the French bourgeois without knowing Voltaire, whom he took for his eternal model;¹² but one cannot understand Voltaire, if one does not see how deeply rooted he is in the middle class not only by heredity but also in his whole outlook, despite his seignorial demeanour, his royal friends and his enormous fortune. His sober classicism, his renunciation of the solution of the great metaphysical problems, indeed his mistrust...