Neoclassicism

7 Key excerpts on "Neoclassicism"

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  The Power of Art, Revised

  • Richard Lewis, Susan Lewis(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  N E O C L A S S I C I S M The Neoclassical style was a visual expression of the ideals of the Enlightenment. Enlightenment thinkers, both scientists and philosophers, valued order and ratio-nality above all. Similarly, Neoclassical painters rejected SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS , Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse , 1784. Oil on canvas, 93 × 51 1 ⁄ 2 . Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, United Kingdom. 16-2 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH , The Blue Boy , 1770. Oil on canvas, 70 × 48. Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California. 16-3 Copyright 2019 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 346 CHAPTER 16: THE BATTLE OF THE ISMS: Neoclassicism, ROMANTICISM, AND REALISM both the high drama and murky atmosphere of Baroque art and the misty sentimentality of the Rococo. They searched for clarity of line, color, and form, admiring the simplicity of Greek art. The supreme object of the Neoclassical artist was to paint a moral lesson that would educate and improve the viewer—what were called “history paintings,” generally scenes from the ancient past. They dreamed of creating large works of art that could be used to educate the pub-lic about civic virtues, much as stained-glass windows educated peasants in the Middle Ages.

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  An Introduction to Nineteenth-Century Art

  • Michelle Facos(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  C H A P T E R 2 Classical Influences and Radical Transformations B ritish explorers Wood and Dawkins, collector William Hamilton, and Grand Tourists generally returned from Italy to London filled with enthusiastic admiration for the classical past. They expressed this through membership in the Society of Dilettanti (a club of classical antiquity enthusiasts) and the decoration of their homes. Returning expatriate Lady Wentworth brought back works of ancient art and also Angelica Kauffmann, whose first-hand study of classical antiquity shaped her work. Antiquomania (Figure 2.1) gripped London by the 1760s, with implications both superficial—the high status of ancient culture—and profound —the emulation of “Roman” virtues such as stoicism, generosity, self-sacrifice, and patriotic obedience. In the second half of the eighteenth century, revived interest in antiquity provided the basis for the evolution of Neoclassicism, a term coined in the late nineteenth century. While it is a useful concept for figuring out art of that time, artists were not conscious practitioners of it. One can identify a Neoclassical style, recognizable by its somber color, spare composition, and restrained brushwork; a Neoclassical subject matter identified by its use of stories and events from Greek and Roman antiquity; and a Neoclassical content that espoused “Roman” virtues. Some works combined all three aspects while others display one or two of these elements, depending on the artist’s patron or target audience. Neoclassicism IN BRITAIN One of the earliest Neoclassical paintings—Neoclassical in message, subject, and style—was Benjamin West’s Agrippina Landing at Brundisium with the Ashes of Germanicus (Figure 2.2), commissioned in 1766 by York’s archbishop, Robert Drummond. West began as a portraitist in rural Pennsylvania; his parents were Quaker (although West joined the Anglican Church to affiliate himself with Britain’s power elite)

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  A History of Literary Criticism

  From Plato to the Present

  • M. A. R. Habib(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  On the one hand, the neoclassical concept of nature was informed by Newtonian physics, and the universe was acknowledged to be a vast machine, subject to fixed analyzable laws. On the other hand, the tenor of most neoclassical thought was retrospective and conservative. On the surface, it might seem that the neoclassical writers shared with Enlightenment thinkers a belief in the power of reason. The neoclassicists certainly saw literature as subject to a system of rules, and literary composition as a rational process, subject to the faculty of judgment (Pope uses the word “critic” in its original Greek sense of “judge”). But, while it is true that some neoclassical writers, especially in Germany, were influenced by Descartes and other rationalists, the “reason” to which the neoclassical writers appeal is in general not the individualistic and progressive reason of the Enlightenment (though, as will be seen in a later chapter, Enlightenment reason could from other perspectives be seen as a coercive and oppressive force); rather, it is the “reason” of the classical philosophers, a universal human faculty that provides access to general truths and which is aware of its own limitations. Alexander Pope and others emphasized the finitude of human reason, cautioning against its arrogant and unrestricted employment. Reason announced itself in neoclassical thought largely in Aristotelian and sometimes Horatian terms: an adherence to the requirements of probability and verisimilitude, as well as to the three unities, and the principle of decorum. But the verisimilitude or likeness to reality here sought after was different from nineteenth-century realism that sought to depict the typical elements and the universal truths about any given situation; it did not operate via an accumulation of empirical detail or a random recording of so-called reality.

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  Gardner's Art through the Ages

  A Global History, Volume II

  • Fred Kleiner(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Neoclassicism 791 modern art historical method thoroughly in accord with Enlightenment ideas of ordering knowledge: a system of description and classifica- tion that provided a pioneering model for the understanding of stylistic evolution. As was the norm at that time, Winckelmann’s familiarity with clas- sical art derived predominantly from Roman works and Roman copies of Greek art in Italy. Yet Winckelmann was instrumental in bringing to scholarly attention the differences between Greek and Roman art. Thus he paved the way for more thorough study of the distinct characteristics of the art and architecture of these two cultures. Winckelmann’s influence extended beyond the world of scholarship. He also was instrumental in promoting Neoclassicism as a major stylis- tic movement in late-18th-century painting. He was, for example, the scholar who advised his countryman ANTON RAPHAEL MENGS (1728–1779) on classical iconog- raphy when Mengs painted Par- nassus (FIG. 26-24A), the fresco that many art historians regard as the first Neoclassical painting. It predates Angelica Kauffman’s Mother of the Gracchi (FIG. 26-1) by almost a quarter century. *Translated by Elfriede Heyer and Roger C. Norton in Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, eds., Art in Theory 1648–1815: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 451–453. WRITTEN SOURCES Winckelmann and the History of Classical Art In 1755, Johann Joachim Winckelmann published his groundbreaking Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture. In this treatise, the German scholar unequivocally designated Greek art as the most perfect to come from human hands. For Winckelmann, classi- cal art was far superior to the “natural” art of his day. Good taste, which is becoming more prevalent throughout the world, had its origins under the skies of Greece. . . . The only way for us to become great . . . is to imitate the ancients.

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  Nineteenth-Century Art

  A Critical History

  • Stephen F Eisenman(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Thames and Hudson Ltd

    (Publisher)

  16 INTRODUCTION In eighteenth-century France, the culture of Greco-Roman antiquity and its subsequent reviv-als—also known as Classicism—were an essential resource for both the ruling aristocracy and its political opponents. Classicism enabled the Bourbon kings to claim descent from ancient pagan gods, while simultaneously asserting obedience to Christian virtues. The very same Classicism, deployed by the new intellectual and professional classes of the era, was also used to criticize the corruption of the monarchy and aristocracy, who governed a society divided by gross social, political, and economic inequality. Classicism, in short, was a political instrument available to everyone with power and influence, and as such it became fundamental in the arsenals of the most important artists of the age. The figures who most successfully marshalled the rheto-ric of Classicism were the painter Jacques-Louis David and his principal students, Jean-Germain Drouais, Ann-Louis Girodet, and J.-A.-D. Ingres. The first three of these art-ists created a body of works that embraced the Classically inflected ideology of “patriotism and virtue,” the notion that the highest obligation of a citizen was to support the gen-eral welfare of a nation and its people—even if that meant criticizing current rulers and policies. In picture after pic-ture, from David’s Belisarius Begging Alms (1781) and The Oath of the Horatii between the Hands of Their Father (1784) to Girodet’s Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley (1797), artists exhorted audiences both to challenge the governing political culture and—after the onset of revolution in 1789— to endorse a new, patriarchal, and sometimes autocratic national order. The last of these artists, Ingres, was a far more politically pliant talent, lending his imaginative genius to Napoleon and aristocratic antagonists alike. A few artists stood largely outside the emerging Classical system.

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  Gardner's Art through the Ages

  A Concise Global History

  • Fred Kleiner(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  313 FRAMING THE ERA THE ENLIGHTENMENT, ANGELICA KAUFFMAN, AND Neoclassicism The dawn of the Enlightenment in the 18th century brought a new way of thinking critically about the world and about men and women, independently of religion, myth, or tradition. Enlightenment thinkers rejected unfounded beliefs in favor of empirical evidence and promoted the questioning of all assertions. This new worldview was a major factor in the revolutionary political, social, and economic changes that swept Europe and America in the mid- to late 1700s. Among these were the wars for indepen-dence in America and France, the Industrial Revolution in England, and a renewed admiration in both Europe and America for the art and architecture of classical antiquity. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on rationality in part explains this classical focus, because the geometric harmony of classical art and architecture embodied Enlightenment ideals. Moreover, Greece and Rome represented the pinnacle of civilized society—paragons of enlightened political organization. With their traditions of liberty, civic virtue, morality, and sacrifice, these cultures were ideal models during a period of political upheaval. The Enlightenment interest in classical antiquity in turn gave rise to the artistic movement known as Neoclassicism, which incorporated the subjects and styles of Greek and Roman art. One of the pioneers of Neoclassical painting was Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807). Born in Switzerland and trained in Italy, Kauffman spent many of her productive years in England. In an era when nearly all successful artists were men, Kauffman enjoyed an enviable reputation and was a founding member of the British Royal Academy of Arts. Cornelia Presenting Her Children as Her Treasures, or Mother of the Gracchi (fig. 11-1 ), is perhaps Kauffman’s best-known work.

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  The Tradition of Return

  The Implicit History of Modern Literature

  • Jeffrey M. Perl(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  As realism has the Real to contend with and endlessly to redefine, so classicism has to deal with the Classics—with canon-mak- ing or unmaking, with fresh literary interpretations, with new 68 · CHAPTER III insights into cultural context, with the discoveries of archeol- ogy and linguistics. It is in the critic's interest, if he hopes to evaluate modernism in the context of modernity, to transcend the dialectic of competing classicisms. Writers have been so busy making new definitions of the classical, and critics have been so busy debunking them, that no one has stopped to wonder at the extraordinary compulsion that has fueled this centuries-long pattern of definition/refutation/redefinition. The current trend in criticism looks, at first glance, like a departure from the pattern: contemporary critics have determined to dismiss the classicism issue altogether. But ignorance of a dialectic is not the same as transcendence, and our current understanding of modernism has suffered from the circum- scription of our critical scope. THE MODERNISTS' insistence that modernism and classicism are one is our best window on the ideology of history that underwrote the modernist enterprise. In his most sustained exposition of that ideology, Eliot writes: . . . what I see, in the history of English poetry, is . . . the splitting up of personality. If we say that one of these partial personalities which may develop in a national mind is that which manifested itself in the period between Dry- den and Johnson, then what we have to do is to reinte- grate it: otherwise we are likely to get only successive alternations of personality. 19 This statement represents a new historical perspective, for many earlier critics had attempted to wipe either Neoclassicism or romanticism or (in the twentieth century) both off the cultural map.

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