The Age of Classicism: Art and Architecture

SCULPTURE FROM CLASSICISM TO MODERNISM

Sources

Universalism and Consumerism. Inspired by the Enlightenment and guided by the authority of antiquity, eighteenth-century painters embraced the universalist ideal that all individuals share the same human condition and the same fundamental principles. Equally important, painters found themselves working in a new environment, a consumer culture in which artworks increasingly became commercial products. The transition from the old court society to the new market society was gradual, but everywhere signs pointed toward the new. In fact, though it looked to ancient Greece and Rome for models, Classicism as a style owed much of its success to the new conditions of the late eighteenth century. In 1764 Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), a German art theorist, laid out the fundamental principles of Classicism in his book Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (The History of Ancient Art). According to Winckelmann, the ancient Greeks embodied the universal natural laws in their art, and “moderns” could do no better than to imitate them. Winckelmann’s book was a major publishing success, spreading the ideas of universalism and natural laws in classicism to readers in an ever-broadening consumer public. Winckelmann’s book was influential in another way as well. He introduced the scholarly discipline of aesthetics that centered on the individual’s capacity for feeling and sensibility. Winckelmann’s ideas were equally influential among elite art theorists and courtly patrons who still used art as a means of displaying distinction and among the growing numbers of artists who merchandised their work and sold it on the consumer market. As the art public became increasingly pluralistic, the width and variety of the market expanded, especially in the large cities of Europe. Classicism became so popular that two snobbish art connoisseurs, Thomas Hope (1769–1831) and Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803), bemoaned “the

fact is that this fad for imitating the ancients caught on, if not with the keenest of minds, at least with those who were most energetic and enterprising. The imitative arts, theatre, literature in general, and everything down to the furniture all manifested the furor to imitate first the Romans, and later the Greeks....” Such imitation, they complained, even applied “to feminine fashions, the decoration of apartments, and the most common utensils.” For all the diversity among artists, patrons, and popular consumers they were captive of the empiricism of the Enlightenment, with its trust in the ability of the senses to arrive at truth through observation and employ it in pursuit of progress, and they all judged—and consumed—art accordingly.

Painting and Progress. The Enlightenment values of empiricism and universalism conditioned visual artists to represent the idea of progress. In keeping with contemporary understandings of this idea, artists such as Claude-Joseph Vernet (1714–1789) sought to extol the noble aspiration of public improvement. Through something as commonplace as the building of a road, Vernet hoped to reveal to his viewers the ideal of human betterment through improvements in the public welfare guided by rational principles. Vernet was in fact commissioned by the French state to paint Construction of a Road (1774).In the painting one can see what Vernet considered the triumphs of French transport technology. For instance, he included a crane that was invented by the engineer directing the project, Jean-Rodolphe Perronet (1708–1794), who is portrayed as one of the men on horseback in the painting.

Painting and Revolution. As revolution gripped France in the late eighteenth century, painters sought to represent its values in pictures. Universalism was cast in the ideas of the brotherhood of man—the revolutionary slogan “freedom, equality, brotherhood” embraced it as a fundamental human value—and of progress and betterment through revolutionary change. The Classical style served these purposes well. For example, in his Oath of the Horatii (1785) Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) realistically depicted men in Classical garb heroically dedicated to the ideal of brotherhood. Such a value, moreover, was starkly masculine. Viewers did not miss David’s commentary, which was shared widely among revolutionaries, that the these new, masculine revolutionaries were capable of toppling the Old Regime, which was aristocratic, decadent, and unnaturally affected (and thus out of step with the true standard of nature). Indeed, its critics often cast it as feminine. An anonymous drawing titled At the Café Royal d’Alexandre: The Burning of the Coiffures (circa 1780) uses biting satire to make these points.

Architecture and the Laws of Nature. The empirical method of knowledge acquisition championed by Enlightenment thinkers rested on mathematical science and a new “rationality.” These tools, they believed, would permit the discovery of the universal laws of

nature. In his Essai sur I’architecture (Essay on Architecture, 1753) Marc-Antoine Laugier (1713–1769) claimed to have uncovered the fixed and unchanging laws of nature that fundamentally governed the art of building. To discover these structural laws, Laugier asserted, one must examine the primordial constructions of natural man, and the building that hewed the closest to man in his natural state was the hut. Laugier’s influence on architectural theory was profound. All Classical architects henceforth assumed that the hut was the primal structure that embodied in its simplicity the pure and fundamental laws of nature.

The Ideal City. With the belief in the idea of progress came an optimism that mankind had the tools not only to improve the human condition but even to perfect it.This confidence in the perfectibility of man rose to a utopianism that influenced almost all aspects of thought. City planning was no exception. Urban architecture and design, true to Classical form, hailed the Greeks and Romans as the ideal models. Enlightenment Classicists therefore believed that progress was linked to a renewal of civic life, specifically that monumental public

SCULPTURE FROM CLASSICISM TO MODERNISM

Unlike painting, architecture, literature, and music, sculpture did not change greatly in form or meaning between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries. And with the exception of Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) late in the nineteenth century, few great artists are associated with sculpture during this period. In the age of Classicism, Antonio Canova (1757–1822) and Bertel Thorvaldsen (1740–1814) were the leading sculptors and became highly influential on young artists. Canova, in good Classical fashion, chose heroic subjects and in that way personified universal values of the Enlightenment. As Napoleon’s court sculptor, he carved portraits of his powerful contemporaries, but he invariably presented them in ancient attire and cut his statues from marble, closely imitating ancient Roman technique and making no concessions to the emerging style of Romanticism. Thorvaldsen was equally Classical in his desire to instill his sculptures with universal values such as human dignity and grace, although he departed from the dominant secular mood of the time by combining Christian motifs with ancient ones. Like Canova, he mastered the ancient technique of working with marble.

So great and long-lasting was the influence of Classicism on sculpture that Romanticism never really took hold, and in the few instances where it did (almost entirely in France), it was expressed more in mood than form. The most significant Romantic sculptor was Francois Rude (1784–1853), and his Departure of the Volunteers in 1792 (1835–1836), more commonly known as the Marseillaise, embodies the Romantic values of emotionalism and political rebellion. This sculpture graces Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe in Paris and, like the Romantic Eugéne Delacroix’s painting, Liberty Leading the People, evokes the French Revolution.

The mid-century trend toward Realism and Naturalism resulted in extraordinary artistic expressions in painting but not sculpture. Under the sway of this style, most sculptors simply produced what critics consider uninteresting, life-like reproductions. An exception was Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827–1875), who sought to convey an enhanced realism through the use of illusionary techniques of texture and shadow, but the real breakthrough in sculpture had to await Rodin. He continued Carpeaux’s use of illusion to capture reality but, like the Impressionist painters, explored the play of light on his subject and used it abundantly. As an artist working in a three-dimensional medium, he was also keenly aware of how empty spaces around his forms could contribute to the force, mood, and effect of his sculpture. Rodin combined all these techniques in works of art such as the monumental Burghers of Calais (1884–1886), pushing sculpture toward the modern style of Expressionism. The chief objective of his art was to express forcefully the mood of the piece, and he employed sharp contrasts in light, mass, and body poses to gain bold expressive effects. In this sense, Rodin was the last great sculptor of the pre–World War I period. As Modernism took hold after the war, sculpture moved boldly in the direction of abstraction.

Sources: George Heard Hamilton, Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1880-1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).

Fritz Novotny, Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1780-1880 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).

buildings and wide-open spaces would be conducive to the nurturing of a public spirit. City planning and urban architecture reflected other influences of the age as well. One of the ideas the Scientific Revolution bequeathed to Enlightenment thought was the concept that the laws of nature were mechanistic and constantly propelling matter into motion. For urban planners and architects such as Pierre Patte (1723–1814) the ideal city would, like a machine, efficiently allow the natural movement of goods, money, people, and ideas. The desire to create a rational, regular, and ordered urbanspace informed Patte’s “Project for an Ideal Street,” published in 1769. Patte called for public laws to dictate the proper—that is, rational—mathematical proportion for the relationship between the width of a street and the height of the buildings. The plan of houses and streets would form an interlocking system designed according to regulated ratios. (Symmetry and balance were central to Classical aesthetics.) The result would ensure public health by allowing plentiful circulation of air, sufficient light, and the removal of waste through adequate drainage. Public safety was further guaranteed by spatially separating pedestrians from vehicles.

Sources

Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture, 1750-1890 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

Albert Boime, Art in an Age of Revolution, 1750-1800 (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1987).

Matthew Craske, Art in Europe, 1700-1830: A History of the Visual Artsin an Era of Unprecedented Urban Economic Growth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, volume 2(New York: Knopf, 1952).

Fritz Novotny, Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1780-1880 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1978).