Introduction to Neoclassicism

After the Renaissance--a period of exploration and expansiveness--came a reaction in the

direction of order and restraint. Generally speaking, this reaction developed in France in the midseventeenth century and in England thirty years later; and it dominated European literature until
the last part of the eighteenth century.

The New Restraint

Writers turned from inventing new words to regularizing vocabulary and grammar. Complex,
boldly metaphorical language, such as Shakespeare used in his major tragedies, is clarified and
simplified--using fewer and more conventional figures of speech. Mystery and obscurity are
considered symptoms of incompetence rather than signs of grandeur. The ideal style is lucid,
polished, and precisely appropriate to the genre of a work and the social position of its
characters. Tragedy and high comedy, for example, use the language of cultivated people and
maintain a well-bred tone. The crude humor of the gravediggers in Hamlet or the pulling out of
Gloucester's eyes in King Lear would no longer be admitted in tragedy. Structure, like tone,
becomes more simple and unified. In contrast to Shakespeare's plays, those of neoclassical
playwrights such as Racine and Moliere develop a single plot line and are strictly limited in time
and place (often, like Moliere's The Misanthrope and Tartuffe, to a single setting and a single
day's time).

Influence of the Classics

The period is called neoclassical because its writers looked back to the ideals and art forms
of classical times, emphasizing even more than their Renaissance predecessors the classical
ideals of order and rational control. Such simply constructed but perfect works as the Parthenon
and Sophocles' Antigone, such achievements as the peace and order established by the Roman
Empire (and celebrated in Book VI of Vergil's Aeneid), suggest what neoclassical writers saw in
the classical world. Their respect for the past led them to be conservative both in art and politics.
Always aware of the conventions appropriate to each genre, they modeled their works on
classical masterpieces and heeded the "rules" thought to be laid down by classical critics. In
political and social affairs, too, they were guided by the wisdom of the past: traditional
institutions had, at least, survived the test of time. No more than their medieval and Renaissance
predecessors did neoclassical thinkers share our modern assumption that change means progress,
since they believed that human nature is imperfect, human achievements are necessarily limited,
and therefore human aims should be sensibly limited as well. It was better to set a moderate goal,
whether in art or society, and achieve it well, than to strive for an infinite ideal and fail.
Reasonable Philinte in The Misanthrope does not get angry at people's injustice, because he
accepts human nature as imperfect.

Neoclassical Assumptions and Their Implications

Neoclassical thinkers could use the past as a guide for the present because they assumed that
human nature was constant--essentially the same regardless of time and place. Art, they believed,
should express this essential nature: "Nothing can please many, and please long, but just
representations of general nature" (Samuel Johnson). An individual character was valuable for
what he or she revealed of universal human nature. Of course, all great art has this sort of
significance--Johnson made his statement about Shakespeare. But neoclassical artists more
consciously emphasized common human characteristics over individual differences, as we see in
the type-named characters of Moliere.
If human nature has remained constant over the centuries, it is unlikely that any startling new
discoveries will be made. Hence neoclassical artists did not strive to be original so much as to
express old truths in a newly effective way. As Alexander Pope, one of their greatest poets,
wrote: "True wit is nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well
expressed." Neoclassical writers aimed to articulate general truth rather than unique vision, to
communicate to others more than to express themselves.

Social Themes
Neoclassical writers saw themselves, as well as their readers and characters, above all as
members of society. Social institutions might be foolish or corrupt--indeed, given the intrinsic
limitations of human nature, they probably were--but the individual who rebelled against custom
or asserted his superiority to humankind was, like Alceste in The Misanthrope, presented as
presumptuous and absurd. While Renaissance writers were sometimes fascinated by rebels, and
later Romantic artists often glorified them, neoclassical artists expected people to conform to
established social norms. For individual opinion was far less likely to be true than was the
consensus of society, developed over time and embodied in custom and tradition. As the rules for
proper writing should be followed, so should the rules for civilized conduct in society. Neither
Moliere nor Jane Austen advocate blind following of convention, yet both insist that good
manners are important as a manifestation of self-control and consideration for others.

The Age of Reason

The classical ideals of order and moderation which inspired this period, its realistically
limited aspirations, and its emphasis on the common sense of society rather than individual
imagination, could all be characterized as rational. And, indeed, it is often known as the Age of
Reason. Reason had traditionally been assumed to be the highest mental faculty, but in this
period many thinkers considered it a sufficient guide in all areas. Both religious belief and
morality were grounded on reason: revelation and grace were de-emphasized, and morality
consisted of acting rightly to one's fellow beings on this earth. John Locke, the most influential
philosopher of the age, analyzed logically how our minds function (1690), argued for religious
toleration (1689), and maintained that government is justified not by divine right but by a "social
contract" that is broken if the people's natural rights are not respected.
As reason should guide human individuals and societies, it should also direct artistic creation.
Neoclassical art is not meant to seem a spontaneous outpouring of emotion or imagination.
Emotion appears, of course; but it is consciously controlled. A work of art should be logically

organized and should advocate rational norms. The Misanthrope, for example, is focused on its
theme more consistently than are any of Shakespeare's plays. Its hero and his society are judged
according to their conformity or lack of conformity to Reason, and its ideal, voiced by Philinte,
is the reasonable one of the golden mean. The cool rationality and control characteristic of
neoclassical art fostered wit, equally evident in the regular couplets of Moliere and the balanced
sentences of Austen.
Sharp and brilliant wit, produced within the clearly defined ideals of neoclassical art, and
focused on people in their social context, make this perhaps the world's greatest age of comedy
and satire.
NEOCLASSICISM
Neoclassicism was a widespread and influential movement in painting and
the other visual arts that began in the 1760s, reached its height in the
1780s and '90s, and lasted until the 1840s and '50s. In painting it
generally took the form of an emphasis on austere linear design in the
depiction of classical themes and subject matter, using archaeologically
correct settings and costumes.
Neoclassicism arose partly as a reaction against the sensuous and
frivolously decorative Rococo style that had dominated European art
from the 1720s on. But an even more profound stimulus was the new and
more scientific interest in classical antiquity that arose in the 18th century.
Neoclassicism was given great impetus by new archaeological
discoveries, particularly the exploration and excavation of the buried
Roman cities of Herculaneum and Pompeii (the excavations of which
began in 1738 and 1748, respectively). And from the second decade of
the 18th century on, a number of influential publications by Bernard de
Montfaucon, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, the Comte de Caylus, and
Robert Wood provided engraved views of Roman monuments and other
antiquities and further quickened interest in the classical past. The new
understanding distilled from these discoveries and publications in turn
enabled European scholars for the first time to discern separate and
distinct chronological periods in Greco-Roman art, and this new sense of
a plurality of ancient styles replaced the older, unqualified veneration of
Roman art and encouraged a dawning interest in purely Greek antiquities.
The German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann's writings and
sophisticated theorizings were especially influential in this regard.
Winckelmann saw in Greek sculpture "a noble simplicity and quiet
grandeur" and called for artists to imitate Greek art. He claimed that in
doing so such artists would obtain idealized depictions of natural forms
that had been stripped of all transitory and individualistic aspects, and
their images would thus attain a universal and archetypal significance.

Neoclassicism as manifested in painting was initially not stylistically

distinct from the French Rococo and other styles that had preceded it.
This was partly because, whereas it was possible for architecture and
sculpture to be modeled on prototypes in these media that had actually
survived from classical antiquity, those few classical paintings that had
survived were minor or merely ornamental works--until, that is, the
discoveries made at Herculaneum and Pompeii. The earliest Neoclassical
painters were Joseph-Marie Vien, Anton Raphael Mengs, Pompeo
Batoni, Angelica Kauffmann, and Gavin Hamilton; these artists were
active during the 1750s, '60s, and '70s. Each of these painters, though
they may have used poses and figural arrangements from ancient
sculptures and vase paintings, was strongly influenced by preceding
stylistic trends. An important early Neoclassical work such as Mengs's
"Parnassus" (1761; Villa Albani, Rome) owes much of its inspiration to
17th-century classicism and to Raphael for both the poses of its figures
and its general composition. Many of the early paintings of the
Neoclassical artist Benjamin West derive their compositions from works
by Nicolas Poussin, and Kauffmann's sentimental subjects dressed in
antique garb are basically Rococo in their softened, decorative prettiness.
Mengs's close association with Winckelmann led to his being influenced
by the ideal beauty that the latter so ardently expounded, but the church
and palace ceilings decorated by Mengs owe more to existing Italian
Baroque traditions than to anything Greek or Roman.

"Oath of the Horatii," oil

painting by
Jacques-Louis David,
1784; in the Louvre, Paris
Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

"The Death of Marat,"

oil painting by
Jacques-Louis David,
1793; in the Muses
Royaux des. . .

Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

A more rigorously Neoclassical painting style arose in France in the

1780s under the leadership of Jacques-Louis David. He and his
contemporary Jean-Franois-Pierre Peyron were interested in narrative
painting rather than the ideal grace that fascinated Mengs. Just before and
during the French Revolution, these and other painters adopted stirring
moral subject matter from Roman history and celebrated the values of
simplicity, austerity, heroism, and stoic virtue that were traditionally
associated with the Roman Republic, thus drawing parallels between that
time and the contemporary struggle for liberty in France. David's history
paintings of the "Oath of the Horatii" (1784; Louvre, Paris [see
photograph]) and "Lictors Bringing to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons"
(1789; Louvre) display a gravity and decorum deriving from classical
tragedy, a certain rhetorical quality of gesture, and patterns of drapery
influenced by ancient sculpture. To some extent these elements were
anticipated by British and American artists such as Hamilton and West,
but in David's works the dramatic confrontations of the figures are
starker and in clearer profile on the same plane, the setting is more
monumental, and the diagonal compositional movements, large groupings
of figures, and turbulent draperies of the Baroque have been almost
entirely repudiated (see photograph). This style was ruthlessly austere
and uncompromising, and it is not surprising that it came to be associated
with the French Revolution (in which David actively participated).

Neoclassicism as generally manifested in European painting by the 1790s

emphasized the qualities of outline and linear design over those of colour,
atmosphere, and effects of light. Widely disseminated engravings of
classical sculptures and Greek vase paintings helped determine this bias,
which is clearly seen in the outline illustrations made by the British
sculptor John Flaxman in the 1790s for editions of the works of Homer,
Aeschylus, and Dante. These illustrations are notable for their drastic and
powerful simplification of the human body, their denial of pictorial space,
and their minimal stage setting. This austere linearity when depicting the
human form was adopted by many other British figural artists, including
the Swiss-born Henry Fuseli and William Blake, among others.

Neoclassical painters attached great importance to depicting the

costumes, settings, and details of their classical subject matter with as
much historical accuracy as possible. This worked well enough when
illustrating an incident found in the pages of Homer, but it raised the
question of whether a modern hero or famous person should be
portrayed in classical or contemporary dress. This issue was never
satisfactorily resolved, except perhaps in David's brilliantly evocative
portraits of sitters wearing the then-fashionable antique garb, as in his
"Portrait of Madame Rcamier" (1800; Louvre).

Classical history and mythology provided a large part of the subject

matter of Neoclassical works. The poetry of Homer, Virgil, and Ovid,
the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and history recorded
by Pliny, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Livy provided the bulk of classical
sources, but the most important single source was Homer. To this general
literary emphasis was added a growing interest in medieval sources, such
as the pseudo-Celtic poetry of Ossian, as well as incidents from medieval
history, the works of Dante, and an admiration for medieval art itself in
the persons of Giotto, Fra Angelico, and others. Indeed, the
Neoclassicists differed strikingly from their academic predecessors in
their admiration of Gothic and Quattrocento art in general, and they
contributed notably to the positive reevaluation of such art. (see also
Index: classical literature)

Finally, it should be noted that Neoclassicism coexisted throughout much

of its later development with the seemingly obverse and opposite
tendency of Romanticism. But far from being distinct and separate, these
two styles intermingled with each other in complex ways; many ostensibly
Neoclassical paintings show Romantic tendencies, and vice versa. This
contradictory situation is strikingly evident in the works of the last great
Neoclassical painter, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, who painted
sensuous Romantic female nudes while also turning out precisely linear
and rather lifeless historical paintings in the approved Neoclassical mode

Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825)

One of the most celebrated French painters of his day, Jacques-Louis David was the principal
exponent of neoclassical art (flourished 1770-1830) - a style that rejected the light-

heartedness of the Rococo school in favour of the austere spirit and ordered forms of
classical art, which were more in keeping with the European Age of Enlightenment.
Neoclassicism was both a reaction against the decadence of the French court and also a
cultural response to the Roman art discovered at Herculaneum and Pompeii (1738-50), as
exalted by the German historian and scholar Johann Winckelmann (1717-68). Close to
Robespierre, and other revolutionary leaders of the new French Republic, who often used his
monumental neoclassical painting as propaganda, J-L David later became official painter to
the Emperor Napoleon. His most famous paintings include The Oath of the Horatii (1784,
Louvre, Paris); The Death of Socrates (1787, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); The
Lictors Returning the Bodies of his Sons to Brutus (1789, Louvre); Death of Marat (1793,
Musees Royaux, Brussels) and the Sabine Woman (1794, Louvre, Paris). As well as being
one of the best history painters of the late 18th century, J-L David is also considered to be
one of the best portait artists in French art. He influenced a large number of his
contemporaries including the romantic Delacroix (1798-1863) as well as the classicist Ingres
(1780-1867).

Joshua Reynolds RA (1723-92)

Reynolds was twenty-six years old when he arrived in Italy full of enthusiasm for the old masters. His
character was already completely formed, and as an artist he had already left far behind the dry manner and
withering conventions of the popular portrait-painters. He had the docile temper of the student, which
enabled him to profit by study of the works of others, but at the same time he had far too much intelligence
to degenerate into a slavish imitator. To his thinking, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Annibale Carracci of Bologna
were the great exemplars of what was then known as the "grand style" of painting. The Venetian colourists
he relegated to a much lower plane, speaking of their work as merely ornamental and without appeal to the
intellect or imagination. Of his three years in Italy he spent less than a year in Venice, and the greater part of
the time in Rome, yet of all the artists of the Renaissance, it was the Venetians who left their mark upon his
style.

Influence of the Italian Renaissance Artists

Reynolds' work seldom, if ever, recalls the severity and grandeur of

Michelangelo, but its richness and warmth of colour, sumptuousness of
arrangement, and lusciousness of pigment constantly remind one of the great
masters of the Venetian Renaissance. In later life, the examples of Rubens,
and especially of Rembrandt, further developed this tendency to rich glowing
and golden colour-schemes, and an opulent texture of paint. Colour was his
greatest natural gift, together with an instinct for harmonious arrangement. In
form, to which he himself gave the premier position among artistic
excellences, he was less gifted. Although he always endowed his figures with a
feeling of weight, substance, and solidity, he showed little sensitiveness to
refinement of form, and no delight in a subtle interplay of surface, while the
limbs of his figures, especially the arms and hands, often show no sense of the
underlying structure of bone. The method of study he adopted in Italy was not
calculated to develop this sense of form, excellent though it was in other
ways.
He copied little, but made numerous studies in his sketch-book of composition,
arrangement, and disposition of light and shade. This was characteristic of the
intelligence he always brought to bear on his work. He realized that time spent
in the manual labour of making complete copies would be less productive than
time spent in thinking out the principles on which the works of the great
masters were put together. Consequently, his studies are slight, but they are
compact with thought, and when he returned to England in 1752 he was the
most thoroughly educated English artist there had yet been.
Legacy
One of the most famous painters of the 18th century, the importance of Reynolds in the
development of English painting can scarcely be over-estimated, and his influence on his
contemporaries and successors for fifty years or more was profound. The qualities of his
work combined with his personal character and his position as President of the Royal
Academy to give him a unique authority. His personal teaching survived in the Discourses,
and his example raised the sorry business of professional portrait-painting from a trade to
an art, and set a standard of vigorous and painter-like handling which found echoes in the
work of nearly all the great English artists of his own and the next generation. It was the
constant aim of his life to raise and dignify the position of the arts in England, and if we
exclude William Hogarth he did more than any single man to found an English school of
painting.

Benjamin West (1738-1820)

The first American artist to achieve international fame, Benjamin West began as a portraitist
but made his mark in the genre of history painting. After several unconvincing neoclassical
compositions, West painted his masterpiece The Death of General Wolfe (1770, National
Gallery of Art, Ottowa). It was one of the first history paintings to feature modern dress,
and the first such work to become an overwhelming success. Its popularity helped to

revolutionize the artistic conventions of the day, and West's approach was widely imitated.
West spent almost his whole career in London. A co-founder, later President, of the London
Royal Academy of Art, West became the official history painter to King George III. In
addition, he influenced a number of contemporaries, including the history painter John
Singleton Copley (1738-1815), the portraitist Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828), the landscape
artist John Constable (1776-1837), the romantic Allston Washington (1779-1843), and the
painter-turned-inventor Samuel FB Morse (1791-1872).

The Death of General Wolfe (1770)

National Gallery of Art, Ottowa

Legacy
Since his death, West's reputation as a painter (never the greatest, despite the modernity of
his ideas) has declined. But his importance in the history of art is based on two more
important issues. First, he redefined history painting; second, he inspired successive
generations of American artists, a large number of whom benefited from his presence in
London and from his help and advice. He is rightly described as the "Father of American
Painting."