Classical models and

imaginary space
Neo-Classicism and
Romanticism in Europe
Lecture #2
European Enlightenment Age – Philosophical and
cultural reference

Archeological excavation (Ercolano 1738, Pompei 1748)

Winckelmann: ”Noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of
Greek art = absolute formal beauty, lack of pathos. The
critic thinks that the imitation of Greek art brings modern
artist to a new style opposite to Rococò’s decadence.
(“Thoughts on the imitation of Greek art”, 1755).
Encyclopedia written by Diderot and D’Alembert (1751).
Under the heading "art" Diderot questions the traditional
hierarchy between liberal arts (painting, sculpture, architecture,
scenography) and applied arts, re-evaluating precisely this last
aspect of artistic production. All arts are equally important to
the education’s aim.
Kant: «Have the courage to use your own intelligence! This is
the motto of Enlightenment». Knowledge is the new ability of
man to transform reality. Culture and art lose their elitist
character.
 Antonio Canova
 Antonio Canova, Cupid and Psyche,
1787-1793
 The legend of Cupid and Psyche, fresco
painting, Ercolano
 Funerary Monument of Maria Cristina d’Austria, 1798-1805, Augustinerkirche, Vienna
 Italian Enlightment Age
 Algarotti, Essay on painting, Essay on
sculpture, Essay on music opera [1763]
underlines didactic and moral function of
theater which also has consequences in the
field of scenography.
 He suggests artists to use “camera obscura” in
order to study nature: «The use that
astronomers make of the telescope and
physicists of the microscope, the same use
must be made by the painters of the camera
obscura. This tool allows, like the others, to get
to know nature better» (Algarotti, On painting,
1763)
 «Vedutismo»
 Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Santa Maria
Maggiore in Rome, oil on canvas, 1742
 The term «veduta» (view) describes a
topographical representation in which
the natural element integrates with the
architectural one, requiring
scenographic and quadraturistic skills
 Canaletto, Canal Grande,1740-1745, Pinacoteca di
Brera, Milan
 Canaletto, Campo San Giovanni e Paolo, drawings
from Quaderno, 1728-30, Gallerie dell’Accademia,
Venice
 «Camera ottica» (camera obscura)
 Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Capriccio architettonic
1735
 «Capriccio» is a genre that involves the combin
without any historical or topographical accuracy
fictional architectural elements with imaginary
landscapes.
 Johann Heinric Fussli, The desperation of the
artist in ront of the ancient fragment’s grandeur,
1778, Kunsthaus, Zurich
 Winckelmann, Thoughts on the imitation of
Greek Art, 1755; classical art is caracterized by
«noble simplicity and quiet grandeur»:
«For those who want to reach the knowledge of
perfect beauty, the study of nature will be at least
longer and more tiring than that of the ancient».
 Ancient architecture
between reality and vision

 Giovan Battista Piranesi, Roman

Antiquity, 1756
 Goethe: «The artist should aim to draw
from antiquity not measurable
proportions but what is immeasurable»
 Piranesi, Treatise on the introduction and
progress of Fine Arts in Europe during ancient
times, 1765
 Robert Adams, Chair, Osterley Park, 1775; his
book Works of architecture (1778) was
illusrated by Piranesi
 Piranesi, Egyptian chimney, engraving, 1769
 The Ancient Roman art

 Giovan Battista Piranesi, Roman

Antiquity, 1756
 "Piranesi seems to see in the
magnificence of Roman architecture a
moral principle that is expressed
through the distortion of reality, the
irrational distortion of the normative
scale of proportions, the recourse to the
evocative function of the imagination".
(Giuliano Briganti)
  John Soane, Bank of England, 1798, ink and
Ancient architecture watercolour on paper
between reality and vision  Pierre Henri de Valenciennes, Ancient Agrigento,
1787, oil on canvas
Nature and vision
 The art of the «picturesque» garden
Nicolas
Poussin,
Landscape,
1648

Claude
Thomas Hearne, Paesistic garden, 1794 Lorrain, Landsca
pe, 1669
 New iconography

 The topic of the house: Laugier,

Observations on architecture, 1755
 The quality architecture must
necessarily come from Nature and
Reason. Moreover, it must be free of all
those elements which, without purely
structural connotations, responding to
needs of an ornamental: «All beauty
only dwells in its essential parts»
William Turner, Picturesque
Composition with a Distant
View of Tours from the North
East, 1796

Birth of “picturesque” aesthetic.

William Gilpin: “Instead of
rendering all smooth, artist have
to render all rough, and then he
will render it picturesque too”.
Industrial revolution
in
England

 Joseph Wright of
Derby, An Iron
Forge, 1770
Joseph Wright of Derby,
An Experiment on a Bird
in the Air Pump, 1768
  Jacques-Louis David, Oath of the Horatii, 1784

Neoclassicism in France
Jacques-Louis David, Death of Socrates, 1787
 Napoleonic period
 Jacques Louis-David, Crowning of Napoleon and Josephine in Notre-Dame, 1807
 Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps or Bonaparte at the St Bernard Pass, 1800–01
 Napoleonic period
Fontaine, Vendome Coloumn,
Parigi, 1806-10
 Traiano’s Coloumn, Roma
Napoleonic period

Milan

 Luigi Cagnola, Arco della Pace,

1806-1837, Milano
 Arco di Costantino, Roma
 Andrea Appiani, Portrait of
Napoleon, 1803
 Andrea Appiani, Aphotheosis of
Napoleon, 1808
 Ingres, Turkish bath, 1863
 Ingres, Jupiter and Thetis, 1811. “This picture that contains parts
skillfully executed and whose composition could give rise to a
better effect, lacks in the set of relief depth; it has no volume,
the color is weak and monotonous" (Salon’s Review, 1824)
Neoclassicism
Use of classical layout of composition: Joseph Wright of Derby:
painting structured by a pyramid and an elliptic distribution of
figures on the base; Jacques- Louis David: geometric and rational
construction of the painting; Antonio Canova, Grave of Mary
Christine of Austria: pure geometry of the composition
Napoleonic period: approach to antiquity is changed. There is no
more a revision of classical shapes but a an almost identical quote
of ancient monuments with propaganda’s aim. See difference
between Andrea Appiani and Ingres
New iconography
The space of psyche
 Fussli, The nightmare, 1781

 William Hogarth, Satan, 1697-1764
 Marcantonio Raimondi, Dream from
Raphael, 1508
 Giulio Romano, Dream of Ecuba,
1538
Fussli, The nightmare, 1781

Stanley Kubrik, Barry Lyndon, 1975

Rebecca Blake, 1978

Francisco Goya

The space of psyche

 Francisco Goya, The sleep of reasons

produces Monstres, 1799
 Fantasy and irrationalism opposed to
classical vision
 The work of Goya foreshadows both
the souls of Romanticism and Realism.
 Francisco Goya, The 3rd of May 1808,
1814, Prado, Madrid
 The city in the backgroud and the
close-up action
 Lucid observation of reality
 Renounce the myth of heroism
 Violent use of light
 "Photographic" painting in which the
observer is attracted to the main subject
 Expression on the canvas of the
drama’s sequence
Aesthetic of “ugly”.
Victor Hugo affirms in his drama “Cromwell”: “The beautiful is only one type, the ugly has a thousand. Humanly
speaking, beauty is nothing, but the form considered in its simplest relationship, in its absolute symmetry, in its most
intimate harmony with our organism. Beauty offers us a complete but limited whole. On the contrary, what we call ugly
is a detail of a great whole that escapes from us and that does not harmonize with man but with the whole creation. That
is why it continually offers us new but incomplete aspects”
• Gericault, Portraits of madmen, 1822
Gericault, Guillotined heads, 1818
Portrait of alienated people, 1818-22
• Théodore Gericault, The Raft of
the Medusa, 1818

• The scene is characterized by a

series of diagonals

• Gericault studied anatomical

parts at the morgue but in the
final image prevails the
beautiful shape of the victims

• Bodies resemble those of the

ancient heroes to the classical
statuary models that populated
the academies
Théodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818
Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830
Delacroix, realistic details of «Liberty Leading the People»
“The painting is ugly plebeian, an apology of the society’s scum
of waste” (1831)
“It is inappropriate to exhibit a picture representing Liberty in a
red cap, on top of a barricade where French soldiers are trampled
by the foot of the rabble” (First Minister of Napoleon III, 1851)
• Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios, 1824
• Historical episode (repression of Greek revolt by
Turkish Army) coexist with contemporary facts:
epidemic plague of paris.
• Composition: the painting misses the real central
axis. There is an empty space determined by M-
disposition and the eye goes to the city of Paris on
fire.
• Allegory and realistic details coexist.
 • Spatial construction: freedom to use
paintbrush realizing “spots”
• Reference to “tocco” (touch) technique
that came from the tradition of Venetian
Romantic age: A Renaissance Art
new attitude to • Mark of recognition of the rebellious style
that the poet Baudelaire would later refer
colour to a "painting done with a drunken
broom”
• From “pictoresque” to “sublime” aesthetic
• Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios, 1824 (detail)

• Tiziano, Pietà, 1575

Goya, The dog, 1819-1823
Man, nature, struggle of life
Space abstraction
Interpenetration between subject and spatial idea to
express an existential vision
Expression of sensitivity foreshadows Romanticism

Edmund Burke, Philosophical inquiry into the

origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful
(1757): sublime in art is everything that can arouse
the idea of ​pain and danger; man feels in front of
sublime a "delightful horror"
 Constable, The Mill of Flatford, 1816
 Corot, The Narni Bridge, 1826 • Daubigny, Sunset on the Oise, 1865

 Painting en plein air; construction: use of color almost without

• Barbizon school; Spatial structure is given by dense and fast
drawing; space, depth and the succession of planes, is suggested only
brushstrokes; Theophile Gautier accused Daubigny of only painting
by light’s variations and modulations; Stage that precedes
«sketches at an early stage», to «be satisfied with an impression», to
Impressionism
«offer only juxtaposed splashes of color».
 William Turner, Fire at the Parliament,
1834
 «He replaced the grandeur and mystery
of the vastest sceneries of the Earth to
limited space and defined forms of the
traditional landscape» (Ruskin);
 The renewed spatial vision passed from
an observation of nature and from the
discovery of color as the medium that
structures shape and spatiality of the
painting
 Turner destroyes Renaissance’s space
and every idea of ​a completed form