Tradition

Neoclassicism

Overview

Neoclassicism, also spelled Neo-classicism, emerged as a Western cultural movement in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that drew inspiration from the art and culture of classical antiquity. Neoclassicism was born in Rome, largely due to the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann during the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Its popularity expanded throughout Europe as a generation of European art students finished their Grand Tour and returned from Italy to their home countries with newly rediscovered Greco-Roman ideals. The main Neoclassical movement emerged from the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, and reached its peak in the early-to-mid-19th century, eventually competing with Romanticism. In architecture, the style endured throughout the 19th, 20th, and into the 21st century.

European Neoclassicism in the visual arts began c. 1760 in opposition to the dominant Rococo style. Rococo architecture emphasizes grace, ornamentation and asymmetry; Neoclassical architecture is based on the principles of simplicity and symmetry, which were seen as virtues of the arts of Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, and drawn directly from 16th-century Renaissance Classicism. Each "neo"-classicism movement selects some models among the range of possible classics that are available to it, and ignores others. Between 1765 and 1830, Neoclassical proponents—writers, speakers, patrons, collectors, artists and sculptors—paid homage to an idea of the artistic generation associated with Phidias, but sculpture examples they actually embraced were more likely to be Roman copies of Hellenistic sculptures. They ignored both Archaic Greek art and the works of late antiquity. The discovery of ancient Palmyra's "Rococo" art through engravings in Robert Wood's The Ruins of Palmyra came as a revelation. With Greece largely unexplored and considered a dangerous territory of the Ottoman Empire, Neoclassicists' appreciation of Greek architecture was predominantly mediated through drawings and engravings which were subtly smoothed and regularized, "corrected" and "restored" monuments of Greece, not always consciously.

The Empire style, a second phase of Neoclassicism in architecture and the decorative arts, had its cultural centre in Paris in the Napoleonic era. Especially in architecture, but also in other fields, Neoclassicism remained a force long after the early 19th century, with periodic waves of revivalism into the 20th and even the 21st centuries, especially in the United States and Russia.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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And, above all, those great men, unique in every branch of art and science, whom nature then produced at one time, will render his reign eternally memorable. The age was greater than Louis XIV., but it shed its glory upon him. Emulation in art has changed the face of the continent, from the Pyrenees to the icy sea. There is hardly a prince in Germany who has not made useful and glorious establishments. What have the…
Voltaire, A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 02
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They think that the Muse of Literature may transfer herself to other countries less dried up or worn out than our own. They seem to see the withering effect of criticism on original genius. No one can doubt that such a decay or decline of literature and of art seriously affects the manners and character of a nation. It takes away half the joys and refinements of life; it increases its dulness and grossness. Hence it…
Plato, Phaedrus
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The first expression of this was some element, rarefied by degrees into a pure abstraction, and purged from any tincture of sense. Soon an inner world of ideas began to be unfolded, more absorbing, more overpowering, more abiding than the brightest of visible objects, which to the eye of the philosopher looking inward, seemed to pale before them, retaining only a faint and precarious existence. At the same time, the…
Plato, Timaeus
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Philosophers who discussed Neoclassicism

Theodor W. Adorno

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of Classicism.

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