Neoclassicism was an attitude that influenced visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture in the 18th century. The movement originated in Rome at the time of the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum and soon spread to other parts of Europe. The movement coincided with The Age of Enlightenment and Romanticism.
The Attributes of the Arts by Anne Vallayer-Coster (1769)
In visual arts, neoclassicism successor to the Rococo style. The latter emphasized grace, ornamentation, and asymmetry whereas Neoclassical works were based on the principles of simplicity, symmetry, and mathematics. These were seen as virtues of the arts of Rome and Ancient Greece and were taken from 16th-century Renaissance Classicism.
In art, neoclassicism was an idealist concept. It believed that art should express ideal virtues of life and impart the immortalizing messages, it was a conservative approach. The three main themes of neoclassicism were restraint, self-control, and common sense. Many of the neoclassical paintings were history paintings. The included subjects from the bible, classical mythology, and history, followed by portraiture, genre painting, landscapes, and still lifes. Instead of promoting sensuality as its predecessors, Neoclassicism promoted rationality and morality.
_MET_DP827987.jpg)
The ancient Capitol ascended by approximately one hundred steps . . . by Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1750)
The focus was shifted from ornamentation in paintings to well-delineated form—clear drawing and modeling (shading). The drawing was considered more important than painting. Thus the qualities of outline and linear design became important. The painting surface had to look perfectly smooth, thus no evidence of brush strokes discernable to the naked eye was left. The art had clarity of form, sober colors, smooth contouring, shallow space, and strong horizontal and verticals. Artists used minimalist and austere color palettes, dominated by bright reds and some blue, to convey the narrative. The paintings were usually of life-size scale. Neoclassical paintings are specially characterized to include line over colour, straight lines over curves, frontality and closed compositions over diagonal compositions into deep space, and the general over the particular.
Portrait of Charlotte du Val d'Ognes by Marie-Denise Villers (1801) Julie Lebrun by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1799)
Famous artists of this movement were Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jacques-Louis David, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Asmus Jacob Carstens, and Anton Raphael Mengs among others. Notable works of this period are Anton Raphael Mengs' Parnassus, history paintings of Angelica Kauffman, Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii, etc.
