Neoclassical architecture

Neoclassical architecture was a reaction to Rococo and Baroque architectural styles. New discoveries of Greek and Roman architecture led Neoclassical period, which lasted 1850-1900.

Neoclassical buildings have few defining characteristics:

Clean, elegant linesUncluttered appearanceFree standing columnsMassive buildings

The ideal form that Neoclassical architecture looks at was the temple. Which was represented classical architecture in its purest form.

Columns were used to carry the weight of the building's structure. But later they became used as a graphical element.

Roof is usually flat and horizontal and often is visible from the ground.

Newoclassical architecture style had no domes or towers.

Building's facade is flat and long. Often having a screen of free-standing columns.

Exterior was built in such ways as to represent classical perfection. Doors and windows were built to represent that perfection. Decorations were reduced to a minimum on outside.

There were often gardens around buildings completed in geometric patterns.

Neoclassical architecture

Revival of Classical architecture during the 18th and early 19th centuries. The movement concerned itself with the logic of entire Classical volumes, unlike Classical revivalism (see Greek Revival), which tended to reuse Classical parts. Neoclassical architecture is characterized by grandeur of scale; simplicity of geometric forms; Greek, especially Doric (see order), or Roman detail; dramatic use of columns; and a preference for blank walls. The new taste for antique simplicity represented a general reaction to the excesses of the Rococo style. Neoclassicism thrived in the U.S. and Europe, with examples occurring in almost every major city. Russia's Catherine IItransformed St. Petersburg into an unparalleled collection of Neoclassical buildings as advanced as any contemporary French and English work. By 1800 nearly all new British architecture reflected the Neoclassical spirit (see Robert Adam; John Soane). France's boldest innovator was Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, who had a central role in the evolution of Neoclassical architecture. In the U.S. Neoclassicism continued to flourish throughout the 19th century, as many architects looked to make the analogy between the young country and imperial Rome when designing major government buildings. The style also spread to colonial Latin America.

Neo-classical architecture - Definition

Neoclassicism (sometimes rendered as Neo-Classicism or Neo-classicism) is the name given to quite distinct movements in the visual

arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture. These movements were in effect at various times between the 18th and the 20th

centuries. What could these "neoclassicisms" have in common?

Late Baroque classicizing: G. P. Pannini assembles the canon of Roman ruins and Roman sculpture into one vast imaginary gallery (1756)

What any "neo"-classicism depends on most fundamentally is a consensus about a body of work that has achieved canonic status

(illustration, right). These are the "classics." Ideally— and neoclassicism is essentially an art of an ideal— an artist, well-schooled and

comfortably familiar with the canon, does not repeat it in lifeless reproductions, but synthesizes the tradition anew in each work. This

sets a high standard, clearly; but though a neoclassical artist who fails to achieve it may create works that are inane, vacuous or even

mediocre, gaffes of taste and failures of craftsmanship are not commonly neoclassical failings. Novelty, improvisation, self-expression,

and blinding inspiration are not neoclassical virtues; neoclassicism exhibits perfect control of an idiom. It does not recreate art forms

from the ground up with each new project, as modernismdemanded. "Make it new" was the modernist credo of the poet Ezra Pound.

Speaking and thinking in English, "neoclassicism" in each art implies a particular canon of "classic" models. We recognize them, even

if we struggle against their power: Virgil, Raphael, Nicholas Poussin,Haydn. Other cultures have other canons of classics, however, and

a recurring strain of neoclassicism appears to be a natural expression of a culture at a certain moment in its career, a culture that is

highly self-aware, that is also confident of its own high mainstream tradition, but at the same time feels the need to regain something

that has slipped away: Apollonius of Rhodes is a neoclassic writer;Ming ceramics pay homage to Sung celadon porcelains; Italian 15th

century humanists learn to write a "Roman" hand we call italic(a.k.a. Carolingian); Neo-Babylonian culture is a neoclassical revival,

and in Persia the "classic" religion of Zoroaster, Zoroastrianism, is revived after centuries, to "re-Persianize" a culture that had fallen

away from its own classic Achaemenean past.

Contents [hide]

1 Neoclassicism in architecture and the visual arts

2 Covert neoclassicism in Moderne styles

3 Literary neoclassicism

4 See also

Neoclassicism in architecture and the visual arts

G.B. Piranesi's design for a vase on stand, Rome ca 1780, appealed more to his English and French patrons. Similar gilt-bronze vases were made in London and Paris, from ca. 1768 onwards.

In the visual arts the European movement called "neoclassicism" began after ca 1765, as a reaction against both the

surviving Baroque and Rococo styles, and as a desire to return to the perceived "purity" of the arts of Rome, the more vague perception

("ideal") of Ancient Greek arts (where almost no western artist had actually been) and, to a lesser extent, 16th century Renaissance

Classicism.

Each "neo"- classicism selects some models among the range of possible classics that are available to it, and ignores others. The

neoclassical writers and talkers, patrons and collectors, artists and sculptors of 1765 - 1830 paid homage to an idea of the generation

of Pheidias, but the 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 Rococo art of ancient Palmyra came as a revelation, through

engravings in Wood's The Ruins of Palmyra. Even in all-but-unvisited Greece, a rough backwater of the Ottoman Empire, dangerous to

explore, neoclassicists' appreciation of Greek architecture was mediated through drawings and engravings, which subtly smoothed and

regularized, "corrected' and "restored" the monuments of Greece, not always consciously. As for painting, Greek painting was utterly

lost: neoclassicist painters imaginatively revived it, partly through bas-relief friezes, mosaics, and pottery painting and partly through

the examples of painting and decoration of the High Renaissance of Raphael's generation, frescos in Nero's Domus

Aurea, Pompeii and Herculaneum and through renewed admiration of Nicholas Poussin. Much "neoclassical" painting is more

classicisizing in subject matter than in anything else.

There is an anti-Rococo strain that can be detected in some European architecture of the earlier 18th century, most vividly represented

in the Palladian architecture of Georgian Britain and Ireland, but also recognizable in a classicizing vein of architecture in Berlin. It is a

robust architecture of self-restraint, academically selective now of "the best" Roman models.

Neoclassicism first gained influence in England and France, through a generation of French art students trained in Rome and influenced

by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and it was quickly adopted by progressive circles in Sweden. At first, classicizing

decor was grafted onto familiar European forms, but a second wave, more severe, more studied (through the medium of engravings)

and more consciously archaeological, is associated with the height of the Napoleonic Empire. The first phase of neoclassicism in

France is expressed in the Louis XVI style, the second phase in the styles we call "Directoire" or "Empire." Italy clung to Rococo until

the Napoleonic regimes brought the new archeaological classicism that was embraced as a political statement by young, progressive,

urban Italians with republican leanings.

David's Oath of the Horatii (1784) is not just neoclassic in subject.

The high tide of neoclassicism in painting is exemplified in early paintings by Jacques-Louis David (illustration, right) and Jean

Auguste Dominique Ingres' entire career. David'sOath of the Horatii was painted in Rome and made a splash at the Paris Salon of

1784. Its central perspective is perpendicular to the picture plane, made more emphatic by the dim arcade behind, against which the

heroic figures are disposed as in a frieze, with a hint of the artificial lighting and staging of opera, and the classical coloring of Nicholas

Poussin.

Thetis rising from the sea by Thomas Banks (1735 - 1805), 1778 Victoria and Albert Museum: low-relief that is as linear as a pencil drawing

In sculpture, the most familiar representatives are the ItalianAntonio Canova, the Englishman John Flaxman and the Dane Bertel

Thorwaldsen.

In the decorative arts, neoclassicism is exemplified in Empire furniture made in Paris, London, New York, Berlin; in Biedermeyer

furniture made in Austria; in Karl Friedrich Schinkel's museums in Berlin, SirJohn Soane's Bank of England in London and the newly

built "capitol" inWashington, DC; and in Wedgwood's bas reliefs and "black basaltes" vases. The Scots architect Charles Cameron

created palatial Italianate interiors for the German-born Catherine II the Great in Russian St. Petersburg: the style was international.

"Grotesque" painted decor that hearkened back to Raphael'sstanze decorated Mme de Sérilly's Paris boudoir (Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

Indoors, neoclassicism made a discovery of the genuine classic interior, inspired by the rediscoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum,

which had started in the late 1740s, but only achieved a wide audience in the 1760s, with the first luxurious volumes of tightly-

controlled distribution of Le Antichità di Ercolano. The antiquities of Herculaneum showed that even the most classicizing interiors of

the Baroque, or the most "Roman" rooms of William Kent were based on basilica and templeexterior architecture, turned outside

in: pedimented window frames turned into gilded mirrors, fireplaces topped with temple fronts, now all looking quite bombastic and

absurd. The new interiors sought to recreate an authentically Roman and genuinely interior vocabulary, employing flatter, lighter

motifs, sculpted in low frieze-like relief or painted in monotones en camaïeu ("like cameos"), isolated medallions or vases or busts

or bucrania or other motifs, suspended on swags of laurel or ribbon, with slender arabesques against backgrounds, perhaps, of

"Pompeiian red" or pale tints, or stone colors. The style in France was initially a Parisian style, the "goût Grèc" not a court style. Only

when the plump, young king acceded to the throne in 1771 did his fashion-loving Queen bring the "Louis XVI" style to court.

At the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Playfair employs a Greek Doricoctastyle portico

From about 1800 a fresh influx of Greek architectural examples, seen through the medium of etchings and engravings, gave a new

impetus to neoclassicism that is called the Greek Revival.

Neoclassicism continued to be a major force in academic art through the 19th century and beyond— a constant antithesis

to Romanticism or Gothic revivals— although from the late19th century on it had often been considered anti-modern, or even

reactionary, in influential critical circles. By the mid-19th century, several European cities - notably St Petersburg andMunich - were

transformed into veritable museums of Neoclassical architecture.

In American architecture, neoclassicism was one expression of the American Renaissancemovement, ca 1890-1917; its last

manifestation was in Beaux-Arts architecture, and its very last, large public projects were the Lincoln Memorial (highly criticised at the

time), theNational Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the American Museum of Natural History's Roosevelt Memorial. These

were white elephants as they were built. In the British Raj, SirEdwin Lutyens' monumental city planning for New Delhi marks the

glorious sunset of neoclassicism. Soon World War II destroyed all illusions.

Covert neoclassicism in Moderne styles

Meanwhile, conservative modernist architects like Charles Perret in France kept the rhythms and spacing of columnar architecture even

in factory buildings. Where a colonnade would have been decried as "reactionary," a building's pilaster-like fluted panels under a

repeating frieze looked "progressive." Pablo Picasso experimented with classicizing motifs in the years immediately following World

War I, and theArt Deco style that peaked in the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Décoratifs often drew on neoclassical motifs without

expressing them overtly: severe, blocky commodes by E. J. Ruhlmann or Sue et Mare; crisp, extremely low-relief friezes of damsels

and gazelles in every medium; fashionable dresses that were draped or cut on the bias to recreate Grecian lines; the art dance of Isadora

Duncan; theStreamline Moderne styling of US post offices and county court buildings built as late as 1950; and the Roosevelt dime.

Neoclassic themes can even be detected in the Smith Tower, Seattle.