Rococo France

Rococo, style in interior design, the decorative arts, painting, architecture, and sculpture that originated
in Paris in the early 18th century but was soon adopted throughout France and later in other countries,
principally Germany and Austria. It is characterized by lightness, elegance, and an exuberant use of
curving natural forms in ornamentation. The word Rococo is derived from the French word rocaille,
which denoted the shell-covered rock work that was used to decorate artificial grottoes

At the outset the Rococo style represented a reaction against the ponderous design of Louis XIV’s Palace
of Versailles and the official Baroque art of his reign. Several interior designers, painters, and engravers,
among them Pierre Le Pautre, J.-A. Meissonier, Jean Berain, and Nicolas Pineau, developed a lighter and
more intimate style of decoration for the new residences of nobles in Paris. In the Rococo style, walls,
ceilings, and moldings were decorated with delicate interlacings of curves and countercurves based on
the fundamental shapes of the “C” and the “S,” as well as with shell forms and other natural shapes.
Asymmetrical design was the rule. Light pastels, ivory white, and gold were the predominant colours,
and Rococo decorators frequently used mirrors to enhance the sense of open space.

Rococo in Spain

In the 18th century, the Spanish Baroque moving towards a more ornate style. Sculpture, painting and
carving blend with the architecture, sometimes to encourage classical architectural schemes that remain
in force in floors and elevations. Facing the outside, usually austere, are creates vibrant interiors. This
late-Baroque which employs profusely ornamental motifs as acanthus leaf, of Classical roots, begins to
soak in the 1730s from the influence of French Rococo, exemplified mainly in the dissemination of a new
decorative motif: the rocaille (the French rocaille), consisting of complicated sets of “C” and “S” that
generate asymmetrical shapes and also remind marine forms. The rocaille became known in Spain
through three main ways: dissemination through the pattern books, the importation of furniture and
other decorative arts from Europe and its direct brought hand of foreign architects, case of the
Portuguese Cayetano de Acosta.

Thus, for the Spanish case it is difficult to speak of the existence of a pure Rococo but, rather, a late-
Baroque that borrows elements of the French Rococo. The generic name of Rococo for the Spanish art
of the 18th century due to an outdated tendency to consider the Rococo as the logical evolution of the
Baroque. Keep in mind that this style was born in France, where the art of the previous century, known
as the Grand Siécle was substantially different to the Spanish case, for its character more classicist.
Therefore, the style born as rather more like reaction than as an evolution of 17th century French.
Moreover, the Rococo is an art eminently bourgeois and secular, difficult to reconcile with the religious
art, the most abundant of the Spanish Baroque. This traditional terminological confusion has
contributed to the presence in the 18th century Spanish XVIII of Italian architects and solutions brought
of Italian Baroque (more moved in ground), but outside the Rococo but confused with it.
Painting

Like 18th-century Spanish painters, close to Rococo but of Academicist trend, highlight Luis Egidio
Meléndez and Luis Paret y Alcázar; also the Italian Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who worked in Spain along
with Anton Raphael Mengs.

Also highlight the painting works by Antoni Viladomat and Francesc Tramulles i Roig, a Viladomat’s
disciple and less known because of the ephemeral nature of his work. Francesc Pla i Duran, known as “el
Vigatà” showed a slight influence of the Rococo in paintings of the Palau Moja in Barcelona, although
the rest of his work have to place it within a Baroque language.

They can be considered transitional painters, but with an atmosphere and a chromatic delicacy that
announces the new Rococo sensibility that was beginning to triumph in Rome, Naples and Venice, some
of the works of Miguel Jacinto Meléndez (1675-1734) or young painters of camera Juan Bautista Peña
(1710-1773) and, more sharply, the Aragonese Pablo Pernicharo (1705-1760), who, pensioners in Rome
and disciples of Agostino Masucci , show in their works of 1740 a symbiosis between the academic
baroque and rococo.

Gaya Nuño , in a 1970 article, 2 estimated that the Rococo current had had little acceptance in Spain
because of the hindrance that the last Spanish Baroque had made, a genuine national creation unlike
the imported Rococo. In him, to his understanding, scarce rococo Spanish, the painting had developed
paradoxically in full reign of the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando and had manifested in a reduced
and blurred in the cartons for tapestries of Goya , Francisco and Ramón Bayeu or José del Castillo , and
especially in an extraordinary rococo painter, Luis Paret y Alcázar . A decade later Jesús UrreaHe
outlined an Introduction to Rococo painting in Spain and defended the existence of such pictorial
current and gave some of the lines of study and interpretation of it. 3