THE 19TH CENTURIES ART

Neoclassicism
European neoclassicism in the visual art began c. 1760 in opposition to the then-
dominant Baroque and 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 Rome and Ancient Greece, and were more
immediately drawn from 16th-century Renaissance Classicism. Each “neo”- classicism selects
models based on the age of possible classics that are available to it, and it 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 Phidias, but the sculpture examples they actually
embraced were more likely tobe 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 engraving in Wood’s The Ruins of Palmyra. Even Greece was all-but-
unvisited, a rough backwater of the Ottoman Empire, dangerous to explore, so 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.

Romanticism
The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic
experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and
awe-especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and
beauty of nature. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but also
spontaneity as a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu). In contrast to the
Rationalism and Classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism and
elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an attempt to escape
population growth, early urban sprawl, and industrialism.
Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm and Drang movement, which
preferred intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the events and
ideologies of the French Revolution were also proximate factors. Romanticism assigned a high
value to the achievements of “heroic” individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained,
would raise the quality of society. It also promoted the individual imagination as a critical
authority allowing freedom from classical nations of the form of art. There was a strong recourse
to historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the presentation of its ideas. In the second
half of the 19th century, Realism was offered as a polar opposite to Romanticism. The decline of
Romanticism during this time was associated with multiple processes, including the social and
political changes and spread of nationalism.