FRENCH & ITALIAN PAINTINGS OF THE 17TH CENTURY
In Italy, the Counter-reformation helped drive
a style of painting that was emotional and direct. Artists again emphasized careful
observation of the natural world and looked to the examples of past masters. Their
classical approach would leave its mark all over Europe for more than 100 years
and, in France would be institutionalized in the French Academy, founded in 1648.
Fueled by the wealth of the Vatican and the spate of construction of new buildings,
seventeenth-century Rome offered great opportunities for artists. Domenico Fetti
saw the Veil of Veronica when it was exhibited at Saint Peter's in Rome and made
it the subject of a moving portrayal of Christ in his suffering.
The French state from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries witnessed a form
of government based on the absolute monarchy, which reached its apogee under the
reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV, from 1643 until 1715. Louis' desire to glorify
his dignity and the magnificence of France found expression in a distinctly French
style that rivaled the more exuberant Italian form of the baroque. Symmetry and
clarity of form characterize the history and landscape paintings of Nicolas Poussin
and Claude Lorrain; the artist's organization of his compositions was to demonstrate
the power of reason that pervaded seventeenth-century French culture.
FRENCH & ITALIAN PAINTING OF THE 18TH CENTURY
The taste for rococo -- intimate and charming subjects painted in pastel colors
-- gave way by mid-century to the simpler, more restrained forms of neoclassical
art. In Italy, travelers on the Grand Tour patronized painters of ancient and
modern landmarks for souvenirs, while in France a sober and restrained look, like
that of Roman reliefs, would serve the Revolution.
In the eighteenth century, a brisk trade in painted views of Venice and Rome grew
up in response to tourists’ demands for souvenirs. Canaletto, Bellotto, Guardi,
and Pannini were at the forefront of production. Italian painters were also commissioned
by foreign princes to decorate their palaces. It is a mark of the times that Tiepolo,
perhaps the most celebrated Italian painter of the eighteenth century, died in
Spain after completing an ambitious mural program for the royal palace in Madrid.
After the death of Louis XIV in 1715, the center of French society moved from
the court at Versailles to Paris. Elegant interiors were decorated with motifs
with sinuous curves and arabesques. The S curve of this rococo style was incorporated
in paintings such as the fêtes galantes of Antoine Watteau, which showed pleasure
seeking ladies and gentlemen socializing in a pastoral setting. François Boucher
who started his career as engraver copying Watteau’s paintings, indicated the
taste of the mid-eighteenth century in his idealized depictions of courtly beauty.
In the closing decades of the century, a surge of interest in archaeology and
a rediscovery of the straight lines and regularized proportions of Greek and Roman
art supplanted the curvilinear and sensual shapes of the rococo. The French Revolution
(1789-1799) profoundly changed the entire political system and subsequently the
governmental structure that had supported the arts since the early reign of Louis
XIV. Jacques- Louis David created new motifs suited to the political needs of
the revolution and also of the Emperor Napoleon, reinterpreting the principles
of classicism.
18TH CENTURY FRANCE - ROCOCO & WATTEAU
In 1715 the French greeted a new king for the first time in seventy-two years.
Louis XV, a boy only five years old, succeeded his great-grandfather Louis XIV,
the Sun King, who had made France the preeminent power in Europe. For the next
eight years the late king’s nephew, the duc d'Orléans, governed as regent. His
appetite for beauty and vivaciousness was well known, and he set aside the piety
enforced by Louis XIV at Versailles. France turned away from imperial aspirations
to focus on more personal -- and pleasurable -- pursuits. As political life and
private morals relaxed, the change was mirrored by a new style in art, one that
was intimate, decorative, and often erotic.
THE ROCOCO STYLE
Louis XIV's desire to glorify his dignity and the magnificence of France had been
well served by the monumental and formal qualities of most seventeenth-century
French art. But members of the succeeding court began to decorate their elegant
homes in a lighter, more delicate manner. This new style has been known since
the last century as "rococo," from the French word, rocaille, for rock and shell
garden ornamentation. First emerging in the decorative arts, the rococo emphasized
pastel colors, sinuous curves, and patterns based on flowers, vines, and shells.
Painters turned from grandiloquence to the sensual surface delights of color and
light, and from weighty religious and historical subjects -- though these were
never ignored completely -- to more intimate mythological scenes, views of daily
life, and portraiture. Similarly, sulptors increasingly applied their skills to
small works for the appreciation of private patrons.
ANTOINE WATTEAU & THE FETE GALANTE
Though several painters of the preceding generation had experimented with the
ingredients of rococo -- emphasizing color, a lighthearted approach, and close
observation -- Antoine Watteau merged them into something new. Born near the Flemish
border, Watteau was influenced by the carefully described scenes of everyday life
popular in Holland and Flanders. Arriving in Paris in 1702, he first made his
living by copying these genre paintings, which contained moralizing messages not
always fully understood by French collectors. He worked for a painter of theatrical
scenes and encountered the Italian commedia dell'arte and its French imitators.
The stock characters of these broadly drawn, improvised comedies appear often
in Watteau's paintings, and the world of the theater inspired him to mingle the
real and imagined in enigmatic scenes.
Through work with a fashionable rococo decorator, Watteau came eventually to the
attention of patrons and established artists. He began studies at the official
Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture -- membership in which was necessary for
important commissions – and gained access to new art collections being amassed
by aristocrats and members of the expanding bourgeoisie. Influenced by his study
of Rubens and Venetian Renaissance artists, Watteau developed a free, delicate
painting technique and a taste for warm, shimmering colors.
In 1717 Watteau's "masterpiece" submitted for admission to the Academy was accepted
as a "fête galante." With this new category, the Academy recognized the novelty
of his work. The immediate popularity of these garden scenes, in which aristocratic
young couples meet in amorous pursuits, suggests how well the fête galante matched
the pleasure-seeking spirit of the early eighteenth century.
Engravings made Watteau's subjects and manner widely known. Though the lyrical
mystery of his own work remained unique, other painters who specialized in the
fête galante, notably Pater and Lancret, also enjoyed international popularity.
18TH & 19TH CENTURY FRANCE - NEOCLASSICISM
The French Revolution began in 1789, when citizens stormed the Bastille prison
in Paris. Within a few years, France had adopted and overthrown several constitutions
and executed its former king. It found itself at war with most of the Continent
and endured horrible violence at home during the Reign of Terror. Finally, in
1799, the successful young general Napoleon Bonaparte seized control and, in 1804,
proclaimed himself Emperor. Though he made important administrative reforms, constant
warfare and his heroic but failed attempt to unite all of Europe preoccupied him
by conquest. After being defeated at Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon was exiled and
the Bourbon monarchy was restored in the person of Louis XVIII.
With the revolution, French painting resumed its moral and political purpose and
embraced the style known as neoclassicism. Even before 1789, popular taste had
begun to turn away from the disarming, lighthearted subjects of rococo; as revolution
neared, artists increasingly sought noble themes of public virtue and personal
sacrifice from the history of ancient Greece or Rome. They painted with restraint
and discipline, using the austere clarity of the neoclassical style to stamp their
subjects with certitude and moral truth.
Neoclassicism triumphed -- and became inseparably linked to the revolution --
in the work of Jacques-Louis David, a painter who also played an active role in
politics. As virtual artistic dictator, he served the propaganda programs first
of radical revolutionary factions and later of Napoleon. As a young man David
had worked in the delicate style of his teacher François Boucher, but in Italy
he was influenced by ancient sculpture and by the seventeenth-century artists
Caravaggio and Poussin, adopting their strong contrasts of color, clear tones,
and firm contours. David gave his heroic figures sculptural mass and arranged
them friezelike in emphatic compositions that were meant to inspire his fellow
citizens to noble action.
Among the many artists who studied in David's large studio was Jean-Auguste-Dominique
Ingres. Unlike his teacher, Ingres did not involve himself in politics and spent
most of his youth in Italy, returning to France only after the restoration of
the monarchy. During his long life, he came to be regarded as the high priest
of neoclassicism, pursuing its perfection after younger artists had become enthralled
with romanticism. A superb draftsman, Ingres insisted on the importance of line
though he nevertheless was a brilliant master of color. A mathematical precision
pushes his work toward formal abstraction despite the meticulous realism of its
surfaces.
