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UNIT NINE: Neoclassicism STUDY GUIDE A Richard Boyle (Earl of Burlington) and William Kent. Chiswick House (near London, England), begun 1725 clear alternative to the splendors of Versailles/ Palladian classicism to create a “rational” look 1. “In England, the Baroque- and especially Rococo, with all its frills – was rejected in the eighteenth century in favor of renewed interest in the ordered, classicizing appearance of Palladian architecture. Palladio‟s Four Books of Architecture was published in an English translation in 1715, and exerted widespread influence. An early example of English Palladian style is Chiswick House on the southwestern outskirts of London, which Lord Burlington (1695-1753) began in 1725 as a library and place for entertainments” (Adams, Art Across Time 691). “Lord Burlington was one of a powerful coterie of Whigs and supporters of the House of Hanover (George I and his family). He took a Grand Tour of Europe in 1714 to 1715 and returned to Italy in 1719 to revisit Palladio‟s buildings. On his return to England, he became an accomplished architect in the tradition of Palladio” (691). “Burlington based Chiswick House loosely on Palladio‟s Villa Rotonda, although it is on a smaller scale, and there are some significant differences in the plans. Unlike the Villa Rotonda, Chiswick House did not need four porticos. Instead, it has one, which is approached by lateral double staircases on each side. The arrangement of the rooms around a central octagon rather than a circle is also different, and the columns are Corinthian rather than Ionic as in the Villa Rotonda. There are no gable sculptures, and the roof is decorated on each side by a row of obelisks, which function as chimney flues. The dome is shallower than that of the Villa Rotonda, and rests on an octagonal drum, allowing more light into the central chamber” (692). 2. “The building plan shares the geometrical symmetry of Palladio‟s villa, although its central core is octagonal rather than round and there are only two entrances. The main entrance, flanked now by matching staircases, is a Roman temple front, a flattering reference to the building‟s inhabitant. Chiswick‟s elevation is characteristically Palladian, with a main floor resting on a basement, and tall rectangular windows with triangular pediments. The result is a lucid evocation of Palladio‟s design, whose few but crisp details seem perfectly suited to the refined proportions of the whole. The popularity of the Palladian style among members of Burlington‟s class during the ensuing decades may be judged by the fact that Hogarth satirized the style in his Marriage a la Mode suite. The architect looking out the window in The Marriage Contract is probably a caricature of Burlington himself. In Rome, Burlington had persuaded an English expatriate, William Kent (1685-1748), to return to London as his collaborator. Kent designed Chiswick‟s surprisingly ornate interior as well as the grounds, the latter in a style that became known throughout Europe as the „English landscape garden.‟ Kent‟s garden, in contrast to the regularity and rigid formality of Baroque gardens, featured winding paths, a lake with a cascade, irregular plantings and shrubs, and other effects imitating the appearance of the natural rural landscape. The English landscape garden was another indication of the growing Enlightenment emphasis on the natural” (Stokstad, Art History 943). 3. “Palladio appealed to the English partly because his designs for villas were well-suited to English country houses and partly because his style accorded with the Rule of Taste promoted by the Enlightenment philosopher Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. What distinguishes the Palladian revival from earlier classicisms, however, is less its external appearance than its motivation Instead of merely reasserting the superior authority of the ancients, it claimed to satisfy the demands of reason and thus to be more „natural‟ than the Baroque. At the time the Baroque style was identified with papist Rome by English Protestants, with absolutist France by George I, and with Tory policies by the Whig opposition. Thus began an association with between Neoclassicism and liberal politics that was to continue through the French Revolution. The appeal to reason found support in Palladio himself, who decried abuses „contrary to natural reason‟ on the grounds that „architecture, as well as all other arts, being an imitation of nature, can suffer nothing that either alienates or deviates from that which is agreeable to nature‟. This rationalism helps to explain the abstract, segmented look of Chiswick House on Burlington‟s estate. Adapted by Burlington and Kent from the Villa Rotonda, as well as other Italian sources, it is compact, simple, and geometric- the antithesis of the Baroque pomp of Blenheim Palace. The concept was not new to England. It had been used on a larger scale just a couple of years earlier at Mereworth castle by Campbell. Chiswick is at once bolder and more rigorous, yet less derivative than Mereworth. Campbell himself acknowledged Burlington as „not only a great Patron of all Arts, but the first Architect‟. The exterior surfaces are flat and unbroken, the ornament is meager, and the temple portico juts out abruptly from the blocklike body of the structure. The interior, probably by Kent, is more luxurious, in the manner of Jones, but with a clarity that looks forward to Robert Adam” (Janson 650, 652). 4. “In eighteenth-century Britain the majority of works of art and architecture, whether houses or gardens, paintings or sculptures, were created for a wealthy, predominantly English and aristocratic minority of the population. But those works express certain attitudes- above all the notion that sense of one‟s own grandeur or self-importance is something to be cautiously and carefully expressed- which were shared by the nation as a whole. Those same attitudes are present, albeit in a very different form, in the art that stood at the opposite end of the spectrum from the art of the aristocracy. The eighteenth century saw the beginnings of the British love and genius for satire: the ironizing and diminishing of the noble, the wealthy, the famous, which has remained a stock-in-trade of popular art and journalism for more than two centuries” (Graham-Dixon 94). “Following William Kent‟s lead, landscape architecture flourished in the hands of such designers as Lancelot (‘Capability’) Brown and Henry Flitcroft. In 1743, the banker Henry Hoare redid the grounds of his estate at Stourhead in Wiltshire with the assistance of Flitcroft, a protégé of Burlington. The resulting gardens at Stourhead carried William Kent‟s ideas much further. Stourhead is, in effect, an exposition of the picturesque, with orchestrated views dotted with Greek and Roman temples, grottoes, copies of antique statues, and such added delights as a rural cottage, a Chinese bridge, a Gothic spire, and a Turkish tent” (Stokstad, Art History 943). 34
UNIT NINE: Neoclassicism STUDY GUIDE B Robert Adam. Etruscan Room at Osterley Park House (Middlesex, England), begun 1761 Robert Adam/ new discoveries at Pompeii/ return of symmetry and rectilinear quality combined with delicacy/ decorative motifs taken from antiquity 1. “Another leader of the Classical revival in England, particularly in the field of interior design, was Robert Adam (1728-92). Interest in Classical antiquity had been heightened by the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Discoveries from these sites provided the first concrete examples of imperial Roman domestic architecture since the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in A.D. 79. Publications about Classical archaeology followed” (Adams, Art Across Time 692). 2. “Not only was Adam influenced by these, but he was himself an enthusiastic amateur archaeologist. He had traveled to Rome and made drawings of the ruins, which informed much of his own work” (692). “His friendship with Piranesi in Rome reinforced Adam‟s goal of arriving at a personal style based on the antique without slavishly imitating it. He was also influenced by Clerisseau, with whom he measured the palace of Diocletian at Split. His genius is seen most fully in the interiors he designed in the 1760s for palatial homes, which take the style of Lord Burlington and William Kent as their point of departure. Most are remodelings of or additions to existing homes. Because he commanded an extraordinarily wide vocabulary, including the Gothic, each room is different in both shape and design. Yet the syntax, which treats classicism with remarkable richness and flexibility, remains distinctive to him” (Janson 657). 3. “Adam was concerned above all with movement, but this idea must be understood not in terms of Baroque dynamism or Rococo ornamentation but in the careful balance of varied shapes and proportions. The play of semicircles, half domes, and arches lends an air of festive grace… This intention was in keeping with Adam‟s personality, which was at ease with the aristocratic circles in which he moved” (657). The effect of his rooms, “stately yet intimate, echoes the delicacy of Rococo interiors (Adam had stayed in Paris in 1754 before going to Rome) but with a characteristically Neoclassic insistence on planar surfaces, symmetry, and geometric precision” (657). D The Concept of the Picturesque 35 C Johann Joachim Winckelmann 1. “The eighteenth century, particularly the later half, saw the beginning of modern art theory and art history. The very term “esthetic” is an eighteenth-century invention” (Adams, Art Across Time 677). 2. “Johann Joachim Winckelmann(1719-68) was born in Berlin, and became a librarian near Dresden. There he met artists and visited museums. In the 1760s he moved to Rome, where he was appointed Superintendent of Antiquities, and oversaw excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Based on his publication in 1764 of The History of Ancient Art, Winckelmann has been called the father of art history, because he believed that styles of art were determined by their cultures. He thus expanded the study of art beyond the more biographical approach of Vasari and the Classical tradition, and beyond the philosophical views of Plato and Aristotle. Beauty, for Winckelmann, was a matter of intuition and spirit, and the height of esthetic beauty had been attained by Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BC Roman art, he said, was derivative of Greek art, which was noble, restrained, and ideal. The Renaissance, in his view, was a revival not of Roman, but of Greek art. Winckelmann classified ancient art into four phases: Archaic, Phidian, the fourth century BC and the period from the third century BC through the fall of the Roman Empire. These categories became a model for later art historical divisions” (677). 3. The ideas of Winckelmann “deeply impressed two painters then living in Rome, the German Anton Raphael Mengs (1728-1779) and the Scotsman Gavin Hamilton (1723-1798). Both had strong antiquarian leanings but otherwise limited artistic ability. This shortcoming may explain why they accepted Winckelmann‟s doctrine so readily. Mengs‟ importance lies principally in his role as a proselytizer of the „Winckelmann program‟, since most of his paintings are weak paraphrases of Italian art. He left Rome in 1761 after painting his major work, a ceiling fresco of Parnassus inspired by Raphael, and went to Spain, where he vied with the aging Tiepolo. It is a measure of Italy‟s decline that artistic leadership passed to the Northerners who gathered in Rome. The only roman painter who could compete on even terms with the foreigners was Pompeo Batoni (1708-1787), a splendid technician who continued the eclectic classicism of Carlo Maratta but is remembered today chiefly for portraits of his English patrons. This vacuum helps to account for the astonishing success of Mengs and Hamilton” (Janson 540). 1. “The most successful of the Roman vedute painters was Giovanni Paolo Panini (c. 1692-1765). Like Canaletto, he specialized in documentary vistas” (Stokstad, Art History 939). “Piranesi is best known for his views of ancient Roman ruins… Such works are fine examples of the new taste for the picturesque, which contemporary British theorists defined as a landscape (actual or depicted) with an aesthetically pleasing irregularity in its shapes, composition, and lighting” (939). “Piranesi‟s and his patrons‟ interest in Roman ruins and in their tragic implications was fueled by the discoveries made at Herculaneum and Pompeii shortly before mid-century” (939). 2. The British garden at Stowe “revolves around a series of picturesque views. Nature and architecture have been composed to recall, from certain ideal vantage points, Poussin‟s or Claude‟s idealized paintings of the Roman campagna. A corner of England has been remodeled to resemble ancient Rome, not only for purely aesthetic reasons but also in order to make a point. The classicism of the buildings dotted throughout the garden delivers the same implicit message, announcing that Britain has become a new Rome and a new Greece… Walking though the garden, it is clear that the set-piece vistas are only temporary visual harmonies, transient moments of order and classical perfection, that dissolve into and are reclaimed by the shapelessness of an English landscape” (Graham-Dixon 89). Stowe “was designed in great part by Capability Brown, one of the earliest pioneers of a distinctively British form of landscape garden” (88).
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