CLASSICISMO. - The concept of c., like that of romanticism and, more recently (limited to the figurative arts), that of baroque, besides denoting a historically well-defined taste, has also acquired the broader meaning of a philosophical category, whereby particular characteristics are elevated to absolute principles of art.
For c. in literature V. UMANESIMO.
In art, from the historical point of view, c., represented by works that flourished in the Greco-Roman world, has no greater value than the tastes proper to other ages and designated by other names. The making of classicism into the prototype of art,
art par excellence, is perhaps still a legacy of Renaissance criticism which, seeing in the works of that period the highest perfection, depreciated in comparison with them the other expressions of art that seemed to depart from them; suffice it to recall Vasari's theory of art in this regard. Renaissance (v.) was certainly not a pure and simple revival of Hellenic rationalism, nor was the neoclassicism of times nearer to our own; it would therefore be mistaken to seek in the history of art the recurrence of forms that are the expression of other ages and of other sentiments.
Nevertheless, already at the beginning of the seventeenth century criticism advised looking to antiquity in order to derive from it exemplary precepts, setting them against the art of so-called naturalistic imitation (identified especially with Venetian painting), in which touch, the picturesque manner of applying colours to the canvas, were regarded as the opposite of the measured, rational style of classical art. In Italy (to mention a few names), these were the ideas of Agucchi, and later of Bellori; in France, of Dufresnoy and later of Roger de Piles. At this point, the step is short to seeing c. identified with the Academy and, once the principle of “selection” is admitted, with Eclecticism, of which in the eighteenth century Winckelmann was an advocate, the greatest representative, together with Mengs, of classical fanaticism of all times. With the emergence, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, of the artists of the romantic school, a clear position also came to be defined in the field of criticism; while for the classicists the programme was “l'Antiquité toute crue” and the artist was a philosopher for whom art had “per guida che la fiaccola della ragione” (David), for the romantics precisely this art was condemnable, because coldly calculated and lacking the creative impetus of the artist's imagination (v. NEOCLASSICISMO; ROMANTICISMO).
The two terms, c. and romanticism, compared in order to define two ways of seeing, then end by taking their definite place in a dyad in which c., identified with Hegelian “beautiful art,” would represent the eternal form of art (Art), while romanticism would be its negation (Non-Art). This is, as may readily be understood, an exceedingly dangerous position: either c. is understood to mean that type of beauty in which (to use Milizia's words) everything is “grazia, delicatezza, eleganza di forme, di proporzioni, di contorni, di attitudini,” as Greek art was at a certain moment, and then the word c. becomes an arbitrary concept (as regards universality), denoting a wholly particular taste, with the further danger of defining as classical works of a wholly external beauty and aesthetically outside art. Or c. is intended to mean the achieved aesthetic synthesis of content and form, and then it is not understood why such a term should be used, since it will end by becoming equivocal when, for example, according to this principle, certain expressions of very modern art must be defined as classical. It is also clear that in the latter case c., as the equivalent of Art, may whenever desired be replaced by other terms, among them romanticism itself, if this too is understood as that same identity of content and form: indeed, whoever has wished, like Croce, to insist upon the definition of the classical, has had to distinguish classicità from c., in the same way, it seems, as those who, in the revaluation of the baroque, distinguished it from barocchismo, including in the former the aesthetic achievements corresponding to his concept of art as the intuition-expression of a sentiment “che si è fatto tutto rappresentazione nitidissima” (Breviario di Estetica, p. 35), while allowing the term c. to decline into indicating, historically, achievements too often negative, of imitation and intellectualistic research. Thus one arrives at a contamination of the meaning of c. with that of romanticism, whereby the work of art ends by being at once classical and romantic, even if, with Paul Valéry, every c. presupposes an earlier romanticism.
In a more strictly formal sense, it should further be added that linear language (as opposed to painterly language), surface vision (as opposed to depth vision), and closed form (as opposed to open form) have been associated with the term c. (set against that of romanticism or baroque).
To give c. a precise definition, after so many have been given, without at the same time forcing the meaning of words, is therefore almost impossible; it would not be inappropriate, then, to advise retaining for the term the meaning of an indication of a historical taste, without wishing to abstract from the works—and naturally only from some—of that age called classical general principles of an aesthetic nature.