CLASSICISM. - The concept of classicism, like that of Romanticism and, more recently (limited to the figurative arts), of Baroque, besides designating a historically well-defined taste, has also assumed the broader meaning of a philosophical category, whereby particular characteristics are elevated to absolute principles of art.
For classicism in literature, see HUMANISM.
In art, from a historical point of view, classicism, represented by the works that flourished in the Greco-Roman world, does not have greater value than the tastes proper to other ages and indicated by other names. The fact of having made classicism the prototype of art, the art par excellence, is perhaps still a legacy of Renaissance criticism, which, seeing in the works of that period the highest perfection, relegated to a lower rank all other artistic expressions that seemed to deviate from them, and it is enough to think, in this regard, of Vasari’s theory of art. But the Renaissance (q.v.) was certainly not a mere revival of Hellenic rationalism, nor was the Neoclassicism of more recent times, and it would be erroneous to seek in the history of art the repetition of forms that are expressions of other ages and of another sensibility.
Nevertheless, already at the beginning of the 17th century, criticism advised looking to antiquity for preceptive exemplars, opposing it to the so-called naturalistic imitation (identified especially with Venetian painting), in which the brushstroke, the picturesque manner of applying colors to the canvas, were regarded as the opposite of the measured, rational style of classical art. In Italy (to cite a few names), these ideas were held by Agucchi, and later by Bellori; in France by Du Fresnoy and later by Roger de Piles. At this point, it is a short step to see classicism identified with the Academy and, once the principle of “selection” is admitted, with Eclecticism, of which Winckelmann was the champion in the 18th century, the foremost representative, together with Mengs, of classical fanaticism of all time. With the rise at the beginning of the 19th century of the artists of the Romantic school, a clear stance was also taken in the critical field, and while for the classicists the program was “l’Antiquité toute crue,” and the artist was a philosopher for whom art had “no guide but the torch of reason” (David), for the Romantics this very art was condemnable, because it was coldly calculated and lacked the creative impetus of the artist’s imagination (see NEOCLASSICISM; ROMANTICISM).
The two terms, classicism and Romanticism, when compared to define two ways of seeing, end up by taking their place decisively in a dyad in which classicism, identified with the Hegelian “beautiful art,” would represent the eternal form of art (Art), while Romanticism would be its negation (Non-Art). A position, it is well understood, exceedingly dangerous, which either understands classicism as that type of beauty in which (to use Milizia’s words) everything is “grace, delicacy, elegance of forms, proportions, contours, attitudes,” as Greek art was at a certain moment, and then the word classicism becomes an arbitrary concept (as to universality) denoting a quite particular taste, with the further danger of defining as classical works of a beauty that is entirely external and aesthetically outside art. Or, if classicism is understood as the achieved aesthetic synthesis of content and form, it is not clear why such a term should be used, which will end up being equivocal when, according to this principle, certain expressions of the most modern art must be defined as classical. It is clear, moreover, that in this latter case classicism, as equivalent to Art, can always be replaced, if one so wishes, by other terms, among which Romanticism itself, understanding by this the same identity of content and form: so much so that those who, like Croce, have insisted on the definition of the classical, have had to distinguish classicism from classic from the same point of view, it seems, as those who, in the reevaluation of Baroque, have distinguished this from Baroqueism, understanding by the former the aesthetic realizations that correspond to its concept of art as the intuition-expression of a feeling “that has become the clearest representation” (Breviario di Estetica, p. 35), while allowing the term classicism to lapse into indicating, historically, realizations all too often negative of imitation and of intellectualistic search. Thus one arrives at a contamination of the meaning of classicism and that of Romanticism, whereby the work of art ends up being at once classical and Romantic, even if presupposing, with Paul Valéry, in every classicism a prior Romanticism.
In a more strictly formal sense, it will moreover be appropriate to add that the term classicism (contrasted with that of Romanticism or of Baroque) has been referred to linear language (in contrast to pictorial language), the vision of surface (in contrast to that of depth), the closed form (in contrast to the open form).
To give classicism a precise definition, after so many that have been proposed, without at the same time forcing the meaning of the words, is therefore almost impossible, and it will not be out of place to advise maintaining 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.