Imperial Style

IMPERIAL STYLE. - Designation of the phase of Neoclassical style adopted and diffused as the official aesthetic expression of the Napoleonic Empire: current usage, however, employs the term in an approximate manner, often applying it to the Neoclassical in general, with a simplification justified by the fact that under the Empire the typical Neoclassical elements that had been spreading through Europe ever since the excavations of Herculaneum and other manifestations of an awakening taste for classical antiquity (Winckelmann, Mengs, Piranesi, the style of Robert Adam based on the study of Diocletian's Palace at Split, of the Baths, of the arabesques and stuccoes of the Vatican Logge and of Villa Madama, the style of Wedgwood ceramics, etc.) reached a mature, often rigid, formula.

The taste of the Empire oscillates between an Egyptian-Etruscan-Roman monumentality and Greek grace, at times skillfully blending those styles, at others creating grotesque hybridisms. Its general characteristics are a certain rigidity of line that confers imposingness and severity, a purity more or less academic that to subsequent generations has seemed coldness, a lack of the unexpected and of elasticity that engenders a certain monotony. Typical is the work of Percier and Fontaine, the supreme expression of official art: inspired not only by classical models but also by our Renaissance, they codified Empire decoration in the Recueil de décorations intérieures, which, having begun to be published in installments in 1801, came out in a definitive edition in 1812. The ornamentation, often hackneyed and precious, of an elegant Alexandrianism (lyres, swans, palmettes, sphinxes, etc.) sometimes conceals what in the eyes of moderns has seemed one of the most notable contributions of the Empire style, its functionality and rationality: in furniture and in buildings, where the predominance of ancient models (the Pantheon, the triumphal arch, etc.) can at first deceive as to the actual contribution of originality of the style. The latter, represented by imposing buildings and urban planning abroad (Paris, St. Petersburg, in which last the Italian genius had occasion to assert itself with Quarenghi and Carlo Rossi), has no distinguished monuments in Italy (the best-known architect who worked in Rome, Valadier, is mediocre; but noble buildings are the Teatro S. Carlo by Niccolini, and the church of S. Francesco di Paola by P. Bianchi in Naples, the Cisternone by Poccianti in Livorno, the Arco della Pace by Cagnola and some palaces in Milan, in the Emilian province, the Canovian Temple of Possagno, etc.). In painting our Appiani is not as representative a name as the Frenchman David, but in sculpture Italy boasts Canova, who was supreme in his day. - See pl. CIII.