Neoclassicism

NEOCLASSICISM. - In a broad sense it can mean any deliberate or programmatic return to expressive forms of classical taste; thus one has been able to speak of neoclassical moments and tendencies in Hellenistic art, Roman art, Byzantine art, and so on. In a narrower sense, by the term n. is meant the establishment and spread in the figurative arts of a particular taste characteristic of the second half of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th, whereby in architecture, sculpture, painting and every other artistic manifestation of a decorative character there is reflected an interest in, a study of, and therefore a deliberate imitation of the forms of ancient classical art, investigated with an archaeological mentality, spirit and culture; and this principally according to the theories of G. G. Winckelmann and of other Italian and foreign scholars and aestheticians.

N. fits into the great Romantic movement (v. ROMANTICISM) and is one of the aspects of that dissatisfaction with the manifestations of the mentality and taste of the Baroque age that is typical in many circles of European culture and art from the first half of the eighteenth century onward. It follows in chronological order the classicist approximations, almost always resolved with returns to sixteenth-century forms, widespread together with the first affirmations of rationalism in the field of architecture and those of veristic naturalism in those of sculpture and painting, and it precedes, again in chronological order, those openly purist ones (v. PURISMO), typical of the first decades of the nineteenth century. Among the major neoclassical architects are remembered in Italy, along with Michelangelo Simonetti, Pietro Camperese the Elder, Raffaello Stern, authors of the architectural complex of the Vatican Museums, A. Niccolini and P. Bianchi, active in Naples, Pollak, L. Cagnola and L. Canonica, active in Milan, Buonsignore, working in Turin, A. Selva, in Venice, P. Nobili, in Trieste. In France, in Paris, along the path already indicated by N. Servandoni and G. Soufflot, B. Vignon, author of the Madeleine, Brouignart, who built the Bourse, and Chalgrin, the greatest, who raised the Arc de l'Etoile, work in a neoclassical vein. Other French neoclassical architects are: C. N. Ledoux, A. Peyre, C. Percier and P. F. Fontaine. Among the Germans are to be remembered K. G. Langhaus, author of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, K. F. Schinckel, L. von Klenze and F. Weinbrenner. The major neoclassical sculptors are A. Canova (v.) and A. Thorwaldsen (v.). Among the painters, the one who embodies better than any other the aspirations of neoclassicism is the Frenchman J. L. David, followed in Italy also by A. Appiani, V. Camuccini, F. Giani and by other lesser artists. - See plate CXIII.

Emilio Lavagnino