I'm using myself as a canvas and trying to paint the truth of our time. This noted landscape depicts the entrance to the Grand Canal in Venice, with a number of gondoliers and their passengers maneuvering horizontally across the canvas. Their asymmetrical placement creates movement as three gondolas extend upward in the center and draw the viewer's eye into the distance, further emphasized by the perspective of the buildings on the right and the church on the left.
The subtle use of local colors give the piece a golden feel and a sense of the idyllic life of the times, which was informed by the Venetian school's love of Arcadian landscapes that heavily informed the Rococo aesthetic.
Canaletto was a pioneer in painting from nature and conveying the atmospheric effects of a particular moment, which has led some scholars to see his work as anticipating Impressionism. As Jonathan Jones wrote, "the delicate feel for light playing on architecture The British art dealer Owen Swiny encouraged him to paint small, even postcard-sized, topographical views to sell to tourists, and the banker and art collector, Joseph Smith, became a noted patron, selling a large number of his works to King George III.
In Canaletto moved to London where he painted scenes of London, such as his Westminster Bridge Ever since his work has retained its popularity and influence: it was featured in the David Bickerstaff film Canaletto and the Art of Venice , and this painting was used in the video game Merchant Prince II Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle.
Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Kimberly Nichols. The Art Story. Ways to support us. Rococo Started: It's not something you add. It's not icing on a cake. It's everything - or it's nothing. Summary of Rococo Centuries before the term "bling" was invented to denote ostentatious shows of luxury, Rococo infused the world of art and interior design with an aristocratic idealism that favored elaborate ornamentation and intricate detailing.
Beginnings and Development. Later Developments and Legacy. Rococo in French Decoration Rococo salons are known for their elaborate detail, serpentine design work, asymmetry and predisposition to lighter, pastel, or gold-based color palettes.
Learning Objectives Discuss the importance of the Rococo salon in France and its typical design. The notion of the salon is an Enlightenment era ideal that transformed the salon, or living room, into the central space for aristocracy to entertain guests and engage in intellectual conversation.
Rococo interiors are highly unified in nature, and represent the coming together of a number of decorative arts. Furniture rose to new heights in the period and emphasized lighthearted frivolity. Furniture, friezes, sculpture, metalwork, wall, and ceiling decoration are woven together stylistically in the Rococo salon.
Key Terms asymmetry : Lacking a common measure between two objects or quantities; incommensurability. Rococo in Painting and Sculpture Rococo style in painting echoes the qualities evident in other manifestations of the style including serpentine lines, heavy use of ornament as well as themes revolving around playfulness, love, and nature.
Learning Objectives Identify themes and qualities commonly associated with Rococo art. Key Takeaways Key Points Rococo style developed first in the decorative arts and interior design, and its influence later spread to architecture, sculpture, theater design, painting, and music. Rococo style is characterized by elaborate ornamentation, asymmetrical values, pastel color palette, and curved or serpentine lines.
Rococo art works often depict themes of love, classical myths, youth, and playfulness. Antoine Watteau is considered to be the first great Rococo painter who influenced later Rococo masters such as Boucher and Fragonard. Rococo sculpture makes use of very delicate porcelain instead of marble or another heavy medium.
Key Terms Rococo : A style of baroque architecture and decorative art, from 18th century France, having elaborate ornamentation. Rococo Architecture 18th century Rococo architecture was a lighter, more graceful, yet also more elaborate version of Baroque architecture. Large areas of Venetian mirror-glass were, of course, important decorative features as early as the creation of the Galerie des Glaces, and also of the Mirror Room in the Grand Trianon: they have often been mistakenly identified solely with the advent of the rococo style, in which, indeed, they were to play an important part.
The design of Louis' bedroom, however, still bears witness to a strong preference for the Classical Orders, with pilaster decoration in the typically academic seventeenth-century tradition. One of the problems of any examination of rococo decoration is that we are uncertain as to how much of it originated from the small army of draughtsmen, whose leading figures such as Mansart kept behind the scenes, and how much from the great architects themselves.
Thus, while a building or an interior passes as the work of Mansart or De Cotte, the novel details in it may just as well have sprung from a 'ghost' designer with a certain sense of fantasy and an originality which the Royal Architect passed off as his own.
These draughtsmen were in all probability familiar with books of decorative patterns - derived from the era of Renaissance art - illustrating the famous grotesques of Raphael in the Villa Madama and the Vatican Loggia. Grotesques , descended from the stucco reliefs and paintings in Roman tombs or grottoes, hence 'grotesques' , played an important part in French decoration as early as the s and later appeared in some of Lebrun's own decorations, such as those in the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre.
They consisted of curving plant-and-scroll forms, often originating in an urn or pot and winding upwards in a regular pattern, inhabited by playful monkeys, insects and other creatures who provide a slight asymmetrical touch. The lightness of this type of decoration was borne in mind by Pierre Lepautre when he decorated the King's suite of rooms at Marly in Lepautre's interiors at Marly are, tragically, known to us only from drawings.
They show that he dispensed with the heavy, rectangular frames around doors and mirrors, replacing them with miniature curving decorations integrated into the corners of mouldings, which themselves were finer and more elegant in effect than ever before.
In place of the traditional painted and gilded ceiling, Lepautre simply articulated the great white plaster expanse with a delicate gilded rosette at the centre - this was to be imitated on both ceilings and panelling throughout the rococo period. The rococo style developed most strongly during the Regency of the Duc d'Orleans , whose town residence was the Palais Royale. Here, licence was the rule, and the tone of rococo society was set: a society which demanded constant novelty, wit and elegance - precisely the qualities of the rococo style.
Society opened its doors to people whom Louis XIV would never have accepted: the newly rich and increasingly important intellectuals. During the Regency much of the aristocracy, which had found itself confined to Versailles during Louis XIV's reign, returned to Paris and commissioned new town houses, as in the Place Vendome, where the transitional style can still be clearly seen.
Their interiors did not call for the elaborate ceiling-paintings of the previous century, and in their place a new school of painters emerged who specialized in the gently curving trumeaux over-doors and small-scale painted panels which form a great part of the output of eg Francois Boucher Also in constant employment from this period until the Revolution were the scupteurs, who executed the often minutely detailed carving on the boiseries, the decorated panel-framings.
It was in about that the transitional style began to give way to a clear rococo style. The term 'rococo' probably derives from the French 'rocaille', which originally referred to a type of sculptured decoration in garden design. Certainly the leading designers of the rococo style, Gilles-Marie Oppenordt , Nicolas Pineau and Juste-Aurele Meissonnier , were very much aware of it. The grotesques of the seventeenth century were now transformed into arabesques under Claude Audran , Watteau's teacher, full of a new fantasy and delicacy.
The main steps forward were made in interior decoration and painting, while little of importance happened to the appearance of the exterior, except that a certain light sophistication replaced the heaviness of the Louis XIV style, and, instead of relying on the Classical Orders, architects such as Jean Courtonne and Germain Boffrand produced buildings whose main effect lay in the subtle treatment of stonework and the skilful disposition of delicate sculpture against sophisticated rustication.
In Paris, two of the best examples are the famous Hotel de Matignon of and the Hotel de Torcy of In interior decoration a steady progression towards extreme elaboration is seen during the Regency, as demonstrated by the Palais Royale and Hotel d'Assy, culminating in such triumphantly sophisticated rooms as the Salon Ovale of the Hotel de Soubise in Paris by Boffrand, whose influence on German rococo architecture was to be considerable.
A tendency to replace the huge series of very formal apartments favoured in the Louis XIV period with smaller, more intimate rooms is also seen, as in the Petites Appartements in Versailles, where form follows function more closely.
Sadly these, together with many of the greatest rococo rooms, have disappeared without trace. Apart from Paris, much fine architecture and decoration in the full-blown rococo style was effected at Nancy, where the dethroned King of Poland lived.
French Rococo Painting Paradoxically, the rococo style was heralded in painting, much earlier than in the other arts, by a Flemish painter, Jean-Antoine Watteau He moved to Paris in about and began working as a theatrical scene-painter, before studying with the Keeper of the Luxembourg Palace, Claude Audran, an artist who painted in a decorative, late baroque style.
It was the Rubens' Life of Marie de Medicis' series in the Luxembourg Palace which most impressed Watteau and through him was to influence the course of French rococo painting. He studied these together with the great Venetian painters and, in the words of Michael Levey, although he had "no public career, no great commissions from Church or Crown; seldom executed large-scale pictures: had no interest in painting historical subjects", he became the greatest French artist of the first half of the century.
Watteau's pictures - See: Pilgrimage to Cythera Louvre, Paris; Charlottenburg, Berlin - with their combination of Rubens' colour and his own delicate eroticism, were always more than a little melancholy. The lyrical quality of his painting, with its suggestion of sophisticated amorality, was precisely that sought by French society in the Regency years: Watteau was not only catering for a taste but also creating one.
The other two major painters of the French rococo period, Francois Boucher noted also as the director of the Gobelins tapestry factory and Jean-Honore Fragonard , both purveyed an entirely different variety of the style from that of Watteau and are often thought to have vulgarized where Watteau had refined. Whereas Watteau achieved an all-enveloping aura of aristocratic distancing, Boucher and Fragonard produced a more intimate and obvious effect.
Significantly, Boucher's career opened as an engraver of Watteau's pictures, and from then on assumed the pattern of traditional success. Winning the Prix de Rome, he worked in Italy from to In he became an Academician, and with the help of his friend and Louis XV's mistress, Madame de Pompadour , he became the most sought-after painter in France for every type of picture, but in particular for his vivid mythological painting of classical subjects.
In these, often rendered in a somewhat unsubtly erotic vein, Boucher, like Watteau, revealed a strong debt to Rubens and Venetian art, especially to Paolo Veronese, his finest predecessor in painting brilliantly clothed and displayed mythologies.
Boucher became Director of the Academy in , and altogether made a highly important contribution to the rococo movement through his many paintings and his designs for tapestries and other decorations.
In the unreality of most of his later forms one recalls Sir Joshua Reynolds' sense of outrage at discovering Boucher had forsaken models. By comparison with the unreal world of Watteau, Boucher's settings are even less real, while the contrast with Thomas Gainsborough , who composed his landscapes with pieces of mirror, twigs and moss, is still more extreme. Miniature trees surround rustic buildings, which appear to have been made in icing-sugar, and water looks as if it were made of glass.
There is no real light and shade, perhaps so as not to contrast too strongly with the surrounding pale and shallow rococo boiserie decoration into which it was set.
While there were a number of great individual artists, there were also families of painters who followed an almost unchanging stylistic tradition. Among these are the Coypels , who executed the chapel ceiling at Versailles, the Van Loos and the De Troys , all of whom painted consistently amusing pictures for the upper classes and for the rising middle classes, who appear for the first time in the rococo period as important patrons and to some extent account for the increased demand for portraiture.
Some of the most delicious evocations of the sophistication of society are found in the portraits of Nattier, Drouais, Roslin and, of course, Boucher himself, whose delicate likenesses of Madame de Pompadour are among the finest portraits of any woman in that century.
Alongside portraiture, many other specialized branches of painting arose, such as the still life, where Jean Baptiste Oudry and Francois Desportes were foremost. In these 'lesser' fields one man is outstanding: Jean Chardin His delightfully simple and deeply sincere genre subjects and his still life paintings have a quality which seem at first glance closer in feeling to Dutch Realism - with an added dash of French precision and sensibility - than to the prevailing rococo style.
A masterpiece could be born from a tiny picture of a Delft vase with a few flowers or from a simple two-figure study. It is their very delicacy and refinement that links them to the rococo. Another outstanding Rococo genre painter was the 'moralistic' Jean-Baptiste Greuze Between about and French designers created furniture which remains unparalleled in its beauty of line and detail, minute finish and costly materials expertly used.
Also in this period most of the furniture types with which we are familiar today came into being: such pieces as the writing-table bureau plat , the secretaire of many different types, notably the drop-front and cylinder type and the sofa in many guises canapes, lits de repos.
The heavy pieces of the later 17th-century inlaid with brass and tortoise-shell in the manner of Boulle were replaced from the Regency onwards by smaller, lighter pieces, a development that coincided with the decrease in the size of rooms and the lessening formality.
The chest-of-drawers commode was lifted off the floor on delicate curving legs, and bombe fronts were covered with sinuous ormolu which often flowed over the entire piece and in which much of the finest decoration of the Rococo is found.
In this rococo craft, superb uses were made of inlaid woods of all types, often imported from the Orient, contributing both to the high cost of the piece and to the craze for the exotic which invaded French society and led to the use often entirely misplaced of terms such as "a la polonaise", "a la grecque" and "a la chinoise". In furniture the major manifestation of this interest in the Orient was in the use of imported or imitation lacquer, many good pieces of Oriental lacquer suffering badly in the process of dissection and reshaping.
The display of luxury in rococo craftwork was not, of course, confined to furniture, and the stark appearance of many rococo ensembles today is misleading. The frivolities and trimmings - frills, ribbons, elaborate hangings on beds, doors and windows, festoons of fringes, gimps and baubles - often only associated with the Victorians, added to the atmosphere of luxury and comfort, a quality little known in seventeenth-century French interiors.
In spite of the extreme rigour of the Guild system, possibly even thanks to it, French furniture achieved, in the eighteenth century, such a state of perfection that it was sought after through-out Europe. The Guild regulations encouraged specialization and incited the sons of master craftsmen to continue in their fathers' trade by the prospect of economic advantages.
The result was exceptional professional skill, and the rise of veritable dynasties of joiners and cabinet-makers, handing down the secrets of their craft from father to son.
Thus, the menuisier practised only the creation of the actual form of the furniture; the ebeniste created the elaborate layers of inlay and surface decoration and yet another craftsman was responsible for fitting the gilt-bronze decoration over the prepared framework; no guild was permitted to intrude on the territory of another.
The Enlightenment encompassed a range of new ways of thinking about the world. Chief among these new ideas was that reason should reign supreme and that knowledge could only be gained through the use of the senses. This kind of thinking would clearly have repercussions, and organized religion and monarchies soon found themselves under attack as thinkers embraced personal liberty, egalitarianism, constitutional government, and the separation of Church and State.
The study of nature and science became increasingly rigorous as intellectual societies devoted to it sprang up alongside other salons for literature and the arts. Scientific discoveries regarding everything from optics and chemistry to physics and astronomy had a profound effect on the way the West understood the world, and that worldview was further altered by knowledge gained from explorers and colonists and their voyages around the globe.
Rococo art reflected this interest in nature in its abundance of floral imagery, and global cultural influence can be discerned in the increasing incorporation of East Asian design motifs into European design.
Sometimes it seems odd that the Age of Reason should beget such lighthearted art, but intense intellectual changes were also bringing about changes in morality and priorities, especially among the privileged classes. As the 18th century wore on, however, philosophers like Voltaire and Diderot criticized Rococo art for being indecent, immoral, and no longer relevant in an age of increasingly serious concerns.
A sober version of the classical forms of ancient Greece and Rome began to be considered the most effective way to give visual expression to Enlightenment ideals of democracy, fraternity, and rationality, and as the 18th century wore on, Rococo art bled into the Neoclassical.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo - Last great fresco painter.
0コメント