Chapter 28 The Enlightenment and its Legacy:
Art of the Late 18th through Mid-19th Century - Notes
Rococo: The French Taste
With the death of Louis XIV, the court at Versailles was abandoned for town life and the aristocracy reasserted itself and sought to expand its power. In the cultural realm, aristocrats reestablished their predominance as art patrons. The townhouses of Paris became the centers of a new softer style called Rococo. The attitude of the new age following the death of Louis XIV and with the reign of Louis XV found perfect expression in this new style. Rococo appeared in France in about 1700, primarily as a style of interior design. The French Rococo exterior was most often simple or plain, but very exuberant took over the interior. The term is derived from the French word rocaille, which literally means “pebble,” but it referred especially to small stones and shells used to decorate grotto interiors. Such shells or shell forms were the principal motifs of the Rococo ornament.
A typical French Rococo room is the Salon de la Princesse in the Hotel de Soubisei n Paris, designed by Germain Boffrand (1667-1754). Boffrand softened the strong architectural lines and panels of the earlier “Hall of Mirrors” at Versailles, into flexible, sinuous curves luxuriantly multiplied in mirror reflections. The walls melt into the vault. Irregular painted shapes, surmounted by sculpture and separated by the typical rocaille shells, replace the halls cornices. Painting, architecture, and sculpture combine to form a single ensemble. The profusion of curving tendrils and sprays of foliage blend with the shell forms to give an effect of freely growing nature.
Rococo was evident in furniture, utensils, and a wide variety of accessories that displayed the characteristic undulating and delicate Rococo line. The French Rococo interiors were designed as total works of art including the furnishings.
French Rococo in Germany
A good example of French Rococo in Germany is the Amailienburg, a small lodge Francois De Cuvillies (1695-1768) built in the park of Nymphenburg Palace in Munich. Though Rococo is generally a style of interior design, the Amailienburg harmonizes the interior and exterior elevations through curving lines and planes. The most spectacular room is the lodge is the room of mirrors. It dazzles the eye with scintillating motifs and forms. The room is Rococo at its fullest. The room is bathed in a light which is amplified by windows and mirrors. The reflections of light create shapes and contours that weave rhythmically around the upper walls and ceiling coves. Everything seems organic, growing, and in motion, an ultimate refinement of illusion. The differences between the Rococo age and the Baroque age in France can be seen by contrasting Rigaud’s portrait of Louis XIV and the work of Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), whom is most associated with French Rococo painting. Rigaud portrayed pompous majesty in supreme glory. Watteau’s, L’Indifferent (the indifferent one), on contrast, is not as heavy or staid and is more delicate. The artist presented a languid, gliding dancer whose minuet might be seen as mimicking the monarch if displayed together. Rather than posing in a setting that exalts the king, the dancer moves in a rainbow shimmer of color as if emerging on a stage to the sound of music. The contrast also highlights the different patronage of the eras; whereas the French Baroque period was dominated by Royal patronage, Rococo was the culture of the wider aristocracy and high society.
Watteau was largely responsible for creating a specific type of Rococo painting, called a
fete galante painting. These paintings depicted the outdoor entertainment and amusements of upper class society. Return from Cythera, completed between 1717 and 1719 as the artist’s acceptance piece into the Royal Academy. Watteau was Flemish, and his work, influenced by Ruben’s style, contributed to the popularity of an emphasis on color in painting.
At the turn of the century, the French Royal Academy was divided rather sharply between two doctrines. One doctrine upheld the ideas of La Brun (the major proponent of French Baroque under Louis XIV), who followed Nicholas Poussin in teaching that form was the most important element of in painting, whereas “colors in painting are as allurements for persuading the eyes,” additions for effect and not really essential. The other doctrine with Rubens as its model, proclaimed the natural supremacy of color and the colorist style as the artist’s proper guide. Depending on which side they took, academy members were called “Poussinites” or “Rubenites.” With Watteau in their ranks, the Reubenistes carried the day, and they established the Rococo style in painting and the colorism of Rubens and the Venetians.
Watteau’s Return from Cythera represents a group of lovers preparing to depart from the island of eternal youth and love, sacred to Aphrodite. Young and luxuriously costumed, they moved gracefully from the protective shade of a woodland park, filled with amorous cupids and voluptuous statuary, down a grassy slope to an awaiting golden barge. Watteau’s figural poses, which combine elegance and sweetness, are unparalleled. He composed his generally quite small paintings from albums of superb drawings that have been preserved in fine condition. These show that he observed slow movement from difficult and unusual angles, obviously intending to find the smoothest, most poised, and most refined attitudes. As he sought nuances of bodily poise and movement, Watteau also strove for the most exquisite shades of color differences, defining in a single stroke the shimmer of silk at a bent knee or the iridescence that touches a glossy surface as it emerges from shadow.
Art historians have noted that the theme of love and Arcadian happiness (seen in Giorgione’s and Ruben’s work) in Watteau’s pictures is slightly shadowed with wistfulness, or even melancholy. Perhaps Watteau, during his own short life, meditated on the swift passage of youth and pleasure. The haze of color, the subtly modeled shapes, the gliding motion, and the air of suave gentility were all to the taste of the Rococo artist’s wealthy patrons.
Francois Boucher
Watteau’s successors never quite matched his taste and subtlety. Their themes were about love, artfully pursued through erotic frivolity and playful intrigue. After Watteau’s death at 37, his follower, Francois Boucher (1703-1770), painter for Madame de Pompadour (the influential mistress of Louis XV), rose to the dominant position in French painting. Although he was a great portraitist, Boucher’s fame rested primarily on his graceful allegories, with Arcadian shepherds, nymphs, and goddesses cavorting in shady glens engulfed in pink and sky blue light. Cupid a Captive presents the viewer with a rosy pyramid of infant and female flesh set off against a cool, leafy background, with fluttering draperies both hiding and revealing the nudity of the figures. Boucher used criss-crossing diagonals, curvilinear forms, and slanting recessions from Baroque thinking, in his masterful compositions. He dissected powerful Baroque curves into a multiplicity of decorative arabesques, dissipating Baroque drama into sensual playfulness. Lively and light hearted, Boucher’s artful Rococo fantasies became mirrors for his patrons, the wealthy French, to behold the ornamental reflections of their cherished pastimes.
Jean Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) was a student of Boucher and a first rate colorist whose decorative skill was equal to his teacher’s. The Swing is a typical Late Rococo that would be called an “intrigue” picture. A young gentleman has managed an arrangement whereby an unsuspecting old bishop swings the young gentleman’s pretty sweetheart higher and higher, while here lover (the work’s patron), in the lower left corner, stretches out to admire her ardently from a strategic position on the ground. The young lady flirtatiously and boldly kicks off her shoe at the little statue of cupid, who holds his finger to his lips. The landscape, glowing pastel colors, and soft light almost by themselves, convey the themes sensuality.
Clodion
The Rococo mood of sensual intimacy also permeated many of the small sculptures designed for the 18th century salons. Claude Michel, also called Clodion (1738-1814), specialized in small, lively sculptures that combined sensuous Rococo fantasies with the action of Bernini’s dynamic figures. Clodion lived and worked in Rome as a recipient of the cherished Prix de Rome. The Royal Academy annually gave the Prix de Rome to the artist who produced the best history painting, subsidizing the winning artist’s stay in Rome (from three to five years).
Clodion’s small group, Nymph and Satyr, has an open and active composition suggestive of Bernini’s work. But the artist tempered any reference to Bernini art with the erotic playfulness of Boucher and Fragonard to energize his eager nymph and the laughing satyr into whose mouth he pours a cup of wine. Here the sensual exhilaration of the Rococo style is caught in a smaller scale for a table top and in inexpensive terracotta. Many Rococo artworks were intended to be displayed on tabletops.
The Enlightenment
By the end of the 18th century, revolutions had erupted in France and America. A major factor in these political, social, and economic changes was The Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was in essence a new way of thinking critically about the world and about humankind, independently of religion, myth, or tradition. The new method was based on using reason to reflect on the results of physical experiments and involved in critical analysis of texts. It was grounded in empirical evidence. Enlightenment thought promoted the scientific questioning of all assertions and rejected unfounded beliefs about the nature of humankind and of the world. The enlightened mind was skeptical of doctrines and theories, such as superstitions and old wives tales that no verifiable evidence could prove. Thus, the Enlightenment encouraged and stimulated the habit and application known as the scientific method.
Empiricism
England and France were the two principal centers of the Enlightenment and they influenced the thinking of intellectuals throughout Europe and in the American colonies. Two of the major thinkers of Enlightenment thought were Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and John Locke (1632-1704). Newton insisted on empirical proof as evidence and not relying on things that could not be seen and observed, such as the supernatural, or of things of faith. This emphasis on both tangible data and concrete experience became a cornerstone of Enlightenment thought. This thinking gave rationality to a physical world. Such concepts were applied to the sociopolitical world by promoting a rationally organized society. John Locke’s works took on the status of Enlightenment Gospel and furthered the application of Enlightenment ideas. Locke said that the mind is a blank tablet and what is known is imprinted on the mind, from what the senses perceived of the material world. Ideas are not innate of God given; it is only from experience that we know. This has been called the Doctrine of Empiricism. There are laws of Nature that grant man the natural rights of life, liberty, and property, as well as freedom of conscience. Government is by contract, and its purpose is to protect these rights, if and when the government abuses these rights, the citizenry has the further natural rights of revolution. Locke’s ideas empowered people to take control of their own destinies.
There was a shared conviction that the ills of humanity could be remedied by applying reason and common sense to human problems. They criticized the powers of the church and state as irrational limits placed on political and intellectual freedom. As knowledge increased humanity could advance by degrees to a happier state than it had ever known. This conviction matured into the Doctrine of Progress and its corollary doctrine the perfectibility of mankind. This thinking continues to have impact today.
Animated by this belief in human perfectibility, they took on the task of gathering knowledge and making it accessible to all. This idea of the accumulation and documentation of knowledge was new to western society, which had relied heavily on tradition and convention.
It is no coincidence that the major revolutions of recent centuries, French, American, and Industrial in England, occurred in this period. The growth of cities and the working class was a major happening, as was the demand for cheap labor and raw materials which drove colonialism. In the United States the Doctrine of Manifest Destiny developed as an ideological justification for continued territorial expansion.
Artists entered into these dialogues about the state and the direction of society and played an important role in encouraging public considerations of these momentous events. In the arts this new way of thinking can be seen in the general label Modern, used to describe art from the late 18th century on. Such a vague generic term, covering centuries of art, renders any concrete definition of “modern art” virtually impossible. One defining characteristic, however, is an awareness of history. People know that heir culture perpetuates or rejects previously established ideas or conventions. The concept of Modernity - the state being modern - involves being up to date, implying distinction between the present and the past. Many recent art historians now assert that this historical consciousness was present in much earlier societies. This accounts for the current use of the term “Early Modern” to describe the Renaissance and even medieval cultures.