Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism (also spelled Neo-classicism) was a Western cultural movement in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that took its inspiration from the art and culture of classical antiquity. It began in Rome, shaped largely by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann at the time of the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The style spread across Europe when art students completed their Grand Tour and brought newly revived Greco-Roman ideals back from Italy to their home countries. The main Neoclassical movement grew out of the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment and reached its height in the early to mid-19th century, where it eventually went head-to-head with Romanticism. In architecture, the style kept going through the 19th, 20th, and into the 21st century.

In the visual arts, European Neoclassicism started around 1760 as a reaction against the dominant Rococo style. While Rococo architecture highlights grace, ornament, and asymmetry, Neoclassical architecture is built on simplicity and symmetry—qualities seen as virtues in the arts of Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, and borrowed directly from 16th-century Renaissance Classicism. Each wave of “neo”-classicism picks certain models from the range of available classics and ignores others. Between 1765 and 1830, Neoclassical supporters—writers, speakers, patrons, collectors, artists, and sculptors—honored an ideal of the artistic generation linked to Phidias, but the actual sculptures they used were usually Roman copies of Hellenistic works. They left out both Archaic Greek art and the art of late antiquity. The discovery of ancient Palmyra’s “Rococo” style, shown in engravings from Robert Wood’s *The Ruins of Palmyra*, came as a surprise. Since Greece was largely unexplored and seen as a dangerous part of the Ottoman Empire, Neoclassicists’ understanding of Greek architecture came mostly through drawings and engravings that subtly smoothed, regularized, “corrected,” and “restored” Greek monuments—often without the artists realizing it.

The Empire style, a second phase of Neoclassicism in architecture and the decorative arts, centered on Paris during the Napoleonic era. Neoclassicism remained influential long after the early 19th century, especially in architecture and other fields, with periodic revivals in the 20th and even the 21st centuries, particularly in the United States and Russia.

**History**

Neoclassicism is a revival of the many styles and spirit of classical antiquity, inspired directly by the classical period. It coincided with and reflected developments in philosophy and other areas of the Age of Enlightenment, and began as a reaction against the excesses of the earlier Rococo style. Although the movement is often described as the opposite of Romanticism, this is a major oversimplification that usually doesn’t hold up when looking at specific artists or works. The case of Ingres, often considered the main champion of late Neoclassicism, shows this especially well. The revival can be traced back to the start of formal archaeology.

The Italian archaeologist and art theorist Giovanni Pietro Bellori is seen as a forerunner of Neoclassicism. In 1664, he gave a lecture on the “Ideal” in art at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, which became the key statement of idealist art theory. Bellori’s lecture had a major impact on European academic theory and later became the theoretical foundation for the Neoclassicism promoted by Winckelmann.

The writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann were crucial in shaping the movement in both architecture and the visual arts. His books *Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture* (1755) and *Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums* (“History of Ancient Art,” 1764) were the first to clearly separate Ancient Greek from Roman art and to define periods within Greek art, tracing a path from growth to maturity to imitation or decline—a framework still influential today. Winckelmann believed art should aim for “noble simplicity and calm grandeur,” and praised the idealism of Greek art, where he said we find “not only nature at its most beautiful but also something beyond nature, namely certain ideal forms of its beauty, which, as an ancient interpreter of Plato teaches us, come from images created by the mind alone.” This theory was not new in Western art, but his focus on closely copying Greek models was: “The only way for us to become great or if this be possible, inimitable, is to imitate the ancients.”

The Industrial Revolution brought a global shift toward more efficient and stable manufacturing, along with tremendous material progress and increased prosperity. With the Grand Tour came a fad for collecting antiquities, which laid the groundwork for many great collections and spread a Neoclassical revival across Europe. “Neoclassicism” in each art form implies a specific canon of a “classical” model.

In English, the term “Neoclassicism” is used mainly for the visual arts; the similar movement in English literature, which started much earlier, is called Augustan literature. That literary movement had been dominant for several decades and was already fading by the time Neoclassicism in the visual arts became popular. Though the terms differ, the situation in French literature was similar. In music, the period saw the rise of classical music, while “Neoclassicism” is used for 20th-century developments. However, the operas of Christoph Willibald Gluck took a specifically Neoclassical approach, laid out in his preface to the published score of *Alceste* (1769), which aimed to reform opera by cutting ornamentation, giving the chorus a bigger role in line with Greek tragedy, and using simpler musical structures.