Art 201: Neoclassicism

this online lecture is on the style of neoclassicism this is a pretty interesting style I should say a very interesting style one of the defining characteristics of late 18th century art was a renewed interest in classical antiquity this is a revival style reviving classicism now we see this interest manifested in the style of neoclassicism it's a movement that is trying to incorporate styles and subjects of ancient art in other ways it's also trying to incorporate some of the political and philosophical ideas of the ancient period as well the class ancient Classical period as well now part of the reason for the emergence of neoclassicism is the enlightenment and with the enlightenment and we we've talked about this you know already in previous lecture with the Enlightenment it's you know a new way of thinking critically and we see this being extended to economics we see it being extended to politics this idea of like hmm Divine Right you know maybe there isn't this thing where like God decides a king and that person gets to be king maybe there should be a thing where people like pick the ruler these kind of ideas and in fact our own American Revolution is based off of the Enlightenment ideas and a lot of our constitutional ideas also were based off of Enlightenment ideas as well such as separation of church and state now let's talk about context the context of neoclassicism is a little bit complicated now I'll make it easy and then I'll make it complicated in terms of you if you want to think about the context in an easy way you could say the context is the French Revolution of 1789 and I do make clear the date 17 because they do have a later revolution that occurs in 1830 1789 now here's one here's where it gets more complicated it has to do with the Revolution but it also includes the leading up to the revolution and what happens afterwards so more correctly the context of the French or the French neoclassical style is the monarchy of louis xvi who is the king of france when all of this discontent really begins to become very dangerous is the right word it was certainly dangerous for him he lost his head in the guillotine but it's when a lot of the discontent really begins to present itself so that's part of it the actual revolution is part of it and then also what happens afterwards is part of it and what happens afterwards is we have Napoleon coming into power in 1803 so expect to see a little bit of variety now here's the good news the neoclassical style is pretty consistent so even though we do see variety in context we Argan see consistency in subjects which again seem to focus primarily on classical history and literature we will see consistency in the visual components of the style as well so that's the good news let's start out talking about this piece death of Marat by the artist Jacques lui devide who was the artist of the French Revolution and what's so fantastic about dahveed is that he painted for louis xvi he painted for the revolutionaries he actually painted for Napoleon as well so we are actually going to see dahveed works that were painted for all three different contexts now like most of the artists who worked in the style of neoclassicism dahveed was inspired by the Enlightenment he believed that subject matter should have a moral so that it's know communicating kind of a more like lofty idea it should be presented in the guise of heroism and virtue there's a lot of idealism that goes on in neoclassical art so dahveed was an important part of the revolution he created paintings for propaganda to further the cause of the jacobian revolutionaries this work was not only meant to commemorate an event and part of this revolutionary struggle it also was intended to encourage revolutionaries to keep up the fight even when things happen that can set their cause back what kind of things that happen that could set their cause back well maybe the murder of one of their leaders Marat so there was this guy Marat who was a leader of the revolutionary cause and he was murdered and Dovie creates a painting about it this is jean-paul Marat now this is meant to establish Marat as a hero and it's doing so in a few different ways Hey so we has depiction of Marat in the bathtub this actually is accurate what happened was is Marat suffered from some sort of skin condition where he had to soak in the tub so he's soaking in the tub and this woman Charlotte Corday whose name you don't need to know comes to the door and she say she was at odds with the revolution and she said to the the man who answered the door you know I've changed my mind I want to adopt the revolutionary cause can I please speak to Marat and I think that personally was kind of weird Bharat's like sure I'll totally talk to her around in a bathtub naked so she comes in and this is the letter by the way that she gave to the person who answered the door he gave it to Marat who says okay I'll see her says holding the letter that was used to gain entry into Bharat's bathroom she comes in she stabs him here's the knife down here so this is a really sad situation because here you have this man at his most vulnerable he is naked and nudity is traditionally all the way back to ancient Egypt uses a sim a symbol for vulnerability he's vulnerable he's naked in a tub you can't really fight someone off you trying to stab you when you're naked in the tub and so he's vulnerable he can't fight back he was tricked by this woman who lied to him it's meant to be a really sad situation and if that's all sad enough for you Davi does something very brilliant through the position of Murad's arm he evokes Michelangelo's pietà look at the arm here and compared to the arm here similar si idea as you see this painting and it oh this reminds me of the Payette ah and who is the ultimate martyr Jesus we've talked about this anytime that you want to convey martyrdom the best thing to do is somehow compare it to the crucifixion of Jesus so it's like oh you know it was really sad that Jesus was you know brutally murdered he was tortured publicly all because of his religion and you make that same observation about Marat this is so sad that he was murdered just because he believed in the revolution no TV did a couple other things one of the things he did is he actually idealized Marat face if you look at pictures of Marat um and I'm sorry if this sounds mean but he was ugly he was not a very good-looking man and Gavi went and he softened a lot of the facial features here so that he looked calm he looked peaceful he looked handsome he had a more appealing face that I think people would kind of gravitate to the more towards and maybe should feel even more sorry for we also have a dramatic light that's kind of shining in down and it's almost like it's like God shining his light down from heaven to just say how sad he is that this incredible man Marat was so brutally murdered let's take a look at another piece here we have another Jacques Louie de vide painting this probably is the most famous of the neoclassical paintings this is a great painting to look at to discuss common stylistic features of neoclassicism because this contains almost every single one of them now what we're looking at is we're looking at on an org allegorical level a struggle between love and patriotism this is a depiction of an ancient account by the historian Livy he's talking about the leaders of the warring cities of Rome and Alba and there was decision made that they were gonna fight it out instead of expending all of their resources on like this huge military to do they would send three representatives from each of the cities they'd fight it out and the results would solve the disagreements wouldn't you know it they decide to send from Rome three brothers so here we have the three brothers and they are swearing allegiance to Rome on their swords being held by their father now there is some messages certainly happening here I'm gonna talk about that in a minute first I want to talk about the common stylistic features of the neoclassical style then we'll talk about the meaning behind this painting common stylistic features okay one of the things that we see in the Oh classicism is we see a stage like space a stage like space what this means is that the action of the scene is constrained within the mediate foreground the background is black and therefore it seems like it kind of ends there we don't have deep spatial Plains it's again confined to the foreground now this idea of the composition as a space that's like a stage this is not new to neoclassicism this is not new to art history there's somebody else who actually came up with this idea first and that was Giotto that's right Giotto we're actually seeing the legacy of his influence living on all the way to French neoclassicism which supports my contention that Giotto is probably one of the most important artists in tire history of art history now another thing that kind of creates the sense of a stage like space it's a spotlight lighting kind of like the lighting that you would see in the space at stage now the other thing is the lighting enhances a sense of drama as well it's dramatic lightening lighting and we see what creates us drama is the contrast between the light and dark areas if you want to say terrorism I would kind of allow it I mean this is black but what happens is is the figure should emerge out of the blackness not happening here but if you said ten umber is Amaya be pretty okay with that but dramatic light we have really crisp brushwork and this is a clear difference between the preceding style of Rococo we have really crisp tight brushwork that creates these very clear compositions right there's a lot of clarity here we also have polarities now polarities are opposition's can you see the polarity in this composition it's with the men and the women so the men they're strong they're active they're in positions that assertively command the space around them they are brave they're angular the women in contrast these are the wives the mother the sister the the men are sad the crime they're scared right and these are Syria feminine attributes which that is problematic but that's a discussion for another time they're closed in on themselves they they sag they're not assertive they don't command the space around them they're soft and their lines are curvilinear rather than being very sharp and angular so polarities opposites right it's the struggle between paid you know patriotism and courage loyalty versus spin sad and scared and love which interestingly love is kind of like a weakness in this case now let's talk about what we're seeing here okay and it's important to know who commissioned this louis xvi actually commissioned this he commissioned w to paint this and he commissioned me to paint this because of the symbolism that we see here this idea of paying homage to your country to your father you know to fight for your country and so what louis xvi was hoping was that people would see this and they'd be like oh yeah like we shouldn't do what the King says we should love our country we should fight for the King right the father is the king he holds the swords they swear allegiance now there was the unfortunate fact that this had the opposite effect and this actually further stoked the fires of the revolution because people were like yeah we should fight for what's right we should fight for our country they didn't think that the country had good rulership etc and then we have Napoleon so after the after the revolution we have Napoleon who was coming into power now what happened was during the Revolution Gaby got himself into trouble he was imprisoned and actually was a really dangerous situation he was slotted for the guillotine that he was gonna have his head removed from his body it was really hard for him being in prison because he wasn't able to make art and so Napoleon came into power he saw the rad paintings that dahveed paints and he came to Dobby and said you know hey like you could get your head cut off or you could come pain for me and for dahveed you know painting that so that's what he does that's his life and so you know people could say oh you know daveed he was kind of a sellout maybe maybe not but you know what he didn't sellout art and I think that that's what what counts so he becomes the official painter for Napoleon he paints this piece Napoleon st. Bernard passed now um with this there's a lot of things that are very typical in terms of royal portraiture we have the ruler presented in an idealized image as being very powerful so let's talk about and you should at this point be able to recognize what is it that makes this look powerful so take a minute pause the video and analyze this painting and note down some things that indicate power so hopefully you've done that so let's talk about it first of all we have the fact that Napoleon is on a horse this is an equestrian portrait we know that equestrian portraits were very popular in the time of ancient Rome the equestrian portrait that you see on the right is the equestrian portrait of Marcus Aurelius which dates to the high Empire period the time when Rome was at its height Marcus Aurelius was a well-loved Emperor he was seen as a brilliant military strategist he was seen as a wonderful ruler Emperor and he also was seen as highly intellectual so by having Napoleon on the horse it is a vocalist idea of rulers that ruled over what was the most powerful empire in the planet supposedly although I've read that actually the Han Dynasty of China which was contemporary to the Roman Empire was larger in size and mightier and military anyways I'm digressing so we have him on his horse and that is certainly conveying power it's conveying wealth it's conveying military leadership it's the same ideas that are being conveyed with both of these and in some ways Napoleon is almost suggesting that he part of this lineage of like really super fantastic Emperor's he's just like Marcus Aurelius they're both on a horse now also with the horse some people said that Napoleon's kind of overcompensating for the fact that he was short I looked it up he was five five so I don't know maybe that's short but take a look at the proportions he's about the same size of his horse so it's kind of like fibbing a little bit suggesting that he's too so large in stature that he rivals the size of like a giant horse and the same thing is happening here in the Marcus Aurelius equestrian portrait where he too had his size enlarged to indicate superhuman strength and power this also is a little bit of a fudge the Napoleon painting because supposedly when he was riding along the st. Bernard pass he technically was riding a mule that's what I'm very powerful and that's not very exciting so instead it's better to put this like crazy rearing horse now the rearing of the horse this is important too because it's showing that like here's a super strong super powerful animal and Napoleon's just like pretty much hanging on with like one hand loosely having this other hand extended leading his troops forward so he is of such strength that he can just like lead a rearing horse and it doesn't even take that much strength for him to do so this actually is something kind of similar that was happening in the equestrian portrait as well this horse originally had reins and you can see that he's just kind of loosely holding them with the other hand extended kind of like how Napoleon's doing okay what else so we see a lot of volume these like gorgeous cape that like really dramatic you know the typical dramatic neoclassical fashion we have it you know kind of going blowing in the wind it effectively enhances his size he's like huge sighs it conveys masculinity it conveys the pure physical power and that's something that he would be wanting to communicate we also have the fact that he's looking directly at the viewer he's making eye contact it shows that he is not feeling like threatened you could even argue that he might be dominant because he is at a higher spatial plan in the viewer and we know that higher up means more heart in terms of what else is typical of the neoclassical style miss Payne ting we do the allusion to classical art with the appropriation of the equestrian portrait we have that crisp clear brushwork that is typical of divots work as well as the neoclassicism style in general we have our shallow stage like space with this super exciting horse situation going on in the immediate foreground with not a lot of background in here and even some of that dramatic lighting sort of stage like coming up from above again this idea that maybe it's God himself that's like looking down and praising the military exploits of Napoleon now here we have the coronation of a pole Ian this is when Napoleon was crowned Emperor this is a really interesting painting first of all it's a giant 20 feet by 32 feet and of course the large size indicates a sense of importance it also indicates the power of Napoleon that his crowning is so important you need a painting like basically the size of a wall to show it and of course we know that large size is typical for the genre of history painting which this is part in part it's like kind of a portrait but I would say more so it's a history painting so that's appropriate as well to make it large in size we know that history paintings are large in size to convey the epic nature of the scene as well as to allow artists to render minut details so here we have the crowning of Napoleon as being crowned as Emperor France and this occurred in the very famous Notre Dame Cathedral Paris so we have this large size as I said that's showing us all the important people that were in attendance such as Josephine Napoleon's wife he's currently crowning right here we also have the Pope this is Pope Pius the seventh right here there's some other people too that um dahveed is included such as Napoleon's mother here now this seems to be a good time to mention that there are some fictional parts to this painting things that the poem himself asked dahveed to change to suit the message that he wanted to communicate about his coronation like for example his mother never attended there was some sort of like issue between like Napoleon and his brother and his mother was angry about it she refused to attend the coronation Napoleon didn't like that she had to be paint her in de vita also painted himself in here i can't recall you somewhere up in here and we've seen this before we saw this in the Spanish baroque period with Las Meninas painted by Diego Velazquez this idea of including artists and significant events to communicate the general importance of the profession of artists now let's talk about some other fictions let's talk about the Pope now the Pope did come to the coronation okay but it didn't happen exactly as we see it traditionally what happened is that the Pope would come and would crown royalty and so when the Pope shows up to crown Napoleon and for our friends the point actually takes the crown from the Pope's head and crowns himself and this gesture clearly indicates that Napoleon is communicating that he alone has power the powers not granted to him by the church and this was like not cool in the eyes of Pius the seventh he was pretty upset about this and so this parts kind of accurate how he was like kind of pouting and stuff but what was false is that you can see here Napoleon had debuted paint in this gesture of blessing the Pope was not giving any blessings after Napoleon took the crown the other thing that's interesting is it daveed has depicted Napoleon's standing while the Pope sits this is an interesting dynamic because it shows that Napoleon is more powerful he's standing while the Pope is in the more submissive position of being seated other thing is that the Pope or excuse me Napoleon has his back to the Pope which is super disrespectful but it also is indicating that Napoleon is more powerful than the Pope they didn't have a really great relationship after this coronation ceremony now let's talk about what's neoclassical about this one this one's a little bit more difficult because we don't have overtly classical references like we did with pietà which yes technically is a Renaissance work of art but we know the Renaissance was highly influenced by the Classical period and like what we saw with the Roman equestrian portrait that Napoleon utilized for his Bernard Pass portrait so what we have here is we don't have really the overt classical references except for like maybe right in here but we do have the shallow stage like space we do have some of the dramatic spotlight lighting and we also have the polarities and in this case the polarities are the clergy the religious clergy and the imperial court all right let's look at something else I'm not painted by DeFede this is by antoine jean gross and this is napoleon at the pest house at java ross painted for napoleon as well so napoleon didn't give all of his commissions to de'vide he spread it around a little bit and he created had this painting created as a little bit of propaganda this is not anything new we see propagandistic imagery all the way back to Egypt so nothing new Napoleon's smart he understands the power of art so what happened was there was kind of an unfortunate situation Napoleon went there was a an outbreak of the plague and in France and so what happened is they were quarantine plague victims and what happened was Napoleon had ordered that these people be killed and somehow this you know got out and it was this horrible thing you know these people are sick in Napoleon just as having them you know killed in large numbers he wasn't wanting them to be poisoned and so he had to do a little bit of damage control and to tell people France like oh hey guys umm not only did I not have people poisoned I actually went and visited people at this plague house this was fictional but again it was propaganda so we have Napoleon you know so brave coming in and visiting these plague victims here he is right here and he's reaching out he is so brave that he is touching an open sore as a plague victim he um it's not worried about getting sick because he's God like he's not gonna get the plague this guy can't even breathe he's like it's so gross and there he's covering up as his mouth the points on unfazed this guy right here is like looking up and ah and Napoleon so very dramatic which that's that tends to be typical of a propagandistic imagery now if you look at the style you can see that I've actually listed two styles here French neoclassicism and Romanticism which we haven't talked about yet this image is technically a transitional image it has components that are neoclassical it also has components that are romantic which is a style that is beginning to emerge during this time although it doesn't reach its full potential until the 1830s so um with this okay we have a few different things so let's talk first of all about what is neoclassical we have of course the context that it's coming out of Napoleon's France we have kind of more of an idealized treatment of the subject we have pretty much a stage like space we've got the dramatic spotlight lighting and we have the polarities in this case it's the Muslim doctors and the French now what is romantic you will notice that we have a looser brushwork let's just go back for one minute not this one so much we can look at this one pretty tight crisp brushwork here it's a lot looser you can see it especially in the background with this representation of atmosphere this is really common in romantic painting dramatic atmosphere so we have the the looser brushwork we have the sense of atmosphere we have this kind of random it's a joke but like it's kind of not we've seen a lot of romantic paintings and I don't know why it's very often there'll be a random man with no pants so here's our man with no pants and then the other thing that's romantic is that romantic paintings tend to have an exotic component to them here are the exotics ISM is in the form of the Muslim doctor seen here and the architecture of this space this right here is an archway that is distinctly Islamic and then here we have a minaret in the background which is a tower that calls the faithful of Islam to prayer five times the dinner all right American neoclassicism neoclassicism was an incredibly popular style it found articulation in other regions besides France and one of those places is America and it appeals to Americans because we've been seeing that a lot of the neoclassical style is related to ideas of like being moral being patriotic having civic virtue paying homage to your father to your country that sort of thing and this allowed for you know these these ideas allowed for neoclassicism to have a relatively wide application contextually it could be applied to the French monarchy it could be applied to the French Revolution it could be applied to the imperialism of Napoleon it could be applied to the revolution of America so this is why you see neoclassicism being so popular the ideas are appealing and they can be used in different context now here we have a sculpture of George Washington and this is executed in a purely neoclassical style what is neoclassical about this work well first of all this is an appropriation of a sculpture that was created in ancient Greece there is this image in ancient Greece of Zeus who's like the head guy of the hierarchy of gods and Greece shown seated in a throne and the arms extended we've had other rulers who have reiterated this idea namely Constantine in the late Empire period of rum and now we have George Washington who's emulating this as well so this is a visual motif that extends back to classical Greece you can look at George Washington and he's got a pretty ripped body that idealism in terms of musculature that also dates back to ancient Greece and of course that was a common component in ancient Rome as well so those are you know some some parts that are our classical and this is a ruler portrait rights the idea is to convey power it is kind of happening in an interesting way it's showing like physical power is strong is muscular they were power by kind of relating him to the god Zeus as well now I will say that this sculpture did not go over well at all and there's a few reasons for that first of all one of the things with Americans we kind of talked about this before is that Americans we are Americans we do our own thing we like to have things that are uniquely American this is a little bit too much European to appeal to the individualistic quality that Americans had so they didn't like that it was so classical and just basically kind of reiterating something that already had been done in Europe Americans wanted something that was distinctly American the other thing that didn't quite work well is the fact that George Washington is semi-nude this didn't really resonate culturally with Americans who felt like this was an inappropriate and almost disrespectful way to depict our first president and we will conclude with some American neoclassical architecture the very famous Monticello which was designed by our former president and who is also an architect Thomas Jefferson so I will say this about neoclassical architecture it was very very popular in America and it was adopted as the official style of our government architecture this is why all of our government buildings are in the neoclassical style the White House the Supreme Court building Capitol building etc right it's because neoclassical style which is relating to these lofty ideas as I said of being democratic because democracy supposedly originated in Greece or a form of democracy or not everybody was free and democracy originated in Greece and they were patriotic there was intelligence etc so gorgeous home this is a personal home of Thomas Jefferson and he had studied architecture and he actually went to Europe to see it firsthand and so we can see his influence on this in this structure there's a lot of classical attributes now first of all this structure is loosely based off of the Roman pantheon the most important structure ever built it too is kind of rotunda esque structure meaning that it's round it's topped by a dome and then it has an emphasized portico or a porch it's the same exact architectural setup as the Pantheon so like other neoclassical works of art that we've been looking at we do have that reference back to classical artwork in many cases this tends to be a reference back to the specific classical pieces we have also classical elements here which you don't have to note these but we have our pediment our entablature we have a colonnade these are Tuscan columns which came out of Rome and it's actually a pretty pretty interesting design I like the red of the brick and the way that it interacts with the white of the architecture I like the austerity of it there's a seriousness to it this idea that government is serious business there's a balance and there's a rationality that pervades throughout the design

Channel: Brandelyn Andres

Views: 4,959

Rating: 4.8888888 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: JElJfpUZ5-o

Length: 36min 43sec (2203 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 13 2016