The Palace of Versailles had been notably ornamented and designed in the Baroque style. After the end of his reign, his successors moved from Versailles and adopted a more lighter approach to interior design. The word Rococo was adopted from the French word rocaille , and it refers to the shell-covered rock work employed in decorating artificial grottoes.
Architects such as Nicolas Pineau popularized the art in France and by the s the style had spread to the sculpting and painting disciplines. The style adopted asymmetry, light colors, and oriental designs and was championed by French artists such as Antoine Watteau and Jean Berain.
Outside of France, the style was soon embraced in Germany and Austria , and then spread into Italy and England. One of the most famous Rococo painters was Antoine Watteau. Watteau created a new kind of painting category known as amorous festival paintings.
These portrayed the aristocracy engaged in different leisure activities in the countryside. The Rococo style was criticized for its superficiality and ornamental excesses. 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. Rococo art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Asymmetrically designed candlesticks. Hotel de Soubise, Paris. This reader is part of a larger series of introductory texts about art and art history.
Each has been written under the direction of Rick Love. 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. Quick view Read more. Boucher's idyllic tableaus of classical mythology, pastoral landscapes which were some of the most popular artists of the eighteenth century. Jean-Antoine Watteau. Jean-Antoine Watteau famous French Rococo paintings were of light-hearted scenes of elegant upper-class life and love.
Fragonard was an eighteenth century French painter whose works epitomized the Rococo style of art. Beyond visual attractiveness, his paintings were infamous for their undercurrent of eroticism. Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin. Chardin is a lauded eighteenth-century French painter of still life, did much to advance the genre, influencing a great number of early European modern painters. The great 18th century Tiepolo ranks as the supreme painter of the ornamental Italian Rococo style.
Canaletto's Baroque views of Venice, Rome, and London won him praise and earned him a place in the history of European landscape painting. Thomas Gainsborough. Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter, as well as a founding member of the Royal Academy. Gainsborough's works were celebrated all over England; he was considered to be the preeminent British painter of his time. The Baroque. Baroque art and architecture emerged in late sixteenth-century Europe after the Renaissance, and lasted into the eighteenth century.
In contrast to the clarity and order of earlier art, it stressed theatrical atmosphere, dynamic flourishes, and myriad colors and textures. Looking back to the arts of Greece and Rome for ideal models and forms, Neoclassicism was a major art period that set standard and redefined painting, sculpture, and architecture. Grand Manner Portraiture.
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