1. 1600- 1800
Overview
• France emerges during this period as a major world power and a
cultural center to rival Rome, fountain head of the Baroque style.
• This is largely due to the absolutist aims of the French monarchs,
particularly Louis XIV, who, with a retinue of architects, painters, and
sculptors, fashions a court of peerless splendour.
• The high Baroque style from Rome is slower to arrive in France than
elsewhere in Europe, as a strict classicism prevails for much of the
seventeenth century.
• In the latter half of the period, France is the seat of the Enlightenment, a
major intellectual movement that asserts the power of reason and
mobilizes a widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary social and
political ills that results, later in the century, in revolution.
• rococo
• With the Enlightenment comes a renewed veneration of antiquity and a
Neoclassical movement in the arts; this gives way, at the end of the
period, to Romanticism.

2. 17 Century
th
the Age of Baroque

3. Chronology
• 1615 Cervantes begins Don Quixote
• 1618 The beginning of the 30 Year War
• 1619 Harvey’s discovered the circulation of the blood
• 1630 the building of the Taj Mahal begins
• 1635 Foundation of the Academie Francaise
• 1642 Rembrandt paints The Night Watch
• 1661 Versailles palace begins construction
• 1666 Stradivarius makes his first violin
• 1675 The Greenwich Observatory is built
• 1682 the Accession of Peter the Great of Russia
• 1683 Newton expounds his theory of gravity
• 1714 Fahrenheit invents the mercury thermometer

4. 17th Century
1600 -1700
• The reformation had been succeeded by the
Counter-Reformation
• Artists and architects benefited from the
renewed strength of the Catholic Church
• Pope Sixtus V replanned Rome in magnificent
style with churches, fountains and palaces at
focal points in the city.
• Noble families rivalled each other as patrons
• Rome became the Artistic capital or the world

5. Artists came from Spain, France, England and
Flounders for commissions
Painters embraced the challenge to create
integrated environments (un bel composto)
meant to heighten religious experience
A bohemian artists’ colony which still survives
grew up around the Spanish Steps
Members of this colony led the way in creating
new art styles and ideas which spread through
out Europe

6. Early Baroque
• Reaction against the artificiality of the 16th
Century Mannerism
• Realism was again in fashion, although
interpreted in different ways
• Two most important groups of Early
Baroque were the Naturalists and
Classicists

7. Naturalism
• Based on extreme realism
• Details are naturalistic and painted in
bright clear colours.
• As a rule painted directly on the canvas

8. Jan van Goyen
River Landscape with Lime Kilns 1640’s

9. Salomon van
Ruysdael
A Wooded
Landscapes with
Cattle and Droves
on a Ferry 1663

10. Carthage Dido, 1813

11. Carthage by Turner

12. • Religious stories told in contemporary
idiom
– ie: the apostles no longer heroes but rough-
looking fishermen
• Extreme foreshortening

13. Peter Paul
Rubens
Two Saints

14. Carravagio, Table at Eramuas

15. Nicolas Poussin
The Triumph of David c.1631-3

16. Harmensz
van Rijn
Rembrandt
Self Portrait
1658

17. Jan Vermeer
Girl with the Pearl
Ear ring c.1665-6

18. Georges de la Tour
The Newborn Child late 1640’s

19. Classicism
• Looked to realism of High Renaissance painting
and classical sculpture for inspiration
• Worked from preliminary drawings
• Monumental figures
• Glowing sensuous colours

20. Francois Boucher
La Cible d’Amour ( The Target of Love)
1758

21. Emphasis on clarity
of expression and
gesture
Ectasy of Mother
Theresa by Bellini

22. • Thomas Wentworth
• Van Dyck

23. Thomas
Gainsborough
Portrait of David
Garrick c1770

24. • Introduction of a new form of painting (realism) began to
paint scenes from everyday life - Millet

25. Jean-
Honore
Fragonard
Les Hazards
heureux de
l’escarpolette
(‘The Swing’)
1767

26. 18 Century
th
1700 - 1800
The Rococo, Neoclassical and
Romantic Era

27. Chronology
• 1717 The first inoculation against smallpox
• 1720 Johann Sebastian Bach completes his first Brandenburg
concerto
• 1735 Linnaeus completes a new system for the classification of
plants
• 1745 The building of Sans Souci palace in Berlin begins
• 1752 Benjamin Franklin invents the lightning conductor
• 1755 A great earthquake in Lisbon
• 1756 The beginning of the Seven Years’ War
• 1765 James Watt invents the steam engine
• 1770 Goethe starts work on Faust
• 1776 The American Declaration of Independence
• 1781 Kant publishes Critique of Pure Reason
• 1787 Mozart appointed Chamber Musician to Emperor Joseph II
• 1789 The storming of the Bastille leads to the outbreak of revolution
in France
• 1804 Napoleon Bonaparte becomes French Emperor

28. The Coronation of Napoleon,1804 David

29. Rococo
• The Rococo style was fashionable in the
early 18th century and was succeeded by
Neoclassical which was then succeeded
by the Romantic style
• Reaction against pomp and grandeur of
the court of Louis XIV

30. Louis XIV
Rigeud
1781

31. • Rococo was associated with his successor
Louis XV
• Colours are light with a lot of white and
silver.
• others colours favoured were: dusty rose,
pale lemon, misty blue, and turquoise
• not much gold as it was too heavy
• S- curves and C- curves frequently appear
in composition

32. Suzanna and the Elders, VEN

33. • Favourite subject stories from the Old
Testament or ancient history but with a
much more light-hearted approach
• Rococo was regarded as the last phase of
Baroque due to similarities such as
illusionist ceiling paintings of fabulous
fantasy worlds

34. Rococo Ceiling

35. Neoclassicism & Romanticism
1750’s
• In total contrast to the Rococo
• Demand for “heroism and civic virtues’ (Goethe)
• The Paris Salon – art should be governed by
rational rules and not uncontrolled feelings
• Rococo was seen and hedonistic and self-
indulgent
• Neoclassical art used spare but precise outline
preliminary drawings
• Figures are posed parallel instead of diagonal to
the picture plane

36. The Classical Ideal
•
The second half of the eighteenth century in Europe saw the increasing
influence of classical antiquity on artistic style and the development of taste.
The achievements of the Renaissance from the period of Raphael (1483–
1520) to that of Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665) and Claude Lorrain (1604/5?–
1682) served as a conduit for a renewed interest in harmony, simplicity, and
proportion, an interest that gained momentum as the new science of
archaeology brought forth spectacular remnants of a buried world of great
beauty. Giovanni Paolo Panini's Ancient Rome (1757 ) is representative of
the movement, a tour-de-force painting encompassing many of the
monuments in and around Rome, including the Pantheon, the Colosseum,
Trajan's Column, the Medici Vase, the Farnese Hercules,and the Laocoön.
In the midst of a grand gallery, students copy the great works of antiquity.
The Neoclassical style arose from such first-hand observation and
reproduction of antique works and came to dominate European architecture,
painting, sculpture, and decorative arts.

37. Romanticism
1800- 1850’s
• Romanticism, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France
and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and
flourished until mid-century.
• With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism
emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment
values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French
Revolution of 1789.
• Though often positioned in opposition to Neoclassicism, early
Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in David’s studio,
including Ingres
• This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best expressed in Ingres'
Apotheosis of Homer and Eugène Delacroix's Death of
Sardanapalus which polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in
Paris.

38. Jean-
Auguste-
Dominique
Ingres
Jupiter and Thetis
1811

39. • In Baroque and Rococo contours are
formed by shading, in Neoclassical they
are formed by unbroken lines, not
interrupted by light or shadow or even light
• A sense of order prevails everywhere.
• Portraits are half or full length

40. Francisco Goya
The Clothed Maja c. 1800-05

41. • Landscapes had traditionally been used to
fill in the background of a painting
• As techniques improved they became
more important to artists
• The public still wanted a ‘subject’ and
artists had to comply

42. • In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential
for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of
Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by
Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated
by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French
philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, "all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a
feeling of terror, leads to the sublime." In French and British painting of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks (
2003.42.56) and other representations of man's struggle against the awesome power
of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with
Théodore Gericault's strikingly original Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), based on a
contemporary event. In its horrifying explicitness, emotional intensity, and
conspicuous lack of a hero, The Raft of the Medusa became an icon of the emerging
Romantic style. Similarly, J. M. W. Turner's 1812 depiction of Hannibal and his army
crossing the Alps (Tate Britain, London), in which the general and his troops are
dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the landscape and engulfed in the swirling
vortex of snow, embodies the Romantic sensibility in landscape painting. Gericault
also explored the Romantic landscape in a series of views representing different
times of day; in Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct (1989.183), the dramatic sky,
blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie.

43. Casper
David
Friedrich
The
Wanderer
Above the
Sea of Clouds
1818

44. • If artists did paint landscapes it was for their own
pleasure and often in Italianate style
• Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature
emerges in the landscapes of John Constable, whose art
expresses his response to his native English
countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed
full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral (
50.145.8); he wrote that a sketch represents "nothing but
one state of mind—that which you were in at the time."
When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the
Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as
"nature itself." Constable's subjective, highly personal
view of nature accords with the individuality that is a
central tenet of Romanticism.

45. John Constable
Lock on the Stour

46. J.M.W. Turner
Farnley Hall from above Otley

47. • This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds
with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the
Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally,
records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles
for expressing a range of psychological and emotional
states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault
probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of
psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of
childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In
his portrait of Alfred Dedreux (41.17), a young boy of
about five or six, the child appears intensely serious,
more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the
background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.

48. Eugene Delacroix
Le Puits de la Casbah Tanger

49. • Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom,
marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and
metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of
wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by
artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer.
Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in
his work. Lord Byron's 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated
Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the
violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who
exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée
Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end
of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome.
His oil sketch (87.15.47) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just
before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal
states that stirred the Romantic imagination.

50. • In its stylistic diversity and range of
subjects, Romanticism defies simple
categorization. As the poet and critic
Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846,
"Romanticism is precisely situated neither
in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but
in a way of feeling."