An oath in Rome
Paris, the Salon of 1785. Visitors crowd in front of one picture. Three brothers stretch out their arms towards their father, who hands them their swords. They swear to fight for Rome, even if it means their death. On the right, the women of the family sink down in grief, sensing what is to come. Jacques-Louis David had painted The Oath of the Horatii in Rome itself, to be close to antiquity.
The picture was like a manifesto: clear lines, hard shadows, a stage like an ancient relief, and a message of duty and sacrifice. A few years later, in the Revolution of 1789, precisely this attitude was to become political.
Antiquity as the standard
Neoclassicism had its origins in scholarship. Herculaneum was excavated from 1738 and Pompeii from 1748, the cities buried in the eruption of Vesuvius in the year 79. Travellers on the Grand Tour brought home drawings, plaster casts and enthusiasm.
In 1755, in Dresden, the scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann published his Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture. The hallmark of the Greek masterpieces, he wrote, was “a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur”. Artists of the present should imitate the ancients in order to become great themselves. This formula shaped an entire generation.
Revolution and Empire
Jacques-Louis David became France’s leading painter. During the Revolution he sat in the National Convention as a Jacobin and voted for the king’s execution. In 1793 he painted The Death of Marat, the murdered revolutionary in his bathtub, as simple and solemn as an image of a saint. Later David served Napoleon and painted his coronation. After Napoleon’s fall he went into exile in Brussels, where he died in 1825.
His pupil Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres carried the line forward. He defended drawing as the foundation of art against the luminous colour of Eugène Delacroix, a dispute that shaped French painting for decades.
Marble like skin
Many regarded sculpture as the leading art of Neoclassicism, because the ancient models were above all sculptures. Antonio Canova, from the Veneto, created marble figures of great grace, such as Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, whose tender embrace can be seen in the Louvre today. The Dane Bertel Thorvaldsen lived in Rome for around forty years and became one of the most sought-after sculptors in Europe. In Berlin, Johann Gottfried Schadow portrayed the sisters Luise and Friederike of Prussia, at once classical and astonishingly lifelike.
A woman among the founders
The Chur-born painter Angelica Kauffman worked in Rome and London and was one of the most celebrated artists of her time. In 1768, together with Mary Moser, she was among the founding members of the Royal Academy in London. It then took until 1936, with Laura Knight, for another woman to be elected a full member.
Germany: Goethe, Schinkel and Klenze
In Germany, Neoclassicism merged with Weimar Classicism. In 1787 Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein painted Goethe in the Roman Campagna, the poet in a wide travelling cloak among ancient ruins. In Berlin, the Brandenburg Gate was built to designs by Carl Gotthard Langhans, crowned by Schadow’s Quadriga, and became the city’s landmark. Karl Friedrich Schinkel built the Altes Museum, and Leo von Klenze the Glyptothek in Munich for ancient sculpture.
Why it still matters
Neoclassicism shaped the face of many cities, from Berlin and Munich to Washington with its Capitol. It shaped the idea of the museum as a public temple of art and anchored ideas such as the ideal, measure and clarity in the theory of art. At the same time it provoked the counter-movement of Romanticism, which set feeling against the rule.
Further reading
- Johann Joachim Winckelmann: Reflections on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture (German original 1755).
- Hugh Honour: Neo-classicism (1968).