Dictionary:

classicism

  (klăs'ĭ-sĭz'əm) also classicalism (-kə-lĭz'əm)

1. Aesthetic attitudes and principles manifested in the art, architecture, and literature of ancient Greece and Rome and characterized by emphasis on form, simplicity, proportion, and restraint.
2. Adherence to the aesthetic values embodied in ancient Greek and Roman art and literature.
3. Classical scholarship.
4. A Greek or Latin expression or idiom.

classicism, an attitude to literature that is guided by admiration of the qualities of formal balance, proportion, decorum, and restraint attributed to the major works of ancient Greek and Roman literature (‘the classics’) in preference to the irregularities of later vernacular literatures, and especially (since about 1800) to the artistic liberties proclaimed by Romanticism. A classic is a work of the highest class, and has also been taken to mean a work suitable for study in school classes. During and since the Renaissance, these overlapping meanings came to be applied to (and to be virtually synonymous with) the writings of major Greek and Roman authors from Homer to Juvenal, which were regarded as unsurpassed models of excellence. The adjective classical, usually applied to this body of writings, has since been extended to outstandingly creative periods of other literatures: the 17th century may be regarded as the classical age of French literature, and the 19th century the classical period of the Western novel, while the finest fiction of the United States in the mid‐19th century from Cooper to Twain was referred to by D. H. Lawrence as Classic American Literature (despite the opposition between ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ views of art, a romantic work can now still be a classic). A classical style or approach to literary composition is usually one that imitates Greek or Roman models in subject‐matter (e.g. Greek legends) or in form (by the adoption of genres like tragedy, epic, ode, or verse satire), or both. As a literary doctrine, classicism holds that the writer must be governed by rules, models, or conventions, rather than by wayward inspiration: in its most strictly codified form in the 17th and 18th centuries (see neoclassicism), it required the observance of rules derived from Aristotle's Poetics (4th century BCE) and Horace's Ars Poetica (c.20 BCE), principally those of decorum and the dramatic unities. The dominant tendency of French literature in the 17th and 18th centuries, classicism in a weaker form also characterized the Augustan Age in England; the later German classicism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was distinguished by its exclusive interest in Greek models, as opposed to the Roman bias of French and English classicisms. After the end of the 18th century, ‘classical’ came to be contrasted with ‘romantic’ in an opposition of increasingly generalized terms embracing moods and attitudes as well as characteristics of actual works. While partisans of Romanticism associated the classical with the rigidly artificial and the romantic with the freely creative, the classicists condemned romantic self‐expression as eccentric self‐indulgence, in the name of classical sanity and order. The great German writer J. W. von Goethe summarized his conversion to classical principles by defining the classical as healthy, the romantic as sickly. Since then, literary classicism has often been less a matter of imitating Greek and Roman models than of resisting the claims of Romanticism and all that it may be thought to stand for (Protestantism, liberalism, democracy, anarchy): the critical doctrines of Matthew Arnold and more especially of T. S. Eliot are classicist in this sense of reacting against the Romantic principle of unrestrained self‐expression. For a fuller account, consult Dominique Secretan, Classicism (1973).

For more information on Classicism, visit Britannica.com.

In architecture, principles that emphasize the correct use not only of Roman and Greek, but also of Italian Renaissance models.

1. Legend and Counter-Legend

The words classicisme and classique are applied to many periods, from antiquity to the early 20th c. of Gide and Valéry, thus implying the existence of an eternal classicism, opposed to an eternal romanticism or baroque. The terms are most used, however, of the literature of the second half of the 17th c., though the âge classique may be seen as extending well into the 18th c. ‘Neoclassicism’, often used as a synonym by English-speaking writers, is best kept for the quite different artistic movement of the late 18th c.

17th-c. classicism is largely a construction of later generations, who used it for their own ideological purposes. The so-called classical writers did not see themselves as such. The word had originally meant the best (usually ancient) writers, and those who were suitable for class-room study. In the mid-18th c., as French literature was more studied in the schools, a set of writers came to be seen as the modern equivalent of the classics of antiquity. This phalanx, with Racine as its central figure, was seen as transcending the disorder, confusion, and licence of earlier generations. Voltaire in his Siècle de Louis XIV enshrined the notion of a cultural high point, comparable to the centuries of Pericles or Augustus. La Harpe, in his influential Lycée, reiterated the classical poetics worked out over the previous 150 years and offered the French classical writers as unequalled literary models. They were to retain their position in the national patrimoine and the school curriculum during the 19th and much of the 20th c.

Because classicism was seen as associated with power, both the royal power of the 17th c. and the power of teachers and academies in the 19th, it became the object of fierce attacks. Romantics such as Hugo or Stendhal saw classical rules as hostile to freedom, imagination, and creativity. Foucault's description of oppressive classical culture in his Histoire de la folie is a modern variation on this theme. Against the idea of a serene order of clarity, harmony, and good taste, modern literary history has therefore tended to stress the variety of 17th-c. writing, paying more attention to the first half of the century and the irréguliers or libertins (e.g. Théophile, Cyrano de Bergerac) who had been overshadowed by the generation of 1660. The baroque and preciosity have come to be viewed more positively, and the importance of women's writing in this period has been more fully recognized.

A different strategy, beginning with the Histoire de la littérature classique (1940) of Daniel Mornet, has been to stretch the idea of classicism to include many qualities previously excluded. This is already visible in Gide's definition of it as ‘un romantisme dompté’, and may be likened to the Nietzschean notion of Greek tragedy as a marriage of Apollo and Dionysus. On this view, classicism does not suppress energy, wit, and passion, but holds them in a productive and satisfying equilibrium. It is characterized less by rules than by its interest in taste, pleasure, and the inexplicable je ne sais quoi.

2. Theories

At one time it was customary to speak of a ‘doctrine classique’. In so far as this implies a shared body of theory which governed writing it is, like the idea of classicism, a post facto construction. Theorists argued with one another, and writers did not necessarily take much notice of them. Even so, the classical period is marked by the new importance given to poetics and criticism, which had an official head-quarters in the newly created Académie Française. The discussions among writers, theorists, and amateurs concerned above all tragedy, but also epic poetry, prose eloquence and lyric poetry, and to a lesser extent comedy, history, and even the novel. The most prominent 17th-c. theorists included d'Aubignac, Balzac, Boileau, Bouhours, La Ménardière, Le Bossu, and Rapin, followed in the 18th c. by Batteux, Marmontel, and others. Boileau, in the Art poétique (1674), the most important single critical work of the time, signalled the role of Malherbe (‘Enfin Malherbe vint’) in establishing a verse language worthy of literature, and language and versification remain central theoretical preoccupations. Other notions which commanded fairly general respect are:

a. Imitation of antiquity. The theorists of classicism, like those of the Renaissance, saw modern literature as working in a tradition which went back to the great writers of antiquity [see Classical Influences]. Although certain theorists were deferential to Aristotle (as interpreted by 16th-c. scholars) and to the rules which he had supposedly extrapolated from ancient practice, the notion of imitation meant re-creation rather than copying. Nevertheless, respect for antiquity was shaken during the 17th c., particularly in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes.

b. Truth to nature. This very elastic concept has served many different literary movements. In the 17th c. it had negative and positive functions. Negatively, it condemns the extravagance attributed to previous generations (what we now call the baroque); positively, it means finding the best possible way of writing about human nature, seen not so much in its local manifestations as in its unchanging essence. A key concept is that of vraisemblance (verisimilitude), which is preferred to attested historical truth; it is vraisemblance which underlies the rule of the three unities [see tragedy].

c. Reason. Closely associated with truth to nature, ‘la raison’ does not mean rationalism, nor does it rule out imagination and creativity. It does, however, imply a taste for order, measure, and harmony. In its social manifestation it enjoins the writer to observe the decorum designated by the term bienséance [see tragedy]. This sets the classical culture of the honnêtes gens apart from the world of peasants, children, or savages.

d. Instruction. Poetry was no longer invested with the grandiose philosophical or religious mission assigned it by a Ronsard, but almost all critics spoke of its didactic function. Aesthetic pleasure was not an end in itself. In its extreme form, in the writing of Le Bossu, this meant the assimilation of the Iliad to the Aesopic fable.

e. Pleasure. While writers had a duty to instruct, they were no less obliged to give pleasure—‘plaire et toucher’; indeed, pleasure makes instruction possible. Critics and theorists, although not always preaching subservience to the taste of the audience, insisted on the need to avoid idiosyncratic independence and pedantic scholarship. Classical culture was far from monolithic, but compared with later generations it shows a remarkable harmony between writer and polite public.

3. Writers

The writers thought of as classical are sometimes grouped under the label ‘l'école de 1660’. In fact, although some of them were linked by friendship, the writers who came to prominence in the 1660s are far from forming a school. For the period 1660-90, the major figures often described as classical are: Pierre Corneille, Pascal, La Fontaine, Boileau, Molière, Racine, Bossuet, La Fayette, La Rochefoucauld, Sévigné, La Bruyère, and perhaps Fénelon, with a second rank including Bourdaloue, Fléchier, Quinault, Thomas Corneille, and Saint-Évremond. Some important writers of the period are generally excluded from the list as representing tendencies which are inimical to classicism, e.g. Madeleine de Scudéry, Perrault, Fontenelle, Villedieu, Bayle.

When one considers this list, it does not look like a coherent group whose writing embodies the theories outlined above. At one extreme, it has been suggested that Racine is the only truly classical writer—particularly if one accepts the view of him as the incarnation of taste and equilibrium, ignoring the extravagance and violence of his theatre. P. Corneille, belonging to an earlier generation, was at odds with the rule-makers and many of their principles. Molière can only be made classical by forgetting a large part of his work, from the farces to the comédies-ballets. La Fontaine was a free spirit. Boileau was the champion of classical poetics, but his own satiric poetry hardly conforms to it. Sévigné and La Fayette wrote in genres that were barely recognized by critics, and the moralistes, like Pascal, favoured fragmentary, discontinuous forms. Bossuet's eloquence is Christian before it is classical, though the two are not necessarily at odds.

Nevertheless, in at least two respects these writers belong together. First, all are preoccupied with understanding human nature and finding the best way of expressing this understanding. Psychological and moral curiosity dominates the age, and this is addressed above all to the social behaviour of human beings. Secondly, all show a powerful rhetorical awareness of their audience. They may not flatter it, sometimes they shock its expectations (La Bruyère, Pascal), but they belong in the society for which they write. One sign of this is the marked stress on orality in their works.

Of course these characteristics were not unique to the writers of the late 17th c.; they continued to define most French writing of the 18th c. What is more specific is that these writers belonged to a court-dominated, absolutist society, and this affected what they wrote. Not that one can equate classicism with authoritarianism; although many of the writers mentioned above enjoyed official patronage, and some took part in the academies that mediated royal power in the arts, none were simply pillars of the establishment. Most had a strongly critical streak; in the absence of any perspective of social or political change, this often found expression in a vision that was ironic, world-denying, or tragic.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• H. Peyre, Le Classicisme français (1942)
• E. B. O. Borgerhoff, The Freedom of French Classicism (1950)
• J. Brody (ed.), French Classicism: A Critical Miscellany (1966); Continuum I, ‘Rethinking Classicism’ (1990)

The aesthetic and cultural perspective guided by admiration for what are perceived as classical qualities: order, maturity, harmony, balance, moderation. The central models for works striving to achieve these qualities are the literary, artistic, and architectural works of ancient Greece and Rome. In the 18th century the pursuit of these ideals became codified in terms of rules of decorum deriving from Aristotle's Poetics and Horace's Art of Poetry. The Augustan age in England stretched from the time of Dryden to the middle of the 18th century, and included many self-conscious attempts to imitate the poets of the Augustan age in Rome (Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Propertius). In philosophical writing Hume is the most self-consciously Augustan of the great philosophers. In the late 18th century the more idiosyncratic, free, unfettered spirit of Romanticism rebelled against what became perceived as the artificial restrictions of classicism.

In general, classicism can be defined as a style in literature, visual art, music, or architecture that draws on the styles of ancient Greece and Rome, especially fifth- and fourth-century B.C.E. Athens and late Republican Augustan Rome. The term can be confusing, because it has taken on many other meanings. It can refer to a general aesthetic characterized by clarity, elegance, and symmetry, or to a style that is generally thought of as exemplifying greatness or perfection. For instance, most people would identify the Boston Pops as performers of "classical music" or John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath as a "classic" of American literature, even though they have little to do with antiquity. Variations on the term, like neoclassicism, can furthermore refer to a specific school or style in a particular time period. Despite this confusion, the term is still useful in describing particular styles and impulses in literature and the arts from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century.

The Middle Ages experienced two noteworthy revivals of the literature of antiquity that were inspired by and helped to promote classicism. The first is known as the Carolingian Renaissance, so called to recognize the flowering of learning under the reign of Charlemagne (ruled 768–814). The most famous figure of this period was the monk Alcuin (c. 732–804), who amassed a remarkable manuscript collection of classical works in the library of York. At the invitation of the emperor Alcuin developed an educational curriculum at the Palace School in Aachen that included readings of classical authors. He also developed the Carolingian miniscule, a clear script based on classical principles, and promoted the copying and distribution of classical texts. The achievements of the Carolingian age set the stage for the next classical revival, known as the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, a term coined by Charles Homer Haskins (1870–1937) to describe the flowering of classical learning during this period. It was more far-reaching than the earlier revival and had implications beyond the field of literature, most importantly in architecture, the visual arts, and the revival of Roman law.

From the twelfth century on, classicism was the domain mainly of lawyers and churchmen, most notably in the papal curia (the circle of theologians and secretaries who carried on papal business), where learned men could come together to share their interests in classical letters and style. It was in this environment at Avignon that Petrarch (1304–1374), the father of Italian humanism, first learned about and promoted classical learning. But it was in Florence, particularly among the patrician class, that Petrarch's classicism was most strongly received, most notably through his friend and disciple Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375). Up to this point classicism had been mainly a literary pursuit that influenced the art of letter writing, poetry, and rhetoric. In the following generation, the Florentine chancellor Colucio Salutati (1331–1406) helped turn classicism from a literary movement into a powerful tool for shaping politics and society on the Italian peninsula. It was in the works of the humanist historian Leonardo Bruni (c. 1370–1444) that classicism laid the foundation for a republican ideology.

The study of ancient Greek was virtually unknown in western Europe from the fifth century C.E. onward. Greek had been a fundamental part of the Roman educational system; any educated Roman would have known it and been able to quote from its most famous authors and orators, such as Demosthenes, Aristophanes, or Lucian. As humanists in Petrarch's circle read more and more ancient authors they discovered that a full appreciation of their literature required a thorough background in the literature and culture of ancient Greece. Salutati invited the most celebrated Byzantine scholar of the times, Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1353–1415), to teach in Florence. The revival of Greek learning was aided by growing contact between the Greek and Latin churches at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–1445 and also by the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, after which Greek émigrés fleeing the city took up residence in Italy and made a living by teaching Greek to Italian pupils. They also brought with them many Greek texts that had been virtually unknown and unread in western Europe since the fall of Rome. Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1472), a priest who converted from the Greek to the Latin church and was a tireless promoter of ancient Greek studies, bequeathed thousands of Greek manuscripts to the people of his adopted home of Venice, where they formed the nucleus of St. Mark's Library. The works of Plato were especially influential, and a circle of Neoplatonic scholars led by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499) sought to fuse Christian thought with Platonic philosophy.

Classicism was also the foundation of the educational revolution of the Renaissance, which sought to revive the studia humanitatis, the educational system of ancient Rome as set out in the writings of classical authors like Cicero and Quintilian. The schoolmasters Gasparino da Barzizza (1360?–1430) and Guarino da Verona (1370/1374–1460) attracted wealthy students to study ancient literature and culture in their schools, and along with Bruni they wrote educational treatises that outlined their pedagogical method. Their disciples carried on their teachings—both in classrooms and in educational treatises and editions of classical works—and spread them throughout Italy and across the Alps into northern Europe. The introduction of printing in the latter part of the fifteenth century greatly propelled humanist learning, providing stable editions of classical texts to a far wider audience than could have been imagined in the earlier classical revivals of the Carolingian period or the twelfth century. The advent of printing is likely responsible for the permanent establishment of classicism as an integral part of Western civilization from the fourteenth century to the present day.

Classicism was embraced in many ways during the Renaissance in Italy, and it manifested itself in various pursuits. For example, Julius Pomponius Laetus (1428–1497) founded the Roman Academy, whose members took an active role in antiquarianism and the study of the ancient ruins of the city of Rome. They also embraced non-Christian ideas and revived ancient pagan ceremonies, which brought them under the scrutiny of church authorities. The collection and preservation of inscriptions, coins, and buildings by antiquarians were important in the historical reconstruction of the history of Rome, and these activities represented the early development of modern archaeology. Meanwhile, Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) explored the linguistic aspects of ancient writers and gave the study of the Latin language a more scientific grounding. His most famous work, Elegances of the Latin Language (published 1471), was a practical style guide for writing and speaking the most elegant Latin, which he identified with the Latin of the "golden age" of Roman letters. By periodizing Latin style, Valla invented a philological method for the scientific study of texts that was further developed by Christian humanists like Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466?–1536), who used it to challenge the authenticity of the Vulgate Bible. This philological method also laid the foundation for modern textual criticism.

While the classicism of the Renaissance started as a literary pursuit, its most striking and accessible flourishing occurred in the visual arts and architecture at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The sculptor Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) turned his talents to architecture and designed (or redesigned) many churches and palaces in a style that reflected his study of ancient buildings. He was particularly interested in the mathematical proportions behind the design of ancient Roman buildings and in developing engineering processes to build them. His slightly younger contemporary Donatello (c. 1386–1466) used the same principles to create statues that imitated the style of classical sculpture. Along with the painter Masaccio (1401–1428), who included classical elements in the content of his paintings and used newly developed techniques of perspective, these visual artists reflected what is known as the early Renaissance style. Its techniques were recorded and explained in treatises written in the vernacular by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), who made the principles of perspective drawing and painting accessible to a wide variety of artists who wanted to learn this fashionable approach. The new style of art was funded by wealthy patrons, including businessmen, aristocrats, and the popes. Classical styles and themes continued to dominate the period of the High Renaissance in the work of the early-sixteenth-century masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564), and Raphael Sanzio (1483–1520).

If Italians played the lead role in the revival of antiquity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the sixteenth century that role was assumed by northern Europe, where classicism particularly flourished among scholars in France, Germany, Switzerland, and England. While classicism had played a small role in medieval universities like Oxford and Paris, its influence had not been widespread. With the new availability of relatively inexpensive printed books and Italian-trained native teachers, however, the study of classical literature became more accessible, and by the middle of the century it was the norm in most educational curricula.

The study of theology in the sixteenth century was completely overhauled as humanist scholars like Erasmus insisted that a thorough grounding in the three biblical languages (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin) was necessary to understand the Bible. Scholasticism, the prevailing school of theology that had its origins in the twelfth-century Paris schools, did not have any particular animosity toward classicism; indeed, a number of Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages, such as Jean de Gerson (1363–1429), displayed interest in the classics. But Scholastic theologians did object strongly to the application of the philological method to the text of the Bible and to language study as the foundation of theological training. Humanists like Erasmus and Protestant reformers like Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1560), himself a scholar of ancient Greek, argued that the theologians were hostile to their biblical studies because they disliked and were ignorant of classical literature, thus turning a debate over authority in theology into a debate over classical learning. By mid-century, classical literature was the foundation of the educational program both in Catholic countries, where the Jesuit order promoted classical learning, and in Protestant countries.

Another controversy that arose among classical scholars themselves was over the status and influence of the Roman orator Cicero. Most prominent in Rome, the Ciceronian faction promoted Cicero as the highest standard of Latin usage, and some, like the papal secretary Pietro Bembo (1470–1547), vowed never to use a word that did not appear in Cicero's writings. Erasmus wrote a famous dialogue mocking what he saw as the Ciceronians' slavish following of Cicero, and he argued for a broader-based standard for Latin usage. This debate continued into the seventeenth century as some scholars sought to dethrone Cicero. At the end of the sixteenth century the Dutch humanist and scholar Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) promoted the revival of the Stoic philosophy. Strongly influenced by the Roman philosopher Seneca, Lipsius promoted Stoicism as an alternative to Neoplatonism, which had been so influential in the earlier part of the century. A little later in France, the astronomer and mathematician Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) championed the revival of Epicureanism, a more materialist ancient philosophy that was more in tune with the rationalism that was gaining ground at the time.

The dramatic growth of vernacular literature in the sixteenth century hastened the abandonment of classical form in literature, though many of its stylistic attributes were adopted as conventions of vernacular style and content. This is visible in works of the group of sixteenth-century French poets known as La Pléïade, and it continues right through to the plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In art classical themes and motifs remained the norm throughout the sixteenth century, but they were challenged late in the century by the emergence of baroque and rococo styles in art, architecture, and music. This movement away from classicism corresponded to a general shift away from the authority of the ancients and toward a greater emphasis on human reason and sense perception, as articulated most strongly in the Discours de la méthode (1637; Discourse on method) by René Descartes (1596–1650). In the arts this shift was reflected by a tendency to focus on human emotions and movement, while retaining the grandiose style and form more characteristic of Renaissance art. The Italian painter, sculptor, and architect Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) exemplifies the baroque style by infusing classical style with intense emotion, as in his Ecstasy of St. Theresa (1645–1652). Likewise baroque music, exemplified by the compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), retained the classical notion of music expressing the order of the universe but was at the same time lively and tuneful. "Neoclassical" is the name given to the style of art and architecture that prevailed from the middle of the eighteenth century through the nineteenth. In music, Franz Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) represent the tenets of classicism, emphasizing balance and proportion. But for Mozart, and even more so for Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827), classical elements were mixed with Romantic ones.

Classicism created a standard of civilization against which contemporary society could be judged, a standard that was prevalent in the early modern period. What began as an elitist literary hobby bloomed from the time of Petrarch and was applied to all facets of life—from education and politics to music, visual art, and architecture. The classical ideal was something to strive for, and in striving for it adherents developed new methods to attain the ideal. Along the way they made advances in mathematics, engineering, linguistics, and design that in turn led to advances in other areas. Moreover, classicism was extremely flexible. It could temper the ascetic desires of a Carmelite monk like Baptista Spagnoli (Mantuanus; 1447–1516), known in his own time as the Christian Virgil, just as easily as it could feed the vanity of an artist like Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), who in his autobiography boasted of his own talents. The same style of architecture that the Americans used for their new capital in Washington, D.C., in order to present their sense of achievement in gaining independence from the British, had previously been used as a symbol of the opulence of the French nobility and crown at Versailles, and it also enshrined the gods of reason in the Pantheon in Paris. Because the classical world contained a spectrum of thought and style, classicism offered an almost endless variety of models and ideas. Though it continued to be strong in some quarters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, classicism never again became as widespread as it had been in the previous five centuries. To a great extent, the discoveries of modern science began to show just how much the ancients had not known, as had been foreshadowed by the European discovery of the "New World" and by Galileo's telescope. As a standard, at least, the ancients were eventually surpassed.

Bibliography

Benson, Robert L., and Giles Constable, eds. Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century. Cambridge, Mass., 1982.

Berger, Robert W. A Royal Passion: Louis XIV as Patron of Architecture. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1994.

Duro, Paul. The Academy and the Limits of Painting in Seventeenth-Century France. New York, 1997.

Grafton, Anthony. Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1997.

Grafton, Anthony, and Lisa Jardine. From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. London, 1986.

Kristeller, Paul Oskar. Renaissance Thought: The Classic, Scholastic, and Humanist Strains. New York, 1961.

Nauert, Charles G., Jr. Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1995.

Rosen, Charles. The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. Expanded ed. New York, 1997.

Rowland, Ingrid D. The Place of the Antique in Early Modern Europe. Chicago, 1999.

Shankman, Steven. In Search of the Classic: Reconsidering the Greco-Roman Tradition, Homer to Valéry and Beyond. University Park, Pa., 1994.

Weiss, Roberto. The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity. 2nd ed. Oxford and New York, 1988.

—MARK CRANE

An approach to aesthetics that favors restraint, rationality, and the use of strict forms in literature, painting, architecture, and other arts. It flourished in ancient Greece and Rome, and throughout Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Classicists often derived their models from the ancient Greeks and Romans.

The adherence to traditional standards that are universally valid and enduring.

For the works or study of works from classical antiquity, see Classics

Classicist door in Olomouc, The Czech Republic

Teatr Wielki in Warsaw

Church La Madeleine in Paris

Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for classical antiquity, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seeks to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained. It can also refer to the other periods of classicism.

Classicism is a force which is always present in post-medieval European and European influenced traditions, however, some periods felt themselves more connected to the classical ideals than others, particularly the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment and some movements in Modernism. The force in particular formed movements labelled "classical" or were referred from the perspective of the 20th century as having been classical. This includes classical economics and classical physics, both of which were related to the more general ideals of classicism from that time period.

General term

Classicism is a specific genre of literature which has Greek and Roman influence, had an emphasis on society, the enlightenment, and the age of reason. Classical and neoclassical are related terms in a variety of fields, artistic, political and scientific. In general there are two strands identified as being important for classicism. The first is a self-conscious reference to the idea of axiomatic logic in the creation of a discipline, and the ideals of balance, proportion and moderation. The second is the period of a discipline when such reasoning from observable first principles is in full flower. Hence the modern referring to the period of economics before marginal theory as "classical" economics, and the references to physics before quantum mechanics as "classical physics".

Classicism first made an appearance as such during the Italian renaissance when the fall of Byzantium and rising trade with the Islamic cultures brought a flood of knowledge about, and from, the antiquity of Europe. Until that time the identification with antiquity had been seen as a continuous history of Christendom from the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine. Renaissance classicism introduced a host of elements into European culture, including the application of mathematics and empricism into art, humanism, literary and depictive realism, and formalism. Importantly it also introduced Polytheism, or "paganism", and the juxtaposition of ancient and modern.

The classicism of the Renaissance was to lead to, and give way to, a different sense of the classical in the 16th and 17th centuries. In this period classicism took on more overtly structural overtones of orderliness, predictability, the use of geometry and grids, the importance of rigorous discipline and pedagogy, the formation of schools of art and music. The court of Louis XIV was seen as the center of this form of classicism, with its references to the divine gods of Olympus as a symbolic prop for absolutism, its adherence to axiomatic and deductive reasoning, and its love of order and predictability. This period sought the revival of classical art forms, including Greek drama and music. Opera, in its modern European form, had its roots in attempts to recreate the combination of singing and dancing with theatre thought to be the Greek norm. Examples of this appeal to classicism included Dante, Petrarch and Shakespeare in poetry and theatre. Tudor drama, in particular, modeled itself after classical ideals and divided works into Tragedy and Comedy. Studying ancient Greek became regarded as essential for a well rounded education in the liberal arts.

The Renaissance also explicitly returned to architectural models and techniques associated with Greek and Roman antiquity, including the golden rectangle as a key proportion for buildings, the classical orders of columns, as well as a host of ornament and detail associated with Greek and Roman architecture. They also began reviving plastic arts such as bronze casting for sculpture, and used the classical naturalism as the foundation of drawing, painting and sculpture.

The Age of the Enlightenment identified itself with a vision of antiquity which, while continuous with the classicism of the previous century, was shaken by the physics of Sir Isaac Newton, the improvements in machinery and measurement, and a sense of liberation which they saw as being present in the Greek civilization, particularly in its struggles against the Persian Empire. The ornate, organic and complexly integrated forms of the baroque were to give way to a series of movements that regarded themselves expressly as "classical" or "neo-classical", or would rapidly be labelled as such. For example the painting of Jacques-Louis David which was seen as an attempt to return to formal balance, clarity, manliness and vigor in art.

The 19th century saw the classical age as being the precursor of academicism, including such movements as uniformitarianism in the sciences, and the creation of rigorous categories in artistic fields. Various movements of the romantic period saw themselves as classical revolts against a prevailing trend of emotionalism and irregularity, for example the Pre-Raphaelites. By this point classicism was old enough that previous classical movements received revivals, for example, the Renaissance was seen as a means to combine the organic medieval with the orderly classical. The 19th century continued or extended many classical programs in the sciences, most notably the Newtonian program to account for the movement of energy between bodies by means of exchange of mechanical and thermal energy.

The 20th century saw a number of changes in the arts and sciences. Classicism was used both by those who rejected, or saw as temporary, transfigurations in the political, scientific and social world - and by those who embraced the changes as a means to overthrow the perceived weight of the 19th century. Thus both pre-20th century disciplines were labelled "classical" and modern movements in art which saw themselves as aligned with light, space, sparseness of texture and formal coherence.

In the present classicism is used as a term particularly in relation to what Apollonian over Dionysian impulses in society and art, that is a preference for rationality, or at least rationally guided catharsis, over emotionalism.

In the theatre

Classicism in the theatre was developed by 17th century French playwrights from what they judged to be the rules of Greek classical theatre, including the so-called "Classical unities" of time, place and action, erroneously attributed to Aristotle.^{[verification needed]}

• Unity of time referred to the need for the entire action of the play to take place in a fictional 24-hour period
• Unity of place meant that the action should unfold in a single location
• Unity of action meant that the play should be constructed around a single 'plot-line', such as a tragic love affair or a conflict between honour and duty.

Classicists did not approve of Shakespeare,^{[verification needed]} who constantly broke these rules.

Examples of classicist playwrights:

• Pierre Corneille
• Jean Racine

Victor Hugo was among the first French playwrights to break these conventions.

In architecture and landscaping

Main article: Neoclassical architecture

Traditionally, classicism in architecture has entailed neoclassical architecture. Recently, however, the term has been appropriated to describe the neo-traditionalist movement associated with architect, urban planner and theorist Leon Krier, who describes the usage as follows:

We do not use the term Classicism as a stylistic classification. In the face of modernism the old polemic between Gothic and classic is largely irrelevant. . .Classicism embraces all monumental architecture (of all continents) of traditional construction and conception, fulfilling the Vitruvian triad. The work of Henry Bacon and that of Hassan Fathy belongs in that classification, as do the Eiffel Tower and the Crystal Palace. The latter are neither anti-historical nor anti-classical or antitraditional structures. They merely represent new additions to the vast typological and formal repertoire of the vernacular-classical tradition. When however they are elevated to the level of paradigm, architecture is diminished.^[1]

In the fine arts

Classical Art

In literature and poetry

See: Classical Literature

See also

• Polish classicism
• Neoclassicism
• Weimar Classicism

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Classicist paintings

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - klassicisme

Français (French)
n. - classicisme

Deutsch (German)
n. - Klassizismus

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - κλασικισμός, αρχαιοπρέπεια

Italiano (Italian)
classicismo

Português (Portuguese)
n. - Classicismo (m)

Русский (Russian)
классицизм

Español (Spanish)
n. - clasicismo, humanismo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - klassicism, klassicitet

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
古典主义, 古典教育主义, 古典风格, 古典派

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 古典主義, 古典教育主義, 古典風格, 古典派

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 고전주의

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 古典主義, 古典の知識, 古典的語法

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮קלסיות, קלסיציזם‬

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