also Ne·o·clas·si·cism n.

A revival of classical aesthetics and forms, especially:

1. A revival in literature in the late 17th and 18th centuries, characterized by a regard for the classical ideals of reason, form, and restraint.
2. A revival in the 18th and 19th centuries in architecture and art, especially in the decorative arts, characterized by order, symmetry, and simplicity of style.
3. A movement in music lasting roughly from 1915 to 1940 that sought to avoid subjective emotionalism and to return to the style of the pre-Romantic composers.

neoclassic ne'o·clas'sic or ne'o·clas'si·cal adj.
neoclassicist ne'o·clas'si·cist n.

neoclassicism, the literary principle according to which the writing and criticism of poetry and drama were to be guided by rules and precedents derived from the best ancient Greek and Roman authors; a codified form of classicism that dominated French literature in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a significant influence on English writing, especially from c.1660 to c.1780. In a more general sense, often employed in contrast with Romanticism, the term has also been used to describe the characteristic world‐view or value‐system of this ‘Age of Reason’, denoting a preference for rationality, clarity, restraint, order, and decorum, and for general truths rather than particular insights. In its more immediately literary sense as a habitual deference to Greek and Roman models in literary theory and practice, neoclassicism emerged from the rediscovery of Aristotle's Poetics (4th century BCE) by Italian scholars in the 16th century, notably by J. C. Scaliger, whose dogmatic interpretation of the dramatic unities in his Poetica (1561) profoundly affected the course of French drama. Along with Aristotle's theory of poetry as imitation and his classification of genres, the principles of the Roman poet Horace as expounded in his Ars Poetica (c.20 BCE) dominated the neoclassical or neoclassic view of literature: these included the principle of decorum by which the style must suit the subject‐matter, and the belief that art must both delight and instruct. The central assumption of neoclassicism was that the ancient authors had already attained perfection, so that the modern author's chief task was to imitate them—the imitation of Nature and the imitation of the ancients amounting to the same thing. Accordingly, the approved genres of classical literature— epic, tragedy, comedy, elegy, ode, epistle, eclogue, epigram, fable, and satire—were adopted as the favoured forms in this period. The most influential summary of neoclassical doctrine is Boileau's verse treatise L'Art poétique (1674); its equivalent in English is Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism (1711). In England, neoclassicism reached its height in the Augustan Age, when its general view of the world was presented memorably in Pope's Essay on Man (1733–4). Some modern critics refer to the period 1660–1780 in England as the ‘Neoclassical period’, but as an inclusive label this is misleading in that one very important development in this period—the emergence of the novel—falls outside the realm of neoclassicism, there being no acknowledged classical model for the new form.

A reinterpretation of the principles of Classical architecture in the late 18th and the early 19th century, and beyond. This term often includes the Federal style, Classical Revival style, and Greek Revival style and is generally characterized by: monumentality, colossal porticos, and columns; strict use of the Greek and Roman orders; sparing application of ornamentation, an unadorned roof line, and an avoidance of moldings. The term Neoclassical style is occasionally used as a synonym.

Neoclassicism of the 19th cent.

---

New and deliberate imitation of Greek and Roman subject-matter, ideas, and style which spread throughout mid-18th-c. Europe. It was stimulated by widespread interest and enthusiasm among the literati for the findings at archaeological excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii and by the interpretative writings of J. J. Winckelmann, especially his History of Ancient Art (1764). Lessing's Laocoon or Concerning the Limitations of Painting and Poetry followed in 1766, demanding more restraint from the visual arts than from poetry. Joseph-Marie Vien (1716-1809) led the fashionable taste in France for subjects from the classics when he returned to Paris in 1750, full of ideas from Rome. He became arbiter of taste in France, counting David among his famous pupils. The Réflexions sur la sculpture of Falconet formed a similar bridge between the ideas of the Rococo and Neoclassicism. La Live de Jully introduced Neoclassical decoration in his study in 1756, and Clerisseau, under the influence of Piranesi and Winckelmann, pioneered the new Roman style in architecture.

Winckelmann's favourite classical statue, the Apollo Belvedere, was looted from Italy by Napoleon and formed a touchstone for French Neoclassical taste. Training at the Academy resumed a more severe character and subjects for the Prix de Rome were taken from Stoic writers. A strong strand of realism, however, developed in portraiture and landscape subjects alongside this resumption of intellectual values. [See also Classicism.

[Patsy Campbell]

Neoclassicism is often termed simply classicism in Russia as, unlike those European countries which had experienced the Renaissance, Russia was exploring the classical vocabulary of ancient Greece and Rome for the first time. Classical motifs had appeared in Russia in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries but it was not until the 1760s that a coherent classical revival emerged, fueled by the work of scholars such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose publications were generating a more comprehensive understanding of the forms and functions of classical art. The effect of this growing veneration for the noble grandeur of classical forms is evident in the Marble Palace (1768 - 1785) in St. Petersburg by Antonio Rinaldi, in which the flamboyant exuberance of the Baroque is partially displaced by a more dignified restraint. Jean-Baptiste Vallin de la Mothe also applied neoclassical principles in his design for the Academy of Arts (1765 - 1789), itself a prime conduit of European artistic debates. The low dome, rusticated basement, and giant order of columns and pilasters serve as a visual reminder of the classical ideal to which the Academy's students were expected to aspire.

During Catherine II's reign, neoclassicism flourished in the private sphere, notably in the work that the Scottish architect Charles Cameron under-took at Tsarskoye Selo after his arrival in Russia in 1779. Cameron, who greatly admired the studies of the antique by Andrea Palladio and Charles-Louis Clérisseau and had himself published drawings of Roman baths, decorated his interiors at Tsarskoye Selo with glass or ceramic columns and molded plaster reliefs inspired by recently-discovered classical sites. Cameron went on to work for Catherine's son Paul at Pavlovsk, where his Temple of Friendship (1780 - 1782) in the park correctly deployed the Greek Doric order for the first time in Russia. The classical revival was also gathering momentum in the work of the Italian architects Vincenzo Brenna and Giacomo Quarenghi, who had worked with the great neoclassical artist Anton Raphael Mengs in Rome. The Hermitage Theater (1783 - 1787), one of Quarenghi's masterpieces, is articulated with giant engaged Corinthian columns, niches, and statuary, while the great curved form of the auditorium is visible from the outside.

Russian as well as foreign architects were working in the neoclassical style. Vasily Bazhenov, who had studied abroad as one of the first two recipients of a travel scholorship from the Academy of Arts, designed an enormous new palace complex for the Moscow Kremlin in 1768. While never realized for financial reasons, it would have applied the language of classicism on a monumental scale. His contemporary Matvei Kazakov never studied abroad, as Bazhenov had done, but brought Moscow neoclassicism to its apogee in the Senate in the Kremlin (1776 - 1787). Like its near contemporary in London, William Chambers's Somerset House, the Senate building uses the authority of classical forms to signify power and public purpose.

Under Alexander I, neoclassicism, also known in this period as the Alexandrian or Empire style, became increasingly prominent in the public domain. Designed by the serf-architect Andrei Voronikhin, the Mining Institute (1806 - 1811) in St. Petersburg included a twelve-column Doric portico and pediment based on the Temple of Poseidon at Paestum, while Thomas de Thomon reconstructed the Stock Exchange (1805 - 1810) as a Greek temple. The most ambitious project was Adrian Zakharov's new Admiralty (1806 - 1823), in which strong geometric masses and classical ornamentation coexist with specifically Russian references. The great central pavilion is decorated with free-standing and low-relief sculptures and an open colonnade, and yet is topped by a golden spire which recalls that of the old Admiralty, while the frieze over the portal depicts Neptune presenting a trident to Peter the Great. These allegorical and structural references to the Russian past result in a distinctly national interpretation of the neoclassical style.

Not that the language of classicism was always suitable for Russian aims. The awkward proportions of the Cathedral of St. Isaac (1819 - 1859) by Auguste Montferrand is testimony to how disastrous some attempts to design an Orthodox church in a classical style could be. Far more successful during Nicholas I's reign is the work of Carlo Rossi, whose concern with entire architectural ensembles in St. Petersburg underlines his flair for the classical organization of space, for example in the streets, squares, and buildings that he designed to complement his Alexandrinsky Theatre (1828 - 1832), or in the General Staff Building (1819 - 1829), which completed Palace Square. This interest in town planning reverberated in provincial towns such as Odessa, where boulevards parallel to the cliff-top benefit from the dramatic views over the Black Sea.

Painting and sculpture made a less distinguished contribution to neoclassicism in Russia than architecture, but certain artists stand out. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Mikhail Kozlovsky produced some notable sculpture on classical themes, and his monument to General Suvorov portrayed the military leader rather improbably as an athletic young Mars. Ivan Martos, who had studied with Mengs in Rome, also attempted to invest his work with both Russian meanings and references to antiquity in his statue of Minin and Pozharsky (1804 - 1818) on Red Square, in which seventeenth-century heroes are clothed in a hybrid of classical tunics and the traditional Russian garb of long, belted shirts worn over trousers. Martos deployed the extravagant rhetorical gestures typical of much ancient sculpture, a device continued in Boris Orlovsky's statues of Marshal Kutuzov and Barclay de Tolly in front of the Cathedral of the Virgin of Kazan in St. Petersburg. On a more intimate note, Fyodor Tolstoy designed bas-relief sculptures reminiscent of the work of the English neoclassical sculptor John Flaxman, while his acclaimed portrait medallions commemorating the Napoleonic War filtered patriotic sensibilities through the classical tradition of coin and medal design.

In painting, Anton Losenko's Vladimir and Rogneda of 1770 initiated a tradition of depicting Russian historical subjects in the so-called Grand Manner, the approved Academic approach which drew heavily on the classical practice of idealization, by the nineteenth century academic history painters were expected to work in the neoclassical style. In Fyodor Bruni's painting Death of Camilla, the Sister of Horatio (1824), the classical hero, who has placed civic virtue above familial sentiment, strikes a suitably grandiloquent pose in the center of a composition arranged like a bas-relief. But the pictorial devices of neoclassicism were already being tempered by Romantic sensibilities, as is evident in Orest Kiprensky's Portrait of Alexander Pushkin (1827) and Karl Bryullov's The Last Day of Pompeii (1830 - 1833). Kiprensky may include a classical statuette in his portrait, and Bryullov may have chosen a classical subject, but the emphasis is now on the Romantic values of subjectivity and personal emotion, as opposed to the harmonic proportion and physical perfection of classical art.

Bibliography

Auty, Robert, and Obolensky, Dmitri, eds. (1980). An Introduction to Russian Art and Architecture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Brumfield, William C. (1993). A History of Russian Architecture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Kennedy, J. (1983). "The Neoclassical in Russian Sculpture." In Art and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. T. G. Stavrou. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Sarabianov, Dmitry. (1990). Russian Art from Neoclassicism to the Avant-Garde. London: Thames and Hudson.

Shvidkovsky, Dmitry. (1996). The Empress and the Architect: British Architecture and Gardens at the Court of Catherine the Great. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

—ROSALIND P. GRAY

One of the last truly international European aesthetic movements, neoclassicism left virtually no aspect of visual culture untouched. Despite its practical and theoretical connections to the classical tradition of Western art, neoclassicism was perceived by eighteenth-century critics as a revolutionary rejection of the decadence of the baroque that had held sway since the early seventeenth century. In addition to its formal stylistic characteristics, which include a propensity toward the emulation of ancient Greco-Roman art and an emphasis on dignity, restraint, and grandeur of scale, neoclassical art was often endowed with an ideological imperative. Seeking to reform society from above, many neoclassicists enlisted ancient virtue, morality, and ethics as antidotes to what they considered to be the frivolity, licentiousness, and sybaritic luxury of eighteenth-century elites. This reforming spirit was especially notable in France, where progressive artists embraced classical subjects that taught lessons in morality. The most important example in painting is Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii (1784). Visualizing La Font de Saint-Yenne's 1749 dictum, neoclassicism helped to redefined art's role in society as an agency that "made virtue attractive and vice odious."

As an artistic phenomenon, neoclassicism's impact may be seen in an astonishing variety of objects, from teaspoons and wallpaper to ecclesiastical architecture and equestrian monuments. Its earliest stirrings may be traced to the 1740s. Neoclassicism was given considerable impetus by the keen interest in archaeological excavation spurred by the discovery of the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii; regular excavations at Herculaneum began in 1738 and at Pompeii in 1748. Major excavations on the Palatine Hill in Rome, at Ostia and at Hadrian's Villa at Tivoli captured the imagination of Europe. Ancient sites in Spain, France, England, and elsewhere also received increased scrutiny. Such excavations created a mania for antique artifacts that led to numerous publications of the often spectacular finds. These books usually had engraved illustrations that did much to inspire artists, who quickly created both public and domestic spaces decorated by classically inspired art. Robert Adam's country house interiors, such as the great vestibule at Syon House, are important examples of neoclassicism's impact on the decorative arts and architecture inspired by neoclassical motifs. Josiah Wedgwood's ceramic works, fired at his factory in the English Midlands, reveal the ubiquity of the neoclassical aesthetic in both decorative and utilitarian objects.

Neoclassicism's epicenter was unquestionably Rome. As the artistic entrepôt of Europe and primary museum of the Western tradition, the city's privileged position as an international capital built on the decaying fabric of antiquity's greatest urban center gave Rome a unique luster. Enlightened papal policies led to the creation of Europe's first public museums, the Capitoline and the Pio-Clementino, which prominently featured canonical antiquities such as the Apollo Belvedere, the Capitoline Venus, and the Laocoön. These ancient marble sculptures were considered ideal exemplars of beauty and truth and inspired emulation by such artists as Antonio Canova, John Flaxman, and Bertel Thorvaldsen, among others. Indeed, Canova's Theseus and the Dead Minotaur of 1781–1783 is unimaginable without considering the artist's assiduous study of Greco-Roman sculptures preserved in Rome's museums and aristocratic collections.

The central aesthetic debates of neoclassicism also centered on Rome. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a Prussian scholar and aesthete who served as librarian to Cardinal Alessandro Albani, gave a rationalist underpinning to developing neoclassicism with the 1764 publication of Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of ancient art). Quickly translated into most European languages, Winckelmann's book had an unprecedented impact on ideas about art and its relationship to society. It also posed questions about the fundamental differences between ancient Greek and Roman art, resolved in favor of the former. Winckelmann viewed the development of antique art as cyclical, from perfection in classical Athens to the bombastic decadence of the Roman Empire. His view was supported by Cardinal Albani's favorite artist Anton Raphael Mengs, who painted Parnassus in 1761 to adorn the ceiling of the grand salon of Albani's chic new villa on the Via Salaria, completed in 1760 by the architect Carlo Marchionni. This fresco is the first fully developed essay in neoclassical painting. The Villa Albani's collection of ancient sculpture was the finest private collection in existence, and the villa became a major attraction for visitors who helped to spread neoclassical ideas.

Albani, Mengs, and Winckelmann as champions of the Greeks did not go unchallenged. The leading exponent of the superiority of Roman art was the Venetian architect and engraver Giambattista Piranesi. Through myriad publications, above all Della magnificenza ed architettura de' Romani (On the magnificence and architecture of the Romans) of 1761, Piranesi consistently championed the grandeur of scale and fantasy of invention of ancient Roman artists and architects, whom he believed had perfected the simplicity and nobility of form achieved by the Greeks. The Greeks-versus-Romans polemic was one of the major intellectual debates of mid-eighteenth-century Europe. Piranesi's publications also had a profound impact on foreigners because of their wide distribution. Visitors were often disappointed because the scale of both ancient ruins and modern buildings was much smaller than Piranesi's prints had led them to imagine.

The grand tour, that elite practice of transalpine travelers venturing to Italy to study the remains of antiquity and the canonical works of both ancient and modern art, was also a crucial factor in the development and dissemination of neoclassicism. Rich tourists created a thriving market for antiquities and created an industry based on the production of pastiched statues and outright fakes of everything from paintings to cameos. A casual visit to almost any British country house will reveal the extent of the collecting mania for all things ancient. The tour promoted the notion of an upper-class, cosmopolitan culture based on the primacy of the classical tradition and helped to create a republic of letters that gave Europe an unprecedented degree of intellectual and aesthetic unity.

While obviously retrospective in nature, by the last years of the century neoclassicism had also attained a utopian thrust that was exploited in the interest of political, social, economic, and spiritual reform. The antique panacea was offered to an ailing Europe for such perceived ills as obscurantism, religious fanaticism, superstition, and social inequality. It was the rationalist basis of neoclassicism that so appealed to progressive Enlightenment thought and that led proponents of the French Revolution to embrace it for regimist purposes. Later, Napoleon co-opted the Roman Empire as both a precedent for and a justification of his own. The Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel (1806–1807) in Paris, executed by Charles Percier to celebrate French victories at Austerlitz and Jena, was based on the precedent of Rome's Arch of Constantine. The fact that both Jacobins and Bonapartists could claim the same cultural and political inheritance is vivid testimony to neoclassicism's pervasiveness and flexibility.

By 1830 neoclassicism had evolved from a progressive style extolling ancient virtue and aesthetic reform while opposing luxury and decorative self-indulgence to become the chief expression of modern empire and military dictatorship. Increasingly identified with an academic pedagogy that many younger Romantic artists considered stifling and outdated, neoclassicism also was associated with conservatism and aristocratic privilege, principles it had challenged and partly overcome in its early phases. Neoclassicism's afterlife has included its adoption by both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. It continues to be a rich source of forms and motifs for postmodern artists, architects, and designers.

Bibliography

Honour, Hugh. Neo-classicism. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1991.

Irwin, David. Neoclassicism. London, 1997.

Praz, Mario. On Neoclassicism. Translated by Angus Davidson. Evanston, Ill., 1969.

—CHRISTOPHER M. S. JOHNS

Dansk (Danish)
adj. - nyklassisk

Français (French)
adj. - néo-classique

Deutsch (German)
adj. - neoklassisch, klassizistisch

Ελληνική (Greek)
adj. - νεοκλασικός

Italiano (Italian)
neoclassico

Português (Portuguese)
adj. - neoclássico

Русский (Russian)
неоклассический

Español (Spanish)
adj. - neoclásico

Svenska (Swedish)
adj. - nyklassisk

中文（简体） (Chinese (Simplified))
新古典主义的

中文（繁體） (Chinese (Traditional))
adj. - 新古典主義的

한국어 (Korean)
adj. - 신고전주의의

日本語 (Japanese)
adj. - 新古典主義の

עברית (Hebrew)
adj. - ‮נאו-קלאסי (אמנות), קשור להחיאת הסגנון הקלאסי באמנות, ספרות וכו'‬

If you are unable to view some languages clearly, click here.

To select your translation preferences click here.