Neoclassical and Romantic sculpture
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Neoclassicism
The 18th-century arts movement known as Neoclassicism represents both a reaction against the last phase of the Baroque and, perhaps more importantly, a reflection of the burgeoning scientific interest in classical antiquity. Archaeological investigations of the classical Mediterranean world offered to the 18th-century cognoscenti compelling witness to the order and serenity of Classical art and provided a fitting backdrop to the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. Newly discovered antique forms and themes were quick to find new expression.
The successful excavations contributed to the rapid growth of collections of antique sculptures. Foreign visitors to Italy exported countless marbles to all parts of Europe or employed agents to build up their collections. The accessibility of the sculpture of antiquity, in museums and private houses and also through engravings and plaster casts, had a far-reaching formative influence on 18th-century painting and sculpture. The great majority of ancient sculptures collected were Roman, although many of them were copied from Greek originals and were believed to be Greek.
In the writing of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the great German historian of ancient art, Greek art had been considered immeasurably superior to Roman. It is curious, however, how little positive influence the marbles that Lord Elgin took to England from the Parthenon in Athens had on sculpture in western Europe, although they had a great influence on scholars. The ideals of Neoclassical sculpture—its emphasis on clarity of contour, on the plain ground, on not rivalling painting either in the imitation of aerial or linear perspective in relief or of flying hair and fluttering drapery in freestanding figures—were chiefly inspired by theory and by Roman neo-Attic works, or indeed by Roman pseudo-Archaic art. The latter class of art exerted an influence on John Flaxman, who was enormously admired for the severe style of his engravings and relief carvings.
“Decorum” and idealization
Academic theorists, especially those of France and Italy during the 17th century, argued that expression, costume, details, and setting of a work be as appropriate to their subject as possible. The 18th century and, in particular, the Neoclassicists inherited this theory of “decorum” but, giving preference to a universal ideal, instead implemented it in restricted form: by subdividing all action and expression into classical repose, idealizing faces and bodies into classical heroes, and transforming all costume, if any, into tight-fitting attire to avoid reference to ephemeral time.
A series of monuments to 18th- and early 19th-century generals and admirals of the Napoleonic Wars in St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster Abbey demonstrate an important resulting dilemma: whether a hero or famous person should be portrayed in Classical or contemporary costume. Many sculptors varied between showing the figures in uniform and showing them completely naked. The concept of the modern hero in antique dress belongs to the tradition of academic theory, exemplified by the English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds in one of his Royal Academy Discourses: “The desire for transmitting to posterity the shape of modern dress must be acknowledged to be purchased at a prodigious price, even the price of everything that is valuable in art.” Even the living hero could be idealized completely naked, as in two colossal standing figures of Napoleon (1808–11) by the Italian sculptor Antonio Canova. One of the most famous of Neoclassical sculptures is Canova’s Paolina Borghese as Venus Victrix (1805–07). She is shown naked, lightly draped, and reclining sensuously on a couch, both a charming contemporary portrait and an idealized antique Venus.