The Rococo Art Movement Was Born When French Painters

A Immature Girl Reading (c.1776)
National Gallery of Art,
Washington DC.
Past Jean-Honore Fragonard.

Rococo Art Manner (18th Century)

Contents

• Introduction
• Origins
• Rococo in France
• Rococo in Italy
• Rococo in England
• Rococo in Federal republic of germany

For a cursory introduction to the architectural aspects of this art style, see: Rococo Architecture.

Rococo Nymphenburg Porcelain group
(1756) Bavarian National Museum.
By Franz Anton Bustelli.

Introduction

Centred in France and emerging as a reaction to the Baroque grandeur of King Louis XIV's royal court at the Palace of Versailles, the Rococo move or style of French painting was associated peculiarly with Madame Pompadour, the mistress of the new King Louis XV, and the Parisian homes of the French aristocracy. It is a whimsical and elaborately decorative way of fine art, whose name derives from the French discussion 'rocaille' significant, rock-work afterwards the forms of sea shells.

In the world of Rococo, all fine art forms, including art painting, architecture, sculpture, interior design, piece of furniture, fabrics, porcelain and other "objets d'art" are subsumed inside an ideal of elegant prettiness.

Pilgrimage to Cythera (1717)
Louvre, Paris.
By Jean-Antoine Watteau.

PAINTING COLOURS
For details of color pigments
used by Rococo painters, see:
Eighteenth Century Colour palette.

MOVEMENTS, STYLES, SCHOOLS
For data near the major
movements in painting and
sculpture, see: History of Fine art.

Earth'S GREATEST ARTWORKS
For the Pinnacle 300 oils, watercolours
see: Greatest Paintings E'er.
For the Superlative 100 works of sculpture
run into: Greatest Sculptures Ever.

GREAT EUROPEAN PAINTERS
For biographies and paintings
of the greatest artists in Europe
from the Renaissance to 1800,
see: Old Masters: Height 100.

Rococo art is exemplified in works by famous painters similar Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721) especially his 'fete galante' outdoor courtship parties; Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) with his pictures of love and seduction; Francois Boucher (1703-70) with his lavish paintings of opulent cocky-indulgence; the Venetian Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) known for his fantastically decorative Wurzburg Residence frescoes (1750-3); and the sculpture of Claude Michel Clodion (1738-1814), sculptor of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, best known for his terra cotta sculpture of nymphs and satyrs. In Britain, Rococo painting achieved its zenith in the female portraits of Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88). Rococo was somewhen replaced by Neoclassical art, which was the signature visual way of Napoleon in France and of the American revolution.

WORLDS TOP ARTISTS
For the greatest view paintings:
Best Landcape Artists.
For the finest still lifes, run across:
Best All the same Life Painters.
For the greatest portraits
see: Best Portrait Artists.
For the top historical painting,
see: Best History Painters.

AESTHETICS
For a discussion virtually beauty
in the visual arts, encounter:
Art Definition and Meaning.

Development OF VISUAL ARTS
For chronological details see:
History of Art Timeline.

Rococo: Origins

Rococo is the frivolous, wayward child of noble, thou Bizarre. The parent was born in Italian republic, the child in France. The Baroque (barocco, a rough pearl) developed in the early 17th-century and spread rapidly throughout Europe. At starting time predominantly a sculptural and architectural style, its greatest exponent and genius was Gianlorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) who, like Michelangelo before him, was showtime and foremost a sculptor, only turned naturally to painting, theatrical decorations and compages while serving several Popes in the remodelling of Rome. His "Ecstasy of St. Teresa" and the pocket-sized church of S. Andrea al Quirinale in Rome both reveal the tendencies which pb on to the rococo mode: a brilliant use of light and shade on expensive and elaborate materials, such as coloured marbles and bronze.

The seventeenth century was an age of grandeur, of strong religious sentiments expressed conspicuously and forcibly in striking visual forms in the paintings of Caravaggio and Cortona, the sculptures of Bernini and the architecture of Francesco Borromini (1599-1667). Its near important manifestations were Italian, and it was really the swan song of Italy as a creative ability, for already at the expiry of Pope Urban VIII, Bernini's patron, the new star was making its advent - France, which was to continue her meteoric rise throughout the century and dominate fashionable and artistic Europe in the succeeding century. See as well: Rococo Artists.

The Rococo Style in France - Characteristics

In 1651 the immature Louis 14 came of age and by the 1660s any dissensions in France had been totally suppressed, and so that Louis could devote his attentions to the edifice and decoration of his palace at Versailles. Hither, the Italian baroque style was adopted and modified by Louis' all-powerful artist, designer and interior decorator, Charles Lebrun, to glorify not the saints of the Catholic Church, only the Rex of French republic: "Le Roi Soleil". Louis' absolute rule involved not just visual proof of his supremacy, only an elaborate court etiquette as potent and unnatural equally the gardens laid out by Le Notre around the Palace. This extreme formality was felt in such apartments as the famous Hall of Mirrors and the multicoloured Ambassadors' Staircase, and it is against this background that the Rococo is fix; French republic was demonstrating that already she was arbiter of taste and eager for novelty.

French Rococo Architecture, Interior Design and Ornament

The Rococo is rightly associated with the 18th-century in France, simply even inside the last years of the previous century, indications of the new way appear, as in the work of the court architect, Jules-Hardouin Mansart (1646-1708), at the Trianon at Versailles, and at Marly, some other majestic residence. In these two buildings Mansart bankrupt away from the stultifying utilize of marble and statuary, turning rather to wooden panelling and paler colours. The very scale of the Trianon indicates a desire to escape from the grandiose palace, a feeling which occasioned a number of highly significant works in the 18th-century. [Note likewise the influence of the earlier Fontainebleau School (1530-1610) on the evolution of the Rococo mode, in detail its playful stucco carvings and other Rococo-like motifs.]

Louis XIV appears to have much encouraged this reaction, as illustrated by his famous injunction to Mansart concerning the ornamentation of the room of the very young Duchesse de Bourgogne in the Chateau de la Menagerie: "You lot must spread everywhere the feeling of youthfulness". This was in 1699, and the Male monarch still had some other sixteen years to alive, years which were to decide the course of fine art and ornament for at least the adjacent generation, not merely in French republic merely every bit far afield as Sicily and Austria.

If the Rococo was specifically a French creation, many factors from further afield influenced and fostered the mode, every bit, for example, the graphic works of such seventeenth-century Italian artists as Stefano delia Bella, who spent a long time in Paris. In his designs delicate, feathery lines enfold forms which are oft purely decorative in intent, as much rococo art was to be.

Many engraved books from the last decades of the seventeenth century reveal the rococo style in embryonic class. The tight scroll-work and then feature of Flemish and German renaissance decoration, and even of the Fontainebleau School, was liberated, making it less severe and symmetrical, and fantastic elements were introduced, unknown in the originals. This is seen in France in the furniture of Andre-Charles Boulle and in Venice in the furniture of Andrea Brustolon, where curving, intricate baroque forms began to be modified around the turn of the century.

One of the commencement appearances of the new manner in a highly important setting is in the bedroom of Louis XIV at Versailles. This was redecorated near 1701 mainly in white and golden, relying entirely for its upshot on the crisp contrasts of finely sculptured pilasters against rich areas of golden carving, and, set in a higher place the chimney-pieces, large mirrors with rounded tops. Big areas of Venetian mirror-glass were, of course, important decorative features as early as the creation of the Galerie des Glaces, and also of the Mirror Room in the G Trianon: they have ofttimes been mistakenly identified solely with the appearance of the rococo style, in which, indeed, they were to play an important function. The design of Louis' bedroom, however, nevertheless bears witness to a strong preference for the Classical Orders, with pilaster decoration in the typically academic seventeenth-century tradition.

One of the problems of any exam of rococo decoration is that nosotros are uncertain as to how much of information technology originated from the small army of draughtsmen, whose leading figures such as Mansart kept backside the scenes, and how much from the slap-up architects themselves. Thus, while a building or an interior passes equally the work of Mansart or De Cotte, the novel details in it may just likewise have sprung from a 'ghost' designer with a certain sense of fantasy and an originality which the Royal Architect passed off as his own.

These draughtsmen were in all probability familiar with books of decorative patterns - derived from the era of Renaissance art - illustrating the famous grotesques of Raphael in the Villa Madama and the Vatican Loggia. Grotesques, descended from the stucco reliefs and paintings in Roman tombs (or grottoes, hence 'grotesques'), played an important part in French decoration equally early as the 1650s and afterward appeared in some of Lebrun'southward ain decorations, such as those in the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre. They consisted of curving plant-and-curl forms, ofttimes originating in an urn or pot and winding upwards in a regular design, inhabited by playful monkeys, insects and other creatures who provide a slight asymmetrical touch. The lightness of this type of ornamentation was borne in mind by Pierre Lepautre when he decorated the King's suite of rooms at Marly in 1699.

Lepautre's interiors at Marly are, tragically, known to united states of america only from drawings. They show that he dispensed with the heavy, rectangular frames around doors and mirrors, replacing them with miniature curving decorations integrated into the corners of mouldings, which themselves were finer and more elegant in event than ever before. In place of the traditional painted and gilded ceiling, Lepautre only articulated the slap-up white plaster surface area with a delicate gilded rosette at the center - this was to be imitated on both ceilings and panelling throughout the rococo menstruum.

The rococo way developed most strongly during the Regency of the Duc d'Orleans (1715-23), whose town residence was the Palais Royale. Hither, licence was the dominion, and the tone of rococo society was prepare: a order which demanded constant novelty, wit and elegance - precisely the qualities of the rococo style. Society opened its doors to people whom Louis XIV would never take accustomed: the newly rich and increasingly important intellectuals. During the Regency much of the aristocracy, which had constitute itself confined to Versailles during Louis 14's reign, returned to Paris and commissioned new boondocks houses, as in the Identify Vendome, where the transitional way can still be clearly seen.

Their interiors did not phone call for the elaborate ceiling-paintings of the previous century, and in their identify a new school of painters emerged who specialized in the gently curving trumeaux (over-doors) and minor-scale painted panels which form a not bad function of the output of (eg) Francois Boucher (1703-70). Too in abiding employment from this menstruum until the Revolution were the scupteurs, who executed the often minutely detailed etching on the boiseries, the decorated console-framings.

Information technology was in about 1720 that the transitional fashion began to requite way to a clear rococo fashion. The term 'rococo' probably derives from the French 'rocaille', which originally referred to a type of sculptured decoration in garden design. Certainly the leading designers of the rococo mode, Gilles-Marie Oppenordt, Nicolas Pineau and Juste-Aurele Meissonnier, were very much aware of information technology. The grotesques of the seventeenth century were at present transformed into arabesques nether Claude Audran, Watteau'southward instructor, full of a new fantasy and delicacy.

The chief steps forward were fabricated in interior ornament and painting, while niggling of importance happened to the appearance of the exterior, except that a certain light sophistication replaced the heaviness of the Louis Fourteen style, and, instead of relying on the Classical Orders, architects such as Jean Courtonne and Germain Boffrand produced buildings whose main effect lay in the subtle treatment of stonework and the practiced disposition of delicate sculpture against sophisticated rustication. In Paris, ii of the best examples are the famous Hotel de Matignon of 1722-23 and the Hotel de Torcy of 1714.

In interior decoration a steady progression towards extreme elaboration is seen during the Regency, as demonstrated by the Palais Royale and Hotel d'Assy, culminating in such triumphantly sophisticated rooms as the Salon Ovale of the Hotel de Soubise in Paris (1738-39) past Boffrand, whose influence on German rococo architecture was to be considerable.

A tendency to supervene upon the huge serial of very formal apartments favoured in the Louis Fourteen menses with smaller, more intimate rooms is likewise seen, every bit in the Petites Appartements in Versailles, where form follows function more than closely. Sadly these, together with many of the greatest rococo rooms, have disappeared without trace. Apart from Paris, much fine architecture and decoration in the full-blown rococo style was effected at Nancy, where the dethroned King of Poland lived.

Notation: For other important art and blueprint trends similar to Rococo, see Art Movements and Schools (from nearly 100 BCE).

French Rococo Painting

Paradoxically, the rococo way was heralded in painting, much earlier than in the other arts, by a Flemish painter, Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721). He moved to Paris in near 1702 and began working every bit a theatrical scene-painter, before studying with the Keeper of the Luxembourg Palace, Claude Audran, an artist who painted in a decorative, belatedly baroque style. It was the Rubens' Life of Marie de Medicis' series in the Luxembourg Palace which nigh impressed Watteau and through him was to influence the form of French rococo painting. He studied these together with the great Venetian painters and, in the words of Michael Levey, although he had "no public career, no great commissions from Church or Crown; seldom executed big-calibration pictures: had no interest in painting historical subjects", he became the greatest French artist of the first one-half of the century.

Watteau's pictures - See: Pilgrimage to Cythera (1717) Louvre, Paris; Charlottenburg, Berlin - with their combination of Rubens' colour and his own delicate eroticism, were always more a little melancholy. The lyrical quality of his painting, with its suggestion of sophisticated amorality, was precisely that sought by French society in the Regency years: Watteau was not just catering for a gustatory modality merely also creating one. For more near nudity in Rococo painting, see: Female Nudes in Fine art History.

The other 2 major painters of the French rococo flow, Francois Boucher (1703-70) (noted also as the manager of the Gobelins tapestry factory) and Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806), both purveyed an entirely unlike diversity of the fashion from that of Watteau and are ofttimes idea to have vulgarized where Watteau had refined. Whereas Watteau achieved an all-enveloping aura of aloof distancing, Boucher and Fragonard produced a more intimate and obvious result.

Significantly, Boucher's career opened as an engraver of Watteau's pictures, and from then on causeless the pattern of traditional success. Winning the Prix de Rome, he worked in Italy from 1727 to 1731. In 1734 he became an Academician, and with the aid of his friend and Louis XV'due south mistress, Madame de Pompadour, he became the nigh sought-after painter in France for every type of picture, but in item for his vivid mythological painting of classical subjects. In these, frequently rendered in a somewhat unsubtly erotic vein, Boucher, like Watteau, revealed a stiff debt to Rubens and Venetian art, specially to Paolo Veronese, his finest predecessor in painting brilliantly clothed and displayed mythologies. Boucher became Director of the Academy in 1765, and altogether made a highly important contribution to the rococo movement through his many paintings and his designs for tapestries and other decorations.

In the unreality of about of his later forms 1 recalls Sir Joshua Reynolds' sense of outrage at discovering Boucher had forsaken models. By comparison with the unreal world of Watteau, Boucher's settings are even less real, while the contrast with Thomas Gainsborough, who equanimous his landscapes with pieces of mirror, twigs and moss, is still more extreme. Miniature copse environment rustic buildings, which announced to have been fabricated in icing-carbohydrate, and water looks as if it were made of glass. There is no real low-cal and shade, mayhap so every bit non to contrast too strongly with the surrounding pale and shallow rococo boiserie decoration into which it was set.

While there were a number of great individual artists, there were also families of painters who followed an about unchanging stylistic tradition. Among these are the Coypels, who executed the chapel ceiling at Versailles, the Van Loos and the De Troys, all of whom painted consistently amusing pictures for the upper classes and for the rising eye classes, who appear for the commencement time in the rococo period as important patrons and to some extent account for the increased demand for portraiture. Some of the about delicious evocations of the sophistication of society are found in the portraits of Nattier, Drouais, Roslin and, of course, Boucher himself, whose delicate likenesses of Madame de Pompadour are among the finest portraits of any woman in that century. See also the Rococo portraits by Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842), the court portraitist to the French Queen Marie-Antoinette.

Alongside portraiture, many other specialized branches of painting arose, such every bit the nevertheless life, where Jean Baptiste Oudry (1686-1755) and Francois Desportes (1661-1743) were foremost.

In these 'lesser' fields 1 man is outstanding: Jean Chardin (1699-1779). His delightfully elementary and deeply sincere genre subjects and his still life paintings take a quality which seem at first glance closer in feeling to Dutch Realism - with an added nuance of French precision and sensibility - than to the prevailing rococo style. A masterpiece could be born from a tiny picture of a Delft vase with a few flowers or from a elementary ii-effigy study. It is their very delicacy and refinement that links them to the rococo. Another outstanding Rococo genre painter was the 'moralistic' Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1725-1805).

French Rococo Article of furniture and Decorative Arts

The same delicacy characterizes French Furniture and a adept deal of the French Decorative Art of the catamenia. Betwixt about 1715 and 1770 French designers created article of furniture which remains unparalleled in its beauty of line and detail, minute finish and costly materials expertly used. Also in this menstruation nigh of the furniture types with which we are familiar today came into being: such pieces as the writing-tabular array (agency plat), the secretaire (of many dissimilar types, notably the drop-front and cylinder type) and the sofa in many guises (canapes, lits de repos).

The heavy pieces of the later on 17th-century inlaid with brass and tortoise-shell in the manner of Boulle were replaced from the Regency onwards past smaller, lighter pieces, a development that coincided with the decrease in the size of rooms and the lessening formality. The chest-of-drawers (commode) was lifted off the floor on delicate curving legs, and bombe fronts were covered with sinuous ormolu which often flowed over the unabridged piece and in which much of the finest decoration of the Rococo is found. In this rococo craft, superb uses were made of inlaid wood of all types, oft imported from the Orient, contributing both to the high price of the slice and to the craze for the exotic which invaded French guild and led to the use (often entirely misplaced) of terms such equally "a la polonaise", "a la grecque" and "a la chinoise". In furniture the major manifestation of this interest in the Orient was in the use of imported or false lacquer, many skillful pieces of Oriental lacquer suffering badly in the procedure of dissection and reshaping.

The display of luxury in rococo craftwork was non, of course, bars to furniture, and the stark advent of many rococo ensembles today is misleading. The frivolities and trimmings - frills, ribbons, elaborate hangings on beds, doors and windows, festoons of fringes, gimps and baubles - often simply associated with the Victorians, added to the atmosphere of luxury and comfort, a quality picayune known in seventeenth-century French interiors.

In spite of the extreme rigour of the Guild system, possibly even thanks to information technology, French furniture achieved, in the eighteenth century, such a state of perfection that information technology was sought after through-out Europe. The Guild regulations encouraged specialization and incited the sons of master craftsmen to continue in their fathers' merchandise by the prospect of economic advantages. The issue was exceptional professional skill, and the rise of veritable dynasties of joiners and cabinet-makers, handing down the secrets of their arts and crafts from father to son.

Thus, the menuisier practised but the creation of the actual form of the furniture; the ebeniste created the elaborate layers of inlay and surface decoration and yet another craftsman was responsible for fitting the gilded-bronze decoration over the prepared framework; no guild was permitted to intrude on the territory of another. As with the other arts, great names arose in each field: Foliot, Lelarge, Sene, Cressent, and an increasing number of Germans: Oeben, Riesener, Weisweiler. They rose to positions of great influence and a signed piece by ane of these craftsmen was equally sought later on as any painting by Boucher or Fragonard.

The Rococo was a style in which the feminine element predominated, demonstrated in furniture in the supple and often sensuous curves, fragile appearance, and fifty-fifty terminology: duchesse (duchess) and sultane (sultana). Flowers decorated much of the wall-panelling and article of furniture of the flow, and many rococo boiseries comprise elaborate trompe d'oeils of garlands and sprays of flowers inhabited by tiny birds and animals, the straight descendants of the grotesque. The modest scale of much of the furniture, peculiarly pieces designed for writing, almost precludes its use by a man, although, paradoxically, one of the finest creations of the catamenia, Louis Xv'southward ain desk-bound executed by Oeben and Riesener between 1760 and 1769 is large and surprisingly masculine.

Porcelain was sometimes incorporated into French furniture design, ordinarily in the form of painted plaques or discs set in bronze frames. Much of it is from the manufacturing plant of Sevres. Louis XV had himself provided funds to dorsum a porcelain enterprize at Vincennes, near Paris, specifically to imitate Meissen porcelain, which moved in 1756 to Sevres. Although non the first factory in France to produce porcelain (Rouen and Saint-Cloud were both operating in the final years of the seventeenth century), Vincennes-Sevres was certainly the most successful in its production of hard-paste porcelain, counting important painters such as Boucher among its designers.

The value attached to Sevres porcelain is attested to past the number of private pieces or sets such equally that made for the Empress Maria Theresa in 1758 sent by Louis 15 every bit diplomatic gifts. Other famous sets include the services made for Catherine the Great and Madame du Barry. The colours perfected at Sevres are not and then different from those plant in Boucher'southward paintings - greeny blues and a wonderful pinkish known as rose Pompadour. The types of objects manufactured ranged from wall-sconces to ink-wells and pot-pourri vases, of which some of the finest examples are in the Wallace Art Collection, London.

For more about Rococo porcelain and Rococo sculpture, read almost ii important French sculptors Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1714-1785) and Etienne Maurice Falconet (1716-1791).

The rococo fashion in France represented her greatest artistic contribution earlier the rising of Impressionism in the nineteenth century and embraced all the arts to an extent found nowhere else in Europe apart from Germany. The astonishing quality of French Rococo is due to the maintenance of the highest standards throughout. It has the added appeal of patronage by such figures as Madame de Pompadour, with whom the style is identified, and it stood at the terminate of a long tradition of the finest French craftsmanship.

The Rococo Style in Italia - Characteristics

A large part of the story of the Rococo in Italia is that of painting in Venice - especially painting by the keen genius Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770) - since the important products of the manner in its almost original form are found in that location. With the exception of some buildings by Juvarra and Bernardo Yittone, Italian compages of the get-go half of the century passes adequately straight from the late baroque style to early Neoclassicism, with little evidence of a definite rococo mode.

Italian Rococo Compages, Interior Design and Ornamentation

Architecture and decorative fine art was dominated past the piece of work of ii men at the turn of the century, Bernini and Borromini, just in particular the latter. Shortly, however, the leading architect in Rome was Ferdinando Fuga (1699-1782), a Florentine whose greatest works were the Palazzo delia Consulta (1732-37) and the facade of Santa Maria Maggiore (1741-43). In the former, a delicate rhythm was created not by massive orders of columns but by subtly proportioned and slightly recessed panels. Against these were ready highly decorative windows, and the whole was crowned by a large central sculpture of angels supporting a cartouche. It is much more sculptural in effect than any French building of the aforementioned appointment, and links up rather more than with German Rococo. The aforementioned central emphasis is found in the facade of Santa Maria Maggiore, simply there the whole facade is conceived every bit an open loggia, relieved merely by calorie-free sculpture. Elsewhere in Rome, other architectural undertakings were coming closer to the spirit of the Rococo, equally for example, in the Spanish Steps (1723-25) by Francesco de Sanctis.

While French architects such as Boffrand were searching for an economic means of expressing the sophistication of their interiors on the outside, Italian architects were still very moch more concerned with the exterior equally the vehicle for an immediate impression. They often devoted their energies to this at the expense of the interiors and equally a outcome simply succeeded internally where huge spaces were involved, as in some of the works of Filippo Juvarra (1678-1736).

Juvarra was built-in in Messina into a family unit of silver-smiths and was trained in Rome under Carlo Fontana, gaining his first successes as a designer of elaborate and decorative phase scenery, an experience which was later to stand him in good stead. Afterwards being appointed Showtime Architect to the Rex at the Court of Savoy in 1714, he travelled to Portugal, London and, in 1719-20, Paris, probably seeing French Rococo in its primeval stages. On his return he became Italian republic's closest parallel to the French architect-designer, involved with not simply architecture, just interiors, piece of furniture and the practical arts. His outstanding achievements are the hunting club he designed between 1729 and 1733 for the Court at the Castle of Stupinigi, the Church building of the Carmine (1732-35) in Turin, and the sanctuary of the Superga about Turin (1717-31). Of these, Stupinigi is his well-nigh exciting cosmos. Gigantic wings radiate from a domed cardinal core Surmounted by a statuary stag, the white exterior preparing one for the incredible spatial acrobatics and colour inside the central Great Hall, which is close to many of Juvarra'southward architectural fantasies and theatrical drawings. Much use is made of illusionistic painting, trompe l'oeil urns filling behemothic niches painted in a higher place the many chimney-pieces in the hall, while a gently swaying gallery runs round the walls and seems to pierce the not bad piers. It is a theatrical tour de force. By comparison, the Superga and the Crimson seem a little pedantic, but the former is sensationally sited on a hilltop dominating the surrounding area with its elegant portico and high dome flanked by onion-domed towers.

Comparable to Juvarra was Bernardo Yittone (1704-1770), who worked exclusively in Piedmont, where he was built-in and to which he returned after studying in Rome and editing the nifty baroque architect Guarini'south 'Architettura Civile'. His nigh important works are in obscure villages in Piedmont and unite Guarini'southward spatial complexity with Juvarra's lightness and brio. In this vein, his masterpieces are the Sanctuary at Vallinotto (1738-39) and the church of Santa Chiara at Bra of 1742.

While Vittone'south domestic architecture is pedestrian, Juvarra's is not, and his rococo interiors are among the finest in Italy. Unlike French republic, Italy was not ruled by one monarch, so patronage was usually limited to a particular surface area of the country, every bit in Juvarra's case. His patron, Vittorio Amadeo II of Savoy, was fortunate in having such an able courtroom architect, and for him Juvarra designed the facade of the Palazzo Madama in Turin (1718-21), and some of the few interiors which approach the French in quality; such is the Chinese Room of the Royal Palace in Turin with its lacquer and gilded boiseries, influenced, perhaps, by JA Meissonnier'southward book of ornaments published in 1734. A comparison of Juvarra'southward interiors with others in Italia shows that he alone stood on an equal footing with other European designers.

Italian Rococo Furniture and Decorative Arts

Unfortunately the history of Italian rococo furniture does not follow such an easy pattern equally the French. The fashion of the seventeenth century overlapped into the eighteenth, and pieces which are ostensibly datable earlier the turn of the century are oft in fact much later. Much of Juvarra'due south furniture remains adequately heavy, using natural forms in quite a different way from French designers such as Nicolas Pineau or Meissonnier.

Splendour, left over from the baroque historic period, was still the ascendant mood for all major interior designs, and there was no feeling, every bit in French republic, or even Germany, for the small scale. Thus were produced more sophisticated but equally imposing piece of furniture and settings. Whereas the French gustatory modality was for constant novelty, Italian interiors changed piddling after the initial swing to the Rococo had been accepted. As in France, and to a greater extent in England, the newly rich or moderately well-off were now trying to keep abreast of contemporary developments.

What surprised most foreign travellers to Italian republic was the emptiness of the bang-up suites which lay backside the facades of almost large palaces. Apart from the few splendid apartments on view, the palaces independent many undistinguished rooms and their contents could not compare with French furniture and the chic of Parisian styles, for which the Italians substituted tasteless extravagance. The pictures past Pietro Longhi of Venetian interiors conjure upwards the sparsely furnished rooms of many Italian rococo houses.

The figures of Andrea Brustolon and Antonio Corradini dominated Venetian design at the outset of the century, their heavy baroque forms continuing to exist produced by succeeding craftsmen well after their deaths, almost until the end of the century. The Venetians were nevertheless the just Italians who took the rococo style seriously to heart and emulated the French, producing exaggerated bombe commodes oft teetering on tiny, fragile legs. Few great names are known in the domain of Italian eighteenth-century article of furniture and one thinks mainly of highly of import private pieces such as Thousand. M. Bonzanigo'south painted and gilded firescreen in the Royal Palace at Turin. In Italy, even more than in France, an apparently insatiable need for curious or unusual pieces arose, elaborately painted in the Venetian style with rustic scenes or flowers, inlaid, only never with the intimate skill of the French ebenistes. Lacquer, heavy gilding, mirrors, painted glass and combinations of other materials led to a bewildering and not always happy mixture of styles.

Outstanding in the fine art of inlay was Pietro Piffetti (1700-77), who worked for the House of Savoy at Turin, creating highly individual furniture combining wood and ivory inlays with such refinements in metal equally masks at the corners and mounts for legs. The Imperial Palace at Turin contains some scenic pieces, literally covered with ivory inlay and occasionally seeming to be supported solely past chance, and so delicate are the legs beneath their elaborate upper parts. In the Museo Civico in Turin is a card-table by Piffetti, stamped and dated 1758, with a wholly convincing trompe l'oeil of playing-cards in ivory and rare forest.

In the pocket-size arts nothing of bully significance was produced in Italian republic compared with elsewhere in Europe, and certainly no ceramics factory appeared to rival that of Sevres. Merely 2 factories produced porcelain, much of which is certainly very cute - Vinovo in Piedmont and Capodimonte outside Naples. Capodimonte porcelain is characterized by the brilliance of its colouring, ofttimes in unexpected combinations every bit seen in the famous Porcelain Room from the Palace at Portici (1754-59).

Italian Rococo Painting

Summary

Rococo emerged in Italy slightly subsequently than in French republic. Early traces can be seen in the lighter style of late Baroque painting, introduced in Rome and besides in Naples past artists like Luca Giordano (1634-1705) and Francesco Solimena (1657-1747).

Then, in the space of 25 years, Venice produced Giambattista Tiepolo (1696-1770), his son, Giandomenico (1727-1804), Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768), Pietro Longhi (1701-85), Francesco Guardi (1712-93), Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-78) and Canaletto's nephew Bernardo Bellotto (1720–1780). All of these, except the last two, spent their working lives in Venice, although Canaletto visited England in 1746. Longhi, and to a lesser extent, the younger Tiepolo, portrayed the daily life of Venice, the former in modest canvases, the latter in drawings; while Canaletto, Guardi and Bellotto painted outdoor scenes on the canals and piazza. Piranesi, though born in Venice, came to Rome in 1738. No paintings by him are known, and his fame rests entirely on his etchings of architecture and ruins. The elder Tiepolo is best known for his boggling fresco decoration of the land dining room (Kaiseraal) and the ceiling of the Grand Staircase (Trepenhaus) in the Wurzburg Residenz of the Prince Bishop Karl Philipp von Greiffenklau, which was undoubtedly the greatest and almost imaginative masterpiece of his career. The focal betoken was the soaring fresco of Apollo Bringing the Bride (1750-1) in the eye of the Trepenhaus, a work which brings to a majestic determination the Italian tradition of fresco painting initiated by Giotto (1270-1337) 4 hundred years earlier.

Tiepolo

In the elder Tiepolo, and in him alone, tin can ane speak of a pure rococo style, related to the tardily Baroque in many ways, but creating an entirely new type of visual experience. Non surprisingly, many of the greatest Venetian qualities from the past are nowadays in his work: the color and original imagination of Titian; the effigy types and luxurious materials of Paolo Veronese, together with his love of opulent classical compages every bit a properties for rich pageants of history and mythology.

The artificiality of the atmosphere in his early frescoes links Tiepolo at one time with the mainstream of rococo art, but at a time when he could not have known much about contemporary French painting. From so on his career was a meteoric success until his eclipse in Madrid at the end of his life at the easily of the neoclassicists under Mengs (1728-79).

His greatest committee came in 1750, when he went to Wurzburg to paint frescoes for the newly completed palace in that location and stayed until 1753 to decorate the staircase (the largest mural painting in the world), the Kaisersaal and the chapel. Shortly before leaving for Wurzburg, Tiepolo had busy the Palazzo Labia in Venice with the story of Anthony and Cleopatra, 1 of his most evocative recreations of classical history.

A comparison of Tiepolo'south style with that of his exact contemporary, Boucher, reveals a dissimilar and perhaps more intellectual temperament. His glacially elegant but still voluptuous nudes and his subtle juxtaposition of types, as in the Wurzburg staircase where the 'Continents' are brilliantly assorted, is more original and complex than anything by Boucher. It was no blow that Boucher admired Tiepolo in a higher place all others; "much more than Watteau's, his art is that of the theatre, with a stage that is deliberately elevated above the states, and actors who keep their distance", says Michael Levey. Indeed his art is the final which is truly representative of aristocratic ethics, before long to be replaced by the republican values of the French Revolution, an art which could only have flourished in a city-country as corrupt as Venice in the eighteenth century

View Painters

While Tiepolo, begetter and son, were the finest decorators in the metropolis, there were the vedutisti, or view-painters, such every bit Canaletto (1697-1768), whose great fame brought him to England between 1746 and 1756, and his nephew Bernardo Bellotto (1720-fourscore).

The paintings of Francesco Guardi (1712-93) are triumphs of atmospheric study and understanding of the singular furnishings of Venetian light on water and compages. With a minimal palette, reduced in some cases almost entirely to unproblematic greens and greys, Guardi evokes landscape and views of the canals in much the same style that Tiepolo executes figures, and with magic dots of colour suggests people hurrying or engaged in chat in the Piazza San Marco or whatsoever of the many squares of Venice which he so clearly loved.

Pietro Longhi (1702-85), in contrast, specialized in somewhat gauche renderings of contemporary life; in their gaucheness however lies their bang-up charm, and in the frequently delightfully unexpected pick of field of study such as the 'Rhinoceros' (National Gallery, London) or the 'Moorish Messenger' (Ca' Rezzonico, Venice).

But Italia was never as happy with the rococo fashion every bit it had been with the preceding style of the Baroque or that of Neoclassicism, both of them heavier and more capable of expressing the grandezza and so honey of Italian post-renaissance art. This, even so, appears in Tiepolo in a modified grade, and it is his proper noun which remains outstanding.

The Rococo Style in England - Characteristics

Of all the European countries which had adopted or contributed to the baroque fashion, England was the one which paid least attention to the Rococo.

English Rococo Architecture, Interior Design and Decoration

In architecture, at least, England moved directly from the baroque style of Wren and Vanbrugh to Palladianism, a transition so swift that it allowed of no intermediate development. With buildings such as Walpole'due south Strawberry Loma, Twickenham, built from 1748, and Arbury, Warwickshire, of the same appointment and the other Gothick buildings erected during the era of late eighteenth century compages it is sentiment which places these works in the rococo category rather than whatever relationship with the rocaille.

In fact English language Gothick is divided into two singled-out categories - 'associational' and 'rococo', the latter existence a light-hearted form of decoration loosely based on medieval precedents merely frivolous enough to become almost a counterpart of Continental Rococo in its sense of abandon and superficiality. William Kent (1684-1748), architect and decorator, devized his own vocabulary of Gothick ornamentation, which spread equally apace and as finer over England as the arabesques of Continental Rococo. But, autonomously from this, rocaille in England touched merely a handful of interiors, some loftier-quality furniture, sure paintings and some porcelain, in particular the products of Chelsea and Bow.

The primeval instance of rocaille in England was the commission given to the great French designer Meissonnier past the Knuckles of Kingston in 1735 for a suite of tabular array furniture in silvery. But this was a fairly rare case and rococo design was generally confined to engraved decoration on sobre forms nearly entirely unaffected by the mode. The new tendencies were disseminated predominantly by pattern-books such as Matthias Lock's, or Jones'south "The Admirer's or Builder's Companion" of 1739, which made rococo or quasi-rococo details available to every craftsman who could afford the book. The fact that these were only details, detached from their surroundings, accounts for the frequently gauche quality of much English rococo piece of furniture. since the craftsman could non exist expected to appreciate the organic nature of the style from mere fragments.

As in Italy and France, the eighteenth-century patron'south gustatory modality often extended to the Oriental in one form or another. accounting for the few rococo rooms of note in England such equally the bedroom at Nostell Priory, Yorkshire, of 1745, or, the virtually important. Claydon House in Buckinghamshire (c.1768), where a series of rooms were decorated by a certain Lightfoot, nigh whom piffling is known. In these rooms, withal, the fashion is past no means as pure as Continental Rococo.

Rococo decorative art announced in other English town and state business firm interiors and issometimes of the highest quality - notably in the hall at Ragley, at nearby Hagley, and in the swirling plasterwork of the Francini brothers. who executed much stucco work in Ireland, and are particularly famed for their work at Russborough. But this bonny local craftsmanship is a far cry from the complete, all-embracing schemes of the Continent.

English language Rococo Piece of furniture and Decorative Arts

Dissimilar the French, English cabinet-makers did non usually sign their pieces, and and then comparatively lilliputian is known of men such as John Linnell, John Cobb, Benjamin Goodison and William Vile, who all appear to have worked extensively in the new fashion. The name of Chippendale is, even so, outstanding, not only because of the quality of his pieces, but also considering of his publication "The Gentleman and Chiffonier-maker's Director" (1754).

In his designs for mirrors and overmantels, often flavoured by chinoiserie, 1 sees exotic examples of the rococo style, equally every bit meticulous every bit French boiserie merely designed to be used as isolated features and rarely every bit part of a whole decorative scheme. Likewise, the elaborate and fantastic carvings in the hall at Claydon are isolated in an otherwise classical setting.

English Rococo Painting

In painting, two English artists fabricated certain concessions to the rococo - William Hogarth (1697-1764) and Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88). Hogarth reacted strongly against the type of baroque history painting which was and then sought after by the 'amateurs' and introduced into his own piece of work the so-chosen 'Line of Beauty', which he explained in his "The Assay of Beauty" (1753) and which was a serpentine line rather similar an elongated 'S'. This was, of course, precisely the form of much rococo decoration.

Gainsborough, on the other hand, began life every bit a painter of minor, stilted portraits later developing a more sophisticated style afterwards his motility to stylish Bathroom. He painted some portraits in a rococo mode surprisingly close to Boucher, their floating brushwork and feathery landscapes, bright pinks and silvery greys pronouncedly more rococo than any contemporary English painting. Run across too the Regency lodge portraitist Thomas Lawrence.

Neoclassicism swept England from the return of Robert Adam to the country in 1758, merely even his celibate and epicene style echoes the dainty, meticulous quality of most French rococo decorations and his Gothick is as rococo as whatsoever decoration of that period in England. The Swiss portrait artist and history painter, Angelica Kauffmann (1741-1807), much admired by Sir Joshua Reynolds for her portraiture, worked with Robert Adam on a number of his architectural decorations.

The Rococo Style in Germany - Characteristics

In dissimilarity to the superb restraint of the finest French rococo, Germany provides a breathtaking range of some of the most outrageous and magnificent rococo compages and interior decoration in the history of European art.

German Rococo Compages, Interior Design and Decoration

This high standard of excellence spread from architecture to practical art - furniture, furnishings and porcelain - though these rarely surpassed those of France. Nothing in 18th-century France, Italy or England rivals the sheer excess of such architectural masterpieces every bit Melk or the Dresden Zwinger, and in the number of first-rate churches and palaces lonely, Frg easily outstrips the others. This may stem from the fact that what we at present telephone call Federal republic of germany, was, in the eighteenth century, divided into several dissimilar principalities, kingdoms anq bishoprics, and then that a sure rivalry must accept determined the creation of buildings of major importance - unlike France or England where the really important commissions were invariably bars to a small number of patrons.

German rococo can be seen to trace its origins to Roman churches of the bizarre menstruation such as Bernini's Sant' Andrea al Quirinale, where colour, lite and elaborate sculpture are all combined. This is credible for the first fourth dimension in Germany in the Abbey Church building of Weltenburg, built later on 1714, with its oval dome cut away internally to reveal a frescoed vision of the heavens in a higher place.

Colour was the main string to the bow of High german rococo - pink, lilac, lemon, blue - all were combined or used individually to telling effect, equally in the Amalienburg, well-nigh Munich. The heavier, curving forms of the Baroque are turned into more staccato rhythms in German language rococo, and one finds the influence of a major baroque monument such as Bernini'south baldacchino in St. Peter'south Rome, transformed by Balthasar Neumann (1687-1753), into a confection of the guild of the high altar at Vierzehnheiligen, perhaps the virtually complex and satisfying of German churches.

While room shapes in France during the eighteenth century did not change a bully deal, and the programme of ecclesiastical buildings inappreciably at all, German language rococo architects explored every possibility. Walls not only seem to sway despite their huge calibration, but whole sections appear to have been cut away, with the effect that the enormous frescoed ceilings, which entirely dominate most of these churches, seem to bladder higher up the worshipper.

One of the most exciting features of German rococo compages is the highly dramatic siting of some of the about important examples, such every bit the Abbey of Melk past J. Prandtauer, begun in 1702. Deliberately placed in a commanding position high above the Danube, the two great towers dominate a courtyard in front opened to the outside world by a great Palladian-type arch. Such a feeling for drama, and for the total interest of the faithful both externally and internally, is also establish at Ettal, in a reversed part, with the monastery dominated by surrounding mountains.

Secular edifice also reached a high level of perfection. Perhaps the most sophisticated examples are to be found in and effectually Munich where, equally court dwarf and architect, Francois Cuvillies (1695-1768) was involved in many buildings, perhaps the finest being the Amalienburg. This small-scale pavilion, built betwixt 1734 and 1739 and named after the Elector's wife, has, in Hugh Award's words, 'an easy elegance and gossamer delicacy'. Its gently swaying front, shallow rustication and unusual pediments herald one of the loveliest rooms in Europe - the famous Hall of Mirrors with its silverish rocaille against powder-blue background and glittering drinking glass. At the opposite end of the scale, Cuvillies Residenz-theater in Munich (1751-53) uses richly gilded figures and musical instruments to frame the entire auditorium, contrasting vividly with the cherry damask and velvet of the walls and seats.

Potsdam and Dresden never produced a rococo style equally refined as that of Munich, just buildings such as the Zwinger (1709-19) by Poppelmann in Dresden overwhelm by their scale and superabundance of decorative detail. The event of this blazon of architecture is likewise felt in the little Palace of Sans Souci at Potsdam (1745-51), which was built for Frederick the Bang-up.

For sheer scale, opulence and overpowering grandeur of detail, the Rococo of Germany is foremost in Europe.

For more than information about Rococo interiors in Russia, run across the piece of work of Bartolomeo Rastrelli (1700-71).

Later Variants of Rococo

The rococo style never really died out in provincial France. With the arrival of Historicism in the 1820s, many craftsmen found it comparatively easy to produce whole interiors and buildings in the '2nd Rococo' fashion so favoured by Louis Phillipe and his queen, examples of which are to be found throughout Paris.

The rococo architectural and blueprint revival came to England as early every bit 1828 with Wyatville's Waterloo Chamber in Apsley House, the interiors of Lancaster Business firm and the Elizabeth Saloon at Belvoir Castle. It appealed naturally to the rich of the day, and the Rothschilds decorated several houses in the style, even incorporating actual 18th-century interiors at Waddesdon Estate in the 1880s.

Purple assent was given to the fashion by Ludwig of Bavaria in his Linderhof Palace and Herrenchiemsee of the aforementioned period. Information technology became the accepted gustation in the ornament of the many new hotels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and 'Le gout Ritz' was to exist synonymous with luxury and elegance.

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