Context and General Characterization

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Cybele Gontar was it circumstantial and empirically, but now the question is built on more scientific, systematic and rational basis. With these archaeological discoveries and theoretical studies became possible to form the first time a chronology of the culture and art of the Greeks and Romans, distinguishing what was proper to each others, and giving rise to an interest in the purely Greek tradition that had been overshadowed by Roman heritage, especially because at the time Greece was under Turkish rule and so, in practice, it was not easily accessible to scholars and the Christian West tourists. [11] [10]

The Death of Marat, Jacques Louis David, 1793, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

The movement also had political overtones, since the origin of neoclassical inspiration was the Greek culture and democracy, and with his Roman republic, with the associated values ​​of honor, duty, heroism, civility and patriotism. As a result, the neoclassical style was adopted by the revolutionary French government as an ideological weapon against "immoral luxury" and "decadent affectation" of elites, typified in gallant and hedonistic art Rococo, putting aside the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of Winckelmann and taking more aggressive, dynamic, dramatic and clearly propagandistic air, calling the society to change. [11] [12] had the Jacques-Louis David painter as his champion and took the successive names of style directory, convention style and later under Napoleon, Empire style, influencing other countries. In the United States, in the tumultuous process of winning their own independence, and inspired by the model of republican Rome, neoclassicism became a standard sponsored by the government and known as Federal Style. However, since then neoclassicism also became a courtier style, and because of their associations with the glorious classical past, was used by monarchs and princes as a propaganda vehicle for their personalities and deeds. [11] [13] [10]

The neoclassicism met its highest point between the mid-eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Winckelmann was great advertisement of ancient culture and the arts shone Goethe, David, Haydn, Mozart and Canova, plus many others. It is one of the characteristics of this period the coexistence of neoclassicism with another cultural movement also large influence: Romanticism. Both were in many ways styles antithetical because Romanticism tended to emphasize the drama, movement, individual vision, the irrational, mysticism and emotion, but on the other hand, was not entirely averse to the classic reference or idealism, and also born under the influence of the Enlightenment. It will often be difficult to distinguish them. Throughout the nineteenth century both schools come to dialogue and to merge increasingly generating the eclectic academicism, prosaic and sentimental the end of the century. In the early twentieth neoclassicism century - and romanticism - had been supplanted by the modernist aesthetic, while continuing to bear fruit in some regions [14] [13] [15] [16] [10] [12] In the decade. 1980 cultivated by the postmodernists, an updated form of classicism appeared on the scene with some momentum, manifesting itself in various forms of art. [17]