Rococo painting represents the expression in painting of an aesthetic movement that flourished in Europe between the early and late 18th century, migrating to America and surviving in some regions until the mid-19th century. The painting of this movement is divided into two sharply differentiated camps. One forms an intimate, carefree visual document of the way of life and worldview of the eighteenth-century European elites, and the other, adapting constituent elements of the style to the monumental decoration of churches and palaces, served as a means of glorifying faith and civil power.
Rococo was born in Paris around the 1700s, as a reaction of the French aristocracy against the sumptuous, palatial, and solemn Baroque practiced in the period of Louis XIV. It was characterized above all by its hedonistic and aristocratic character, manifested in delicacy, elegance, sensuality, and grace, and in the preference for light and sentimental themes, where curved line, light colors, and asymmetry played a fundamental role in the composition of the work. From France, where it assumed its most typical feature and where it was later recognized as national heritage, Rococo soon spread throughout Europe, but significantly changing its purposes and keeping only the external form of the French model, with important centers of cultivation in Germany, England, Austria, and Italy, with some representation also in other places, such as the Iberian Peninsula, the Slavic and Nordic countries, even reaching the Americas.[1][2][3]
Despite its value as an autonomous work of art, Rococo painting was often conceived as an integral part of an overall concept of interior decoration.[4] It began to be criticized from the mid-18th century, with the rise of the Enlightenment, neoclassical and bourgeois ideals, surviving until the French Revolution, when it fell into complete disrepute, accused of being superficial, frivolous, immoral and purely decorative.[5] From the 1830s on, it was again recognized as an important testimony to a certain phase of European culture and the lifestyle of a specific social stratum, and as a valuable asset for its own unique artistic merit, where questions about aesthetics were raised that would later flourish and become central to modern art.[6][7]
- ^ Rococo style. Encyclopaedia Britannica online. May 4, 2009
- ^ COHEN, George M. (ed). The Essentials of Art History. Research & Education Association, 1995. pp. 111–112
- ^ OLIVEIRA, Myriam A. Rococó religioso no Brasil e seus antecedentes europeus Cosac Naify Edições, 2005. p. 43
- ^ ZAGALA, Stephen. Aesthetics: a place I've never seen. In MASSUMI, Brian (ed). A shock to thought: expression after Deleuze and Guattari. Routledge, 2002. p. 34
- ^ KLEINER, Fred. Gardner's Art Through the Ages: A Global History. Cengage Learning EMEA, 2008. Vol. II. pp. 751–752
- ^ PLAX, Julie-Anne Interpreting Watteau across the Centuries. In SHERIFF, Mary (ed). Antoine Watteau: Perspectives on the Artist and the Culture of his Time. University of Delaware Press, 2006. pp. 34–35
- ^ MELVILLE, Stephen W. Philosophy beside itself: on deconstruction and modernism. Manchester University Press ND, 1986. pp. 8-ss