Rococo and Neoclassicm in Architecture

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Rococo and Neoclassicm

The emergence of Rococo arts and Neo-classical style in the seventeenth and eighteenth century
had paid tribute to greatest eras in the history of art as well as of the world. History accounted
that the other marked the lighthearted and uneventful period in the history while the latest came
out during the age of warfare and religious confrontation (Rococo), through which many artists had
drawn inspiration from. Basically, Rococo style was a new mode of Baroque while Neo-classical style
was a modified version of Rococo.
Comparison and Contrast between Rococo and Neo Classical Styles
Comparison ;
Both Rococo and Neoclassicism architectures have achieved similarities despite a total revolution of
style that emerged with Neoclassicism, that is, it was able to emphasize culture, political condition,
and social condition in its theme. Both found the importance of color in enhancing the image of a
once significant structure.
Contrast:
Given the historical features, Rococo style differs from Neo-classical arts in a sense that the
former had light-hearted, whimsical style of decorative art (Rococo), while the latter emphasized
courage, sacrifice, nationalism, and tradition (Neoclassism).
-Specific Works of Visual Arts with Rococo and Neo Classical Styles
For example: as referenceQueluz National Palace in Rococo Style
Queluz National Palace is remarkable in its elaborative design and grandiosity in its very light color.
The faade has decorative features illustrated around windows and doors, rooflines, and swooping
pediments. Other parts of the building are noticeable because of some statues on top of the
building, yet its grandiosity remains standing because of its color that enhances its feminine look.
The interior part is more sophisticated in its glazed tiles, decorated ceilings that are enhanced
through their crystal chandeliers. What make the structure really impressive are the splendid
paintings in light or golden color on the ceilings of very huge rooms, which brighten the interior of
the building. The garden also adds to the attraction which contains statues of interesting story
such as the rape of the Sabines and many others as well as other surprises such as a double
staircase.
--Cathedral of Vilnius in Lithuania in Neo-Classical Style as reference
Cathedral of Vilnius in Lithuania became an important building in the city because of fairs and
other gatherings that were held regularly surrounding the building. The building is characterized by
its solid form usually less decorative column and portico with definite lines that outline windows,
door and the roofs. The walls are plain except for few statues of images including the three at
the rooftop. Most of these statues were recovered from excavation, which is why it has historical
importance. The building has lighter motifs in a solid color of white. This masculine look is
enhanced by the simplicity of the work. In the interior part of the building, there are also lines
that add strength in the character and are enhanced by its color. What surprising about the
building is that inside the chapel, one can see illustration or paintings that can be seen in the
building the altar looks like the one used in pagan religious practices. Actually, one characteristics of
neo classicism is that, it houses several antiques and relics that have been found for the purpose of
preservation and historical relevance.
http://literature-articles.blogspot.com/2013/05/comparison-and-contrast-between-rococo.html
(Rococo was more decorative and light)Rococo was light, ornamental and elaborate style of
art, identified by elegant and detailed ornamentation and the use of curved, asymmetrical
forms. The style appealed to the senses rather that intellect, stressing beauty over depth.
Rococo, with its emphasis on asymmetry, bright colors, and ornamentation is typically
considered to be the direct opposite of the Neoclassical style.
Generally speaking, Neoclassicism is defined stylistically by its use of straight lines, minimal use
of color, simplicity of form and, of course, an adherence to classical values and techniques. The
dominant styles during the 18
th
century were Baroque andRococo. The latter, with its emphasis
on asymmetry, bright colors, and ornamentation is typically considered to be the direct opposite
of the Neoclassical style, which is based on order, symmetry and simplicity. Neoclassical
architecture was modeled after the classical style and in many ways it was a reaction against the
exuberant Rococo style. Generally speaking, Neoclassicism is defined stylistically by its use of
straight lines, minimal use of color, simplicity of form and, of course, an adherence to
classical values and techniques.
https://www.boundless.com/art-history/europe-and-america-in-the-1700s-and-early-1800s/neoclassicism-in-britain/the-
classical-revival/
NEOCLASSICAL:
Neoclassical decorating style takes its roots from Greek and Roman discoveries in the eighteen
century. Thus the style is lush but elegant. The major influence on neoclassical style had the
Scottish architect Robert Adam who had reinterpreted the classical concept by adding architectural
elements from different cultures to it.
Colors ;

Colors in Neoclassical style design are mostly light cream, gray, pale blue, yellow and green. Black,
red, gold and Terra cotta were used as accenting colors. The wallpaper was used together with
murals and ceiling decorations all of which created a luxurious look.
Furniture
Neoclassical furniture is simple but geometrical. The furniture was made of dark wood as well as
the flooring which could also feature marble and stone. The Persian rugs were as floor coverings.
Fabrics during this period are luxurious and include silk, brocade, cotton, and wool.
Decorations
Urns, jars, Wedgwood china, pottery, screens and statuary decorate the Neoclassical interior making
for a really luxurious and detailed look. Big mirrors and artwork decorated the walls together with
moldings that extended from ceiling to floor
http://www.interiorholic.com/decorating/decorating-styles/neoclassical-decorating-style/
ROCOCO:
rococo (rkk, r) [key], style in architecture, especially in interiors and the decorative arts,
which originated in France and was widely used in Europe in the 18th cent. The term may be
derived from the French words rocaille and coquille (rock and shell), natural forms prominent in
the Italian baroque decorations of interiors and gardens. The first expression of the rococo was the
transitional rgence style. In contrast with the heavy baroque plasticity and grandiloquence, the
rococo was an art of exquisite refinement and linearity. Through their engravings, Juste Aurle
Meissonier and Nicholas Pineau helped spread the style throughout Europe. The Parisian tapestry
weavers, cabinetmakers, and bronze workers followed the trend and arranged motifs such as
arabesque elements, shells, scrolls, branches of leaves, flowers, and bamboo stems into ingenious and
engaging compositions. The fashionable enthusiasm for Chinese art added to the style the whole
bizarre vocabulary of chinoiserie motifs. In France, major exponents of the rococo were the painters
Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard and the architects Robert de Cotte, Gilles Marie Oppenord, and
later Jacques Ange Gabriel. The rococo vogue spread to Germany and Austria, where Franois
de Cuvillis was the pioneer. Italian rococo, particularly that of Venice, was brilliantly decorative,
exemplified in the paintings of Tiepolo. The furniture of Thomas Chippendale manifested its
influence in England. During the 1660s and 1670s, the rococo competed with a more severely
classical form of architecture, which triumphed with the accession of Louis XVI.
Read more: rococo, in architecture | Infoplease.com http://www.infoplease.com/encyclopedia/world/rococo-
architecture.html#ixzz34G4jGUvQ
The ornate and decorative style of Rococo was also applied to architecture, furniture,
porcelain, tapestries, and opera and theatre scenery. Rococo architecture developed in
France about 1720 during the Rgence (1715-1723) - the period when Philip, Duke of
Orleans was Regent to the infant Louis XV - and spread to other countries during the
next sixty years. There was, in the Rococo period, the development of a style of
decoration in which most of the familiar themes of the Baroque reappeared but were
treated with a lightness and an asymmetrical freedom which rendered them suitable for
the decoration of rooms and apartments conceived on a much less grand scale. The old
division of the wall into panels was retained but the lines of the mouldings lost their
stiffness and were broken into curves, or garlanded with flowers or terminated in elaborate
scrolls or shell-work. Mirrors were used lavishly, and stucco and tiles were sometimes
applied instead of wood panelling. Coloured marble or imitation marble was used for floors
and chimneypieces.
Chairs, mirrors, picture frames all lost their old square shapes, and the cornice over a door
might dissolve before ones eyes into an Oriental landscape, or a bundle of corn tied up
with ribbons. Rococo architecture reached its greatest splendour in the palaces, monasteries,
and churches of southern Germany and Austria.
The Chinese and the Gothick Tastes
The Rococo style was never fully accepted in England, but many interiors incorporated aspects of it,
particularly through plasterwork, smaller decorative pieces such as mirrors and porcelain, and
furniture. Ceilings were sometimes painted, and decorative plasterwork was generally in white and
gold. Stucco had been almost unknown in England prior to the 18th-century, and now became very
fashionable. It was ideally suited to the sinuous scrollwork of a Rococo ceiling. In particular, Rococo
offshoots - the Chinese Taste and the Gothick Taste were all the rage in England. Books were
published which advised gentlemen how they might improve their homes by decorating in the Italian
(Palladian), the Gothick, or the Chinese manner. By the middle of the century houses like Claydon,
where all these styles can be seen, was not uncommon.
The Chinese Taste, sometimes referred to as chinoiserie, was a style of decoration based on
romanticized, pseudo-Oriental motifs. It reached its height in England in the 1740s and 1750s. The
Gothick Taste was a style of architecture and furniture very loosely based on medieval Gothic
architecture. The gazebos, cottages and summerhouses which formed the principal output of the
Gothick architects were, in fact, ordinary 18th-century cottages on to which were tacked a row of
castellations and some plaster gargoyles. Appearing in the 1730s, it was almost entirely and English
phenomenon. Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpoles London house decorated entirely in this style in the
1740s, was the most influential Gothick house of its day. These specialised styles were normally
seen primarily in furniture and decoration - for example, in the very popular hand-painted Chinese
wallpaper and lacquered furniture - and hardly ever as an integral part of a decorating scheme.
Rococo was not a hard and fast style which flourished in one short period; it was rather a mood
which recurred over the ensuing centuries. After its popularity had declined in Europe it suddenly
reappeared in England and produced the Brighton Pavilion. During the Victorian era it disappeared,
only to return again at the end of the century in Art Nouveau. But it never was so expressive as
in the mid-18th century when its blossoming coincided with the work of major craftsmen such as
Thomas Chippendale, whose name became universally associated with English Rococo furniture.
Rococo Furniture
Most of the designs in it were Rococo, and there were also some of the chinoiserie type known as
Chinese Chippendale. He also used Gothick window-tracery, pinnacles and crockets to furniture that
was otherwise classical in design. It was as this time in France that draped dressing tables appeared.
In keeping with the Rococo style, they had bouffant skirts and were decorated with ribbons and
flowers. Sometimes they even had their own canopies to complement the existing furnishings.
Rococo Furniture in brief:
Influence of French Rococo, Chinese and Gothick;
Mahogany main wood;
Carved cabriole legs;
Claw and ball feet;
Fretwork and Chinese motifs in backs of chairs;
Fabrics are brocade, leather, velour.
Rococo Colours
In France the Rococo style used delicate colours such as pink, white, yellow, azure blue and
ivory mixed with cream and gold;
Appliqu on clear colours was fashionable.
Rococo Flooring
Rugs often Oriental in design - rugs with small patterns and in Chinese designs on blue
grounds were typical.
Rococo Buildings
Claydon House, Polsden Lacy (the Rococo Room), Powderham Castle (The Staircase Hall, The White Drawing
Room, The First Library), Hagley Hall (The Dining Room, The Drawing Room), Belvoir Castle (Elizabeth Saloon),
Victorian and Albert Museum (The Music Room from Norfolk House)
http://www.adriennechinn.co.uk/interior-design-styles/rococo.htm
Rococo appeared in France in about 1700, primarily as a style of interior design. The French Rococo exterior
was most often simple, or even plain, but Rococo exuberance took over the interior. This characteristics of
Rococo reflected the mental tendency of the French bourgeoise. After 72 years of the Louis XIV reign, there arose
in Paris new types of private patrons -- nobles created by the sale of offices, nouveau riche tax collectors, and
millionaires and bankers fat on the spoils of financing 25 years of disastrous wars. They luxuriated in a new
artistic freedom, indulged their highly individualistic tastes, and welcomed fresh ideas in decoration. A society
devoted to material comfort and preoccupied with personal pleasure demanded constant variety, surprise, and
originality. The French nobles abandoned Versailles after 1715 for the pleasures of town life. The "hotels" (town
houses) of Paris soon became the enters of a new, softer style we call "rococo." The feminine look of the Rococo
style suggests that the age was dominated by the taste and the social initiative of women to a large extent it was.
Women -- Madame de Pompadour (Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson: 17211764) in France, Maria Theresa in
Austria (17171780), Elizabeth of Russia (1709-1762) and Catherine the Great (1729-1796)in Russia --
held some of the highest positions in Europe. The Rococo salon was the center of early 18th-centruy Parisian
society, and Paris was the social center of Europe.
A delicacy of decorative motif in paneling and furniture characteristic of the Rococo design of the Louis XV style;
room from the Htel de Varengeville, Paris. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New YorkAt the outset
the Rococo style represented a reaction against the ponderous design of Louis XIVs Palace of Versailles and the
official Baroque art of his reign. Several interior designers, painters, and engravers, among them Pierre Le
Pautre (1648-1716), Juste Aurle Meissonier (1695-1770), Jean Berain the Elder (1640-1711),
and Nicolas Pineau (16841754), developed a lighter and more intimate style of decoration for the new
residences of nobles in Paris. In the Rococo style, walls, ceilings, and moldings were decorated with delicate
interlacings of curves and countercurves based on the fundamental shapes of the C and the S, as well as with
shell forms and other natural shapes. Asymmetrical design was the rule. Light pastels, ivory white, and gold
were the predominant colours, and Rococo decorators frequently used mirrors to enhance the sense of open
space.
The Rococo style was also manifested in the decorative arts. Its asymmetrical forms and rocaille ornament were
quickly adapted to silver and porcelain, and French furniture of the period also displayed curving forms,
naturalistic shell and floral ornament, and a more elaborate, playful use of gilt-bronze and porcelain
ornamentation.
The Rococo style is characterized by freely handled S-shaped curves; the harmonious combination of naturalistic
motifs, such as sprigs of flowers, with unrepresentational ornament, often reminiscent of splashing water; a
tendency towards asymmetry; and a preference for the delicately poised to the solidly square set form.
Irrational conjunctions of distorted curves are characteristic - derived from rocaille or the cleft, scalloped shell
work and rockwork, and from the fantastic forms of exotic seashells (called coquillage) which were collected
and highly prized. Unlike other styles, Rococo first appeared in the decorative arts and only later affected
painting, sculpture, and architecture. Conceived originally in two dimensions, Rococo long remained a linear art,
even when it was developed in France by highly skilled carvers, who occasionally borrowed and incorporated
Chinese decorative motifs, for there was a subtle affinity between the Rococo style and ancient Chinese culture.
Although the style came within the framework of classical design, it was essentially asymmetrical, and the
French master carvers who translated it into three dimensions were ornamentalists with a taste for elegant
complexity. The cross-fertilization of French Rococo and Chinese art liberated a gift for fantasy that was
intemperately indulged, though seldom in England.
http://naturalisticspoon.com/Rococo_Style.html
Influences of Rococo over Architecture
Features of Rococo architecture include intricate patterns, delicate details, light pastel colors,
elaborate scrolls and curves, complex and asymmetrical shapes, and ornaments shaped like plants and
shells. It is a lighter, graceful, and more elaborate version of Baroque architecture. Compared to
Baroque architecture, Rococo architecture is more secular because of its jocular and lighthearted
themes.
Examples of Rococo architecture include the Catherine Palace in Russia, Queluz National Palace in
Portugal, and the Chateau de Versailles in France. Germany had a lot of buildings heavily influenced
by the Rococo style, including the Chinese House, Charlottenburg Palace, and Augustusburg and
Falkenlust Palaces. As for the architects who emulated the Rococo style, there is Philip de Lange,
Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, and Matthaus Daniel Poppelmann.

Influences of Rococo over Different Artistic Modes
Aside from architecture, the Rococo style was also used in furniture and interior design. Furniture
evolved from being a status symbol to a focus on versatility and comfort. Most furniture was
freestanding instead of anchored to the wall to accentuate the lighthearted atmosphere of the
Rococo style. British Rococo was more constrained compared to French Rococo. The style also
became evident in garden designs, as seen in the work of Andre Le Notre, a French landscape
architect and gardener of Louis XIV, who designed the majestic Palace of Versailles.
In painting, the Rococo style can be seen through the delicate colors and curving forms used.
Portraiture became an important component of painting. There are works that showed some form
of naughtiness in the behavior of their subjects, exemplifying Rococo's departure from the Baroque
themes of church and politics. Landscapes also featured leisurely outings of aristocratic couples.
Porcelain sculpture replaced marble statues during the height of the Rococo style, and one
important figure in Rococo sculpture was Etienne-Maurice Falconet.
The Rococo art movement is undoubtedly a major period in the development of European art. In
art history, it sits between the Baroque style and the Neoclassic movement. The playful and
lighthearted style of Rococo was evident in different art modes, such as architecture, furniture and
interior design, painting, and sculpture. You can visit Germany, Austria, and Russia to see Rococo
architecture in all its grandeur.
http://architecture.answers.com/history/revisiting-rococo-architecture
The Rococo style of interior design is flamboyant and rich with intricate and ornate features.
Rococo style peaked during 1700 and 1780 in western Europe and the name Rococo means 'rocaille'
in French, which is appropriate as the Rococo's ornate asymmetry was inspired by natural curves of
trees, shells, clouds and flowers. Gold plasterwork is one of the key features of Rococo decorating
style with lavishly decorated walls and ceilings featuring the contrast of pastels and gold. The use
of mirrors was also a feature of Rococo Interiors and they were usually had intricately-shaped,
gilded frames.
Rococo furniture is made of mahogany wood or gilded and upholstered in leather, brocade or velour.
It also has carved and sinuous silhouettes that compliment the wall and ceiling finishing, which
strengthened the ornate theme. Rococo was known for such colours as yellow, pink, ivory and gold,
azure blue and cream. The combination of pastels and gold is a signature mark of this style. Rococo
style favoured curved lines so previously used asymmetrical square lines and forms were replaced
with circular, oval, spiral and natural forms, even rooms were designed in oval shape or arranged to
avoid square form.
To Recap, the main characteristics of the rococo interior design style are...
Flamboyant and rich.
Lots of intricate, ornate, decorative features.
Gold painted plasterwork contrasting with pastel wall colours.
Multiple ornate mirrors commonly used.
Expensive materials used in furniture, e.g. teak and mahogany.
Curves, spirals and ovals are dominant.
http://www.onlinedesignteacher.com/interior_design/interior_design_styles.html#.U5dGkvm1ZGQ

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