The long nineteenth century
Neoclassicism
c. 1760–1840
A return to the clarity and moral seriousness of ancient Greece and Rome.
Overview
The excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum from the mid-eighteenth century renewed interest in antiquity, and the writer Johann Joachim Winckelmann held up Greek art as a model of “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur.” Artists answered with firm outlines, sculptural figures and sober color.
Subjects from ancient history were used to teach civic virtue and self-sacrifice, ideals that suited the age of the American and French Revolutions. Jacques-Louis David became the leading painter of revolutionary and Napoleonic France.
What defines it
- Clear outlines and smooth, polished surfaces
- Stable, ordered compositions inspired by ancient relief sculpture
- Themes of duty, heroism and civic virtue
Works to know
- Oath of the Horatii
- Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss
- The Death of Marat
- La Grande Odalisque