In art history, the period following the late Baroque in European art and design. It flourished especially in France and S Germany c.170050, until superseded by the Neoclassical taste spreading from Rome. Whereas Baroque was dramatic and powerfully theatrical, Rococo sought effects of charm and delicacy on a small scale - surface effects rather than bold masses. It was therefore most successful as a style of interior decoration, exemplified in the designs of Pierre Lepautre (c.16481716), Gilles-Marie Oppenord (16721742), Nicolas Pineau (16841754), and Juste Aurèle Meissonier (c.16931750). The greatest Rococo painter was Watteau.
The Rococo style of art emerged in France in the early 18th century as a continuation of the Baroque style. In contrast to the heavier themes and darker colors of the Baroque, the Rococo style was characterized by an opulence, grace, playfulness, and lightness. In the mid-late 18th century, rococo was largely supplanted by the Neoclassic style.
The word Rococo is apparently a combination of the French rocaille, or shell, and the Italian barocco, or Baroque style. Due to Rococo love of shell-like curves and focus on decorative arts, some critics used the term to derogatively imply that the style was frivolous or merely fashion; While there is still some debate about the historical significance of the style to art in general, Rococo is now widely recognized as a major period in the development of European art.
Historical development
Rococo developed first in the decorative arts and interior design. The delicacy and playfulness of Rococo designs is often seen as a reaction to the excesses of Louis XIV's regime.
The 1730s represented the height of Rococo development in France. Rococo still maintained the Baroque taste for complex forms and intricate patterns.
The Rococo style spread with French artists and engraved publications. Particularly in the south, German Rococo was applied with enthusiasm to churches and palaces. In Italy, the late Baroque styles of Borromini and Guarini set the tone for Rococo in Turin, Venice, Naples and Sicily, while the arts in Tuscany and Rome remained more wedded to Baroque.
Rococo in England was always thought of as the "French taste." William Hogarth helped develop a theoretical foundation for Rococo beauty. Though not intentionally referencing the movement, he argued in his Analysis of Beauty (1753) that the undulating lines and S-curves prominent in Rococo were the basis for grace and beauty in art or nature (unlike the straight line or the circle in Classicism). The development of Rococo in England is considered to had been connected with the revival of interest in Gothic architecture early in the 18th century.
The beginning of the end for Rococo came in the early 1760s as figures like Voltaire and Jacques-François Blondel began to voice their criticism of the superficiality and degeneracy of the art. By 1780, Rococo had passed out of fashion in France, replaced by the order and seriousness of Neoclassical artists like Jacques Louis David. It remained popular in the provinces and in Italy, until the second phase of neoclassicism, "Empire style," arrived with Napoleonic governments and swept Rococo away.
There was a renewed interest in the Rococo style between 1820 and 1870. The English were among the first to revive the "Louis XIV style" as it was miscalled at first, and paid inflated prices for second-hand Rococo luxury goods that could scarcely be sold in Paris.
Rococo in different artistic modes
Furniture and decorative objects
The lighthearted themes and intricate designs of Rococo presented themselves best on a smaller scale than the imposing Baroque architecture and sculpture. It is not surprising, then, that French Rococo art was at home indoors.
Rococo style took pleasure in asymmetry, a taste that was new to European style.
Rococo taste enjoyed the exotic character of Chinese arts, and imitated them in wares produced in France. (Wider aspects of fanciful European views of the East are discussed at the entry Orient.)
In a full-blown Rococo design, like the Table d'appartement (ca. The knot (noeud) of the stretcher shows the asymmetrical "contraste" that was a Rococo innovation.
For small plastic figures of gypsum, clay, biscuit, porcelain (Sèvres, Meissen), the gay Rococo is not unsuitable; However, confessionals, pulpits, altars, and even facades lead ever more into the territory of the architectonic, which does not easily combine with the curves of Rococo, the light and the petty, with forms whose whence and wherefore baffle inquiry.
Dynasties of Parisian ébénistes, some of them German-born, developed a style of surfaces curved in three dimensions (bombé), where matched veneers (marquetry temporarily being in eclipse) or vernis martin japanning was effortlessly completed by gilt-bronze ("ormolu") mounts: Antoine Gaudreau, Charles Cressent, Jean-Pierre Latz, François Oeben, Bernard II van Risenbergh are the outstanding names.
French designers like François de Cuvilliés, Nicholas Pineau and Bartolomeo Rastrelli exported Parisian styles in person to Munich and Saint Petersburg, while the German Juste-Aurèle Meissonier found his career at Paris. The guiding spirits of the Parisian rococo were a small group of marchands-merciers, the forerunners of modern decorators, led by Simon-Philippenis Poirier.
In France the style remained somewhat more reserved, since the ornaments were mostly of wood, or, after the fashion of wood-carving, less robust and naturalistic and less exuberant in the mixture of natural with artificial forms of all kinds (e.g.
English Rococo tended to be more restrained. The most successful exponent of English Rococo was probably Thomas Johnson, a gifted carver and furniture designer working in London in the mid 1700s.
Interior Design
Solitude Palace in Stuttgart and Chinese Palace in Oranienbaum, the Bavarian church of Wies and Sanssouci in Potsdam are examples of how Rococo made its way into European architecture.
In those Continental contexts where Rococo is fully in control, sportive, fantastic, and sculptured forms are expressed with abstract ornament using flaming, leafy or shell-like textures in asymmetrical sweeps and flourishes and broken curves; intimate Rococo interiors suppress architectonic divisions of architrave, frieze and cornice for the picturesque, the curious, and the whimsical, expressed in plastic materials like carved wood and above all stucco. The Rococo palette is softer and paler than the rich primary colors and dark tonalities favored in Baroque tastes.
A few anti-architectural hints rapidly evolved into full-blown Rococo at the end of the 1720s and began to affect interiors and decorative arts throughout Europe. The richest forms of German Rococo are in Catholic Germany (illustration, above).
Rococo plasterwork by immigrant Italian-Swiss artists like Bagutti and Artari is a feature of houses by James Gibbs, and the Franchini brothers working in Ireland equalled anything that was attempted in England.
In England, one of Hogarth's set of paintings forming a melodramatic morality tale titled Marriage à la Mode, engraved in 1745, shows the parade rooms of a stylish London house, in which the only rococo is in plasterwork of the salon's ceiling. Here, on the Kentian mantel, the crowd of Chinese vases and mandarins are satirically rendered as hideous little monstrosities, and the Rococo wall clock is a jumble of leafy branches.
Painting
Though Rococo originated in the purely decorative arts, the style showed clearly in painting. Portraiture was also popular among Rococo painters.
Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) is generally considered the first great Rococo painter. Even Thomas Gainsborough's (1727–1788) delicate touch and sensitivity are reflective of the Rococo spirit.
Sculpture
Sculpture was another area that Rococo artists branched into. Étienne-Maurice Falconet (1716–1791) is widely considered one of the best representatives of French Rococo. this serves as an excellent symbol of the Rococo style—the demigod is transformed into the soft child, the bone-shattering club becomes the heart-scathing arrows, just as marble is so freely replaced by stucco.
Music
The Galante Style was the equivalent of Rococo in music history, too, between Baroque and Classical, and it is not easy to define in words. The rococo music style itself developed out of baroque music, particular in France.
Boucher's painting (above) provides a glimpse of the society which Rococo reflected.
Rococo "worldliness" and the Roman Catholic Church
A critical view of the unsuitable nature of Rococo in ecclesiastical contexts was taken up by the Catholic Encyclopedia:
For the church the Rococo style may be, generally speaking, compared with worldly church music. In the church Rococo may at times have the charm of prettiness and may please by its ingenious technic, provided the objects be small and subordinate a credence table with cruets and plate, a vase, a choir desk, lamps, key and lock, railings or balustrade, do not too boldly challenge the eye, and fulfill all the requirements of mere beauty of form. The Rococo style accords very ill with the solemn office of the monstrance, the tabernacle, and the altar, and even of the pulpit. The naturalism of certain Belgian pulpits, in spite or perhaps on account of their artistic character, has the same effect as have outspoken Rococo creations. In the case of the larger objects, the sculpture of Rococo forms either seems pretty, or, if this prettiness be avoided, resembles Baroque. Woven materials, wood carvings, and works in plaster of Paris are evidently less obtrusive than works in other materials, when they employ the sportive Rococo. Iron (especially in railings) and bronze lose their coldness and hardness, when animated by the Rococo style; All things considered, we may say of the Rococo style—as has not unreasonably been said of the Baroque and of the Renaissance—that it is very apt to introduce a worldly spirit into the church, even if we overlook the figural accessories, which are frequently in no way conducive to sentiments of devotion, and are incompatible with the sobriety and greatness of the architecture and with the seriousness of sacred functions. Creation of the Rococo (Reprinted as The Creation of the Rococo Decorative Style, 1980). The Age of Rococo Published in the US as The Rococo Age: Art and Civilization of the 18th Century (Originally published in German, 1959).
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