Neoclassicism is a movement in architecture, design and the arts which emerged in France in the 1740s and became dominant in France between about 1760 and 1830. It emerged as a reaction to the frivolity and excessive ornament of the baroque and rococo styles. In architecture it featured sobriety, straight lines, and forms, such as the pediment and colonnade, based on Ancient Greek and Roman models. In painting it featured heroism and sacrifice in the time of the ancient Romans and Greeks. It began late in the reign of Louis XV, became dominant under Louis XVI, and continued through the French Revolution, the French Directory, and the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the Bourbon Restoration until 1830, when it was gradually replaced as the dominant style by romanticism and eclecticism.
Prominent architects of the style included Ange-Jacques Gabriel (1698–1782), Jacques-Germain Soufflot (1713–1780), Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806) and Jean-François Chalgrin (1739–1811); painters included Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) and his pupil, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867).
History Neoclassicism in France emerged in the early to mid-18th century, inspired in part by the reports of the archeological excavations at Herculaneum (1738) and especially Pompeii (1748), which brought to light classical designs and paintings. The news of these discoveries, accompanied by engraved illustrations, circulated widely. The French antiquarian, art collector and amateur archeologist Anne Claude de Caylus travelled in Europe and the Mideast, and described what he had seen in Recueil d'antiquités, published with illustrations in 1755.
In the 1740s, the style began to slowly change; decoration became less extravagant and more discreet. In 1754 the brother of Madame de Pompadour, the Marquis de Marigny, accompanied the designer Nicolas Cochin and a delegation of artists and scholars to Italy to see the recent discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, and made a grand tour of other classical monuments. They returned full of enthusiasm for a new classical style, based on the Roman and Greek monuments. In 1754 they published a manifesto against the Rocaille style, calling for a return to classicism. Marigny, after the death of Louis XV, later became director of buildings for Louis XVI.
The style was given a philosophical appeal by the Philosophes, including Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who called for a restoration of moral values in society, and by the Abbé Marc-Antoine Laugier, who wrote L'essai sur l'architecture, a call for a return to pure and uncluttered forms of architecture. The archeological sites in Greece and Italy became mandatory stops for aristocratic and scholarly visitors on the Grand Tour of Europe. The best young painters in France competed for scholarships to the French Academy in Rome. Ingres studied there, and later became its director. In 1757 the Belgian architect Jean-François de Neufforge published Recueil élémentaire d'architecture, an illustrated textbook of the style. The new taste was originally called le goût grec (the Greek taste). It called for geometric forms and decoration in "the sober and majestic style of the architects of ancient Greece."
In the last years of the reign of Louis XV and throughout the reign of Louis XVI, the new style appeared in the royal residences, particularly in the salons and furnishings of the Dauphine and then Queen Marie Antoinette, and of the Paris aristocracy. It combined Greek, Roman, and what was loosely called Etruscan styles with arabesques and grotesques borrowed from Raphael and the Renaissance, and with chinoiserie and Turkish themes, Between 1780 and 1792, the style also appeared in architecture, in classically buildings including the Petit Trianon in Versailles and the Château de Bagatelle (1777). It also appeared in other art forms, including in particular the paintings of Jacques-Louis David, especially the Oath of the Horatii (1784).
Architecture
Louis XIV, Louis XV and Louis XVI Classicism appeared in French architecture during the reign of Louis XIV. In 1667 the king rejected a baroque scheme for the new east façade of the Louvre by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the most famous architect and sculptor of the Baroque era, in favor of a more sober composition with pediments and an elevated colonnade of coupled colossal Corinthian columns, devised by a committee, consisting of Louis Le Vau, Charles Le Brun, and Claude Perrault. The result, incorporating elements of ancient Roman, French, and Italian architecture, "resolves itself into the greatest palace façade in Europe."
Under Louis XIV, the Roman dome and façade of monumental columns became the dominant features of important new churches, beginning with the chapel of Val-de-Grâce (1645–1710), by Jules Hardouin-Mansart, Jacques Lemercier and Pierre Le Muet, followed by the church of Les Invalides (1680–1706). While the basic features of the architecture of these churches were classical, the interiors were lavishly decorated in the baroque style.
In the latter part of the reign of Louis XV, the neoclassical became the dominant style in both civil and religious architecture. The chief architect of the king was Jacques Gabriel from 1734 until 1742, and then his more famous son, Ange-Jacques Gabriel until the end of the reign. His major works included the École Militaire, the ensemble of buildings overlooking the Place Louis XV (now Place de la Concorde (1761–1770) and the Petit Trianon at Versailles (1764). Over the course of the reign of Louis XV, while interiors were lavishly decorated, the façades gradually became simpler, less ornamented and more classical. The façades Gabriel designed were carefully rhymed and balanced by rows of windows and columns, and, on large buildings like those the Place de la Concorde, often featured grand arcades on the street level, and classical pediments or balustrades on the roofline. Ornamental features sometimes included curving wrought-iron balconies with undulating rocaille designs, similar to the rocaille decoration of the interiors.
The religious architecture of the period was also sober and monumental and tended, at the end of the reign, toward neo-classical; major examples include the Church of Sainte-Genevieve (now the Panthéon), built from 1758 to 1790 to a design by Jacques-Germain Soufflot, and Church of Saint-Philippe-du-Roule (1765–1777) by Jean-François Chalgrin, which featured an enormous barrel-vaulted nave.
During the reign of Louis XVI, neoclassical was the dominant architectural style in Paris and in the provinces. Notable examples include the Hôtel des Monnaies, Paris (1771–75) by Jacques Denis Antoine, as well as the Palais de Justice, Paris by the same architect; and the theater of Besançon (1775) and the Château de Bénouville in the Calvados, both by Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. The École de Chirurgie, or School of Surgery in Paris by Jacques Gondoin (1769) adapted the forms of the neoclassical town house, with a court of honor placed between a pavilion with a colonnade on the street and the main building. He also added a peristyle and another floor above the columns, and transformed the entrance to the courtyard into a miniature triumphal arch.
The new theaters in Paris and Bordeaux were prominent examples of the new style. The architect Victor Louis (1731–1811) completed the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux (1780); its majestic stairway was a forerunner of the stairway of the Paris Opera Garnier. In 1791, in the midst of the French Revolution, he completed the Salle Richelieu. The Odeon Theater in Paris (1779–1782) was built by Marie-Joseph Peyre (1730–1785) and Charles de Wailly (1729–1798). It featured a portico in the form of a covered gallery and columns in advance of the façade.
One of the best-known neoclassical buildings of the period is the Château de Bagatelle (1777), designed and built by François-Joseph Bélanger for the Comte d'Artois, Louis XVI's brother. The small château was designed and completed in just sixty-three days, to win a bet with Marie Antoinette that he could build a château in less than three months. Marie-Antoinette had a similar small neoclassical belvedere created by architect Richard Mique, who had also designed her picturesque rustic village in the gardens of Versailles. It was completed in 1789, the year of the French Revolution.
Another notable example of the neoclassical style in Paris is the Hôtel de Salm (now the Palais de la Légion d'Honneur), built by Pierre Rousseau in 1751–1783. The façade is distinguished by its simplicity and purity, and its harmony and balance. A colonnade of Corinthian columns supports the entablature of the rotunda, which is surmounted by statues. The façade is also animated by busts of Roman emperors in niches, and sculptures in relief above the windows of the semicircular central avant-corps.
A few architects adapted the neoclassical style to more functional purposes. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux designed the Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans with exaggerated neoclassical buildings arranged in circles around a central "temple", where the director's home and office was placed. He also designed several rotundas for the new customs barriers installed around Paris between 1785–89. These barriers became highly unpopular (due to the taxes, not the architecture) and most were destroyed during the Revolution, though those at Parc de la Villette and Parc Monceau still stand.
The most visionary French neoclassical architect was certainly Étienne-Louis Boullée. His designs for an immense spherical monument to Isaac Newton (1784) and a vast new royal library in Paris in the form of a giant barrel vault (1785) were never seriously considered, but foreshadowed the architecture of the 20th century.
Revolution, Directorate and Empire During the French Revolution construction virtually stopped in Paris. The aristocrats fled, churches were closed and sacked. The one large project carried out between 1795 and 1797 was the building of a large new chamber within the Palais Bourbon, which eventually became the home of the French National Assembly. The École des Beaux-Arts was re-organized and reconstituted, with the architecture department under Quatremère de Quincy (1755–1849). De Quincy was an amateur archeologist and a classical scholar, as well as an architect. He was sentenced to death by a revolutionary court in 1793, but was spared by the fall of Maximilien Robespierre. He was charged with the conversion of the Church of Sainte-Genevieve into the modern Panthéon, and assured that architectural studies taught the classical traditions.
After Napoleon Bonaparte came to power, the most influential architects were Charles Percier (1764–1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853). Their grand projects for Napoleon included the Rue de Rivoli, with its uniform neoclassical façades, modeled on the squares built by Louis XIV and Louis XV. They also designed the interior of the Château de Malmaison, the residence of Empress Joséphine de Beauharnais, into the model of the neoclassical style. (1803) Fontaine designed another Napoleonic landmark, the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel (1806–1808) in the courtyard of the Louvre Palace.