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Dictionary of Art
and Artists
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CHAPTER NINE
THE ROCOCO
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ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE
- Part 1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8,
9,
10,
11,
12,
13,
14
PAINTING
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ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE
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Much as the Baroque is often considered
the final phase of the Renaissance, so the Rococo has been treated as
the end of the Baroque: a long twilight, delicious but decadent, that
was cleaned away by the Enlightenment and Neoclassicism. In France, the
Rococo is linked with Louis XV, to whose lifespan (1710-1774) it
corresponds roughly in date. However, it cannot be identified with the
absolutist state or the church any more than can the Baroque, even
though these continued to provide the main patronage. Moreover, the
essential characteristics of Rococo style were created before the king
was born. Its first symptoms begin as much as 50 years earlier, during
the lengthy transition that constitutes the Late Baroque. Nevertheless,
the view of the Rococo as the final phase of the Baroque is not without
basis: as the philosopher Francois-Marie Voltaire acknowledged, the
eighteenth century lived in the debt of the past. In art, Poussin and
Rubens cast their long shadows over the Rococo. The controversy between
their partisans, in turn, goes back much further to the debate between
the supporters of Michelangelo and of Titian over the merits of design
versus color. In this sense, the Rococo, like the Baroque, still belongs
to the Renaissance world.
To overemphasize the similarities and stylistic debt of the Rococo to
the Baroque, however, risks ignoring a fundamental difference between
them. What is it? In a word, it is fantasy. If the Baroque presents
theater on a grand scale, the Rococo stage-is smaller, more intimate. At
the same time, the Rococo is both more lighthearted and tender-minded,
marked equally by playful whimsy and wistful nostalgia. Its artifice
evokes an enchanted realm that presents a temporary diversion from real
life. Because the modern age is the product of the Enlightenment that
followed, it is still fashionable to denigrate the Rococo for its
unabashed escapism and eroticism. To its credit, however, the Rococo
discovered the world of love and broadened the range of human emotion in
art to include, for the first time, the family as a major theme.
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FRANCE
THE RISE OF THE ROCOCO.
After the death of Louis XIV, the centralized administrative machine
that Colbert had created ground to a stop. The nobility, formerly
attached to the court at Versailles, were now freer of royal
surveillance. Many of them chose not to return to their ancestral
chateaux in the provinces, but to live in Paris, where they built
elegant town houses, known as hotels. As state-sponsored building
activity was declining, the field of "design for private living" took on
new importance. These city sites were usually cramped and irregular, so
that they offered scant opportunity for impressive exteriors. Hence, the
layout and decor of the rooms became the architects' main concern. The
hotels demanded a style of interior decoration less grandiloquent and
cumbersome than Lebrun's. They required instead an intimate, flexible
style that would give greater scope to individual fancy uninhibited by
classicistic dogma. French designers created the Rococo ("The Style of
Louis XV," as it is often called in France) from Italian gardens and
interiors to fulfill this need. The name fits well: it was coined as a
caricature of coquillage and rocaille (echoing the Italian barocco),
which meant the playful decoration of grottoes with irregular shells and
stones.
The Decorative Arts
It was in the decorative arts that the Rococo flourished first and
ioremost. We have not considered the decorative arts until now, because
the conservative nature of the crafts permitted only limited creativity
except to a few individuals of outstanding ability. But the latter half
of the seventeenth century ushered in a period of unprecedented change
in French design. A central role was played by Colbert, who in the 1660s
acquired the Gobelins (named after the brothers who founded them) for
the crown and turned them into royal works supplying luxurious
furnishings, including tapestries, to the court under the direction of
the king's chief artistic adviser, Charles Lebrun.
After 1688
the War of the League of Augsburg forced major economies
on the crown, including reductions at the Gobelins that gradually
loosened central control of the decorative arts and opened the way to
new stylistic developments. Thus the situation paralleled the decline of
the Academy's tyrannical influence over the fine arts, which gave rise
to the Rococo in painting.
This does not explain the excellence of French decor, however.
Critical to its development was the importance assigned to designers:
their engravings established new standards of design that were expected
to be followed by artisans, who thereby lost much of their independence.
Let us note, too, the collaboration of architects, who became
increasingly involved in the decoration of the rooms they designed.
Together with sculptors, who often designed the ornamentation, they
helped to elevate the decorative arts virtually to the level of the fine
arts, thus establishing a tradition that continued into modern times.
The decorative and fine arts intersected most clearly in major
furniture. French cabinetmakers known as ebenistes (after ebony,
their preferred wood veneer) helped to bring about the revolution in
interior decor by introducing new materials and techniques. Many of
these upstarts hailed originally from Holland, Flanders, Germany, and
even Italy.
The decorative arts played a unique role during the Rococo. Hotel
interiors were more than assemblages of objects. They were total
environments put together with fastidious care by discerning collectors
and the talented architects, sculptors, decorators, and dealers who
catered to their taste. A room, like a single item of furniture, could
involve the services of a wide variety of artisans —cabinetmakers,
wood carvers, gold- and silversmiths, upholsterers, porcelain makers—all
dedicated to producing the ensemble, even though each craft was, by
tradition, a separate specialty subject to strict regulations. Together
they fueled the insatiable hunger for novelty that swept Europe.
PINEAU.
Virtually none of these rooms has survived intact. Like the furniture
they housed, most have been destroyed, heavily altered, or dispersed. We
can nevertheless get a good idea of their appearance by the
reconstruction of one such room from the Hotel de Varengeville, Paris,
designed about
1735 by
Nicolas Pineau (1684-1754)
for the Duchesse de Villars (fig.
829). The sumptuous effect
bears out the suggestion that the Rococo interior originated to provide
a fit setting for women, who became the center of aristocratic society.
The walls and ceiling are encrusted with ornamentation, and the
elaborately carved furniture is adorned with gilt bronze. Everything
swims in a sea of swirling patterns united by the most sophisticated
sense of design and materials the world has ever known. Here there is no
clear distinction between decoration and function, for example in the
clock on the mantel and the statuette in the corner of our illustration.
Note, too, how the paintings have been thoroughly integrated into the
room.
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Nicolas Pineau
Nicolas Pineau, (born Oct. 8, 1684, Paris—died April 24,
1754, Paris), French wood-carver and interior designer, a
leader in the development of interior decorating in the
light, asymmetric, lavishly decorated Rococo style.
After study with the architects François
Mansart and Germain Boffrand, Pineau followed his father’s
trade. His son, Dominique (1718–86), also became a wood
sculptor.
One of a group of French artisans who were
visiting the newly established city of St. Petersburg in
1716 at the invitation of Peter the Great, Pineau remained
in Russia until about 1728, carving the tsar’s cabinet in
the Peterhof palace and also serving as an architect and
interior designer. Returning to Paris, he became an
important designer, launching the vogue for Rococo rooms in
private dwellings.
Pineau’s works are characterized by
shallow recesses with rounded corners and ornamentation
employing shell motifs, leafy scrolls, and classical busts
in medallions. Later interior designers and architects were
influenced by his engravings.
829. Nicolas Pineau.
Room from the Hotel de
Varengeville, Paris.
ń.
1735.
The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York.
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Clodion Claude Michel.
Because so much of it was done to adorn interiors, French Rococo
sculpture generally took the form of small groups in a "miniature
Baroque" style, which were designed to be viewed at close range. A
typical example is Satyr and Bacchante (fig.
830)
by
Claude Michel
(1738-1814), known as
Clodion. Its coquettish
eroticism is a playful echo of the ecstasies of Bernini, whose work he
studied during a nine-year stay in Italy (compare fig.
768).
Despite the fact that he undertook several
large decorative cycles, Clodion was by nature a modeler who was at his
best working on a small scale. Able to work miracles with terracotta, he
reigned supreme in this intimate realm.
830.
Clodion Claude Michel. Satyr and Bacchante.
ń.
1775. Terracotta, height 59 cm.
The Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York
830.
Clodion Claude Michel. Satyr and Bacchante.
ń.
1775. Terracotta, height 59 cm.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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Clodion
Clodion, original name Claude Michel (born Dec. 20, 1738,
Nancy, France—died March 29, 1814, Paris), French sculptor
whose works represent the quintessence of the Rococo style.
In 1755 Clodion went to Paris and entered
the workshop of Lambert-Sigisbert Adam, his uncle. On his
uncle’s death, he became a pupil of J.B. Pigalle. In 1759 he
won the grand prize for sculpture at the Académie Royale de
Peinture et de Sculpture, and in 1762 he went to Rome.
Catherine II was eager for him to come to St. Petersburg,
but he returned to Paris in 1771. There he was successful
and frequently exhibited at the Salon.
Clodion worked mostly in terra-cotta, his
preferred subject matter being nymphs, satyrs, bacchantes,
and other Classical figures sensually portrayed. He was
also, with his brothers, a decorator of such objects as
candelabra, clocks, and vases. Perhaps because of his
apparent unwillingness to be seriously monumental, he was
never admitted to the Royal Academy. Nevertheless, after the
Revolution had driven him in 1792 to Nancy, where he lived
until 1798, he was flexible enough to adapt himself to
Neoclassical monumentality—the relief on the Arc de Triomphe
du Carrousel, representing the entry of the French into
Munich, is an example.
Encyclopædia
Britannica
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Clodion Claude Michel.
La Gimblette
Clodion Claude Michel.
Satyr Crowning a Bacchante
Clodion Claude Michel.
Minerva
Clodion Claude Michel.
Allégorie du Jour
Clodion Claude Michel.
Reclining Nymph
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