In the Very Temple of Delight: Rococo

ART HISTORY Journey Through a Thousand Years “In the Very Temple of Delight Week Eight: Rococo Rococo - Bernard II van Risenburgh, Writing Table – The Tiepolo Family - How to Look Great: Rococo Women Beauty Guide - Jean-Antoine Watteau – The Shop-Sign of Gersaint - Jean- Honoré Fragonard, The Progress of Love: The Meeting - Jean-Baptiste Greuze, The Village Bride - Sir Joshua Reynolds: 10 Things To Know About The English Artist - Encyclopaedia Britannica & Adam Augustyn: “Rococo” From The Encyclopaedia Brittanica Online (2019) Rococo, style in interior design, the decorative arts, painting, architecture, and sculpture that originated in Paris in the early 18th century but was soon adopted throughout France and later in other countries, principally Germany and Austria. It is characterized by lightness, elegance, and an exuberant use of curving natural forms in ornamentation. The word Rococo is derived from the French word rocaille, which denoted the shell-covered rock work that was used to decorate artificial grottoes. Nicolas Lancret: “Mademoiselle Carmargo Dancing,” Oil on Canvas, Early 18th Century, Collection of Prince Heinrich of Prussia At the outset the Rococo style represented a reaction against the ponderous design of Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles and the official Baroque art of his reign. Several interior designers, painters, and engravers, among them Pierre Le Pautre, J.-A. Meissonier, Jean Berain, and Nicolas Pineau, 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. Excellent examples of French Rococo are the Salon de Monsieur le Prince (completed 1722) in the Petit Château at Chantilly, decorated by Jean Aubert, and the salons (begun 1732) of the Hôtel de Soubise, Paris, by Germain Boffrand. 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. French Rococo chairs by Louis Delanois (1731–92); in the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Paris. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, Paris; photograph by Eddy van der Veen Rococo painting in France began with the graceful, gently melancholic paintings of Antoine Watteau, culminated in the playful and sensuous nudes of François Boucher, and ended with the freely painted genre scenes of Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Rococo portraiture had its finest practitioners in Jean-Marc Nattier and Jean-Baptiste Perroneau. French Rococo painting in general was characterized by easygoing, lighthearted treatments of mythological and courtship themes, rich and delicate brushwork, a relatively light tonal key, and sensuous colouring. Rococo sculpture was notable for its intimate scale, its naturalism, and its varied surface effects. Antoine Watteau: “Mezzetin”, oil on canvas by Antoine Watteau, 1718–20; in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. From France the Rococo style spread in the 1730s to the Catholic German-speaking lands, where it was adapted to a brilliant style of religious architecture that combined French elegance with south German fantasy as well as with a lingering Baroque interest in dramatic spatial and plastic effects. Some of the most beautiful of all Rococo buildings outside France are to be seen in Munich—for example, the refined and delicate Amalienburg (1734–39), in the park of Nymphenburg, and the Residenztheater (1750–53; rebuilt after World War II), both by François de Cuvilliés. Among the finest German Rococo pilgrimage churches are the Vierzehnheiligen (1743–72), near Lichtenfels, in Bavaria, designed by Balthasar Neumann, and the Wieskirche (begun 1745–54), near Munich, built by Dominikus Zimmermann and decorated by his elder brother Johann Baptist Zimmermann. G.W. von Knobelsdorff and Johann Michael Fischer also created notable buildings in the style, which utilized a profusion of stuccowork and other decoration. Cuvilliés, François de, the Elder: Amalienburg Amalienburg, hunting lodge of Nymphenburg, near Munich; designed by François de Cuvilliés the Elder. Photo: Rufus46 In Italy the Rococo style was concentrated primarily in Venice, where it was epitomized by the large-scale decorative paintings of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. The urban vistas of Francesco Guardi and Canaletto were also influenced by the Rococo. Meanwhile, in France the style had already begun to decline by the 1750s when it came under attack from critics for its triviality and ornamental excesses, and by the 1760s the new, more austere movement of Neoclassicism began to supplant the Rococo in France. The term Rococo is sometimes used to denote the light, elegant, and highly ornamental music composed at the end of the Baroque period—i.e., from the 1740s until the 1770s. The earlier music of Joseph Haydn and of the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart can thus be termed Rococo, although the work of these composers more properly belongs to the emerging Classical style. Dianne Pierce: “Bernard II van Risenburgh, Writing Table” From smARThistory (2016) Bernard II van Risenburgh, Writing table (Table à écrire), c. 1755, oak veneered with tulipwood, kingwood, amaranth, mahogany, ebony, mother-of-pearl, stained horn; gilt-bronze mounts and modern velvet, 78.1 x 96.5 x 57.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) The style of the French nobility Encased in the curving frame and delicate decorative scheme of this writing table are clever innovations, technological and artistic brilliance, and a representation of completely new ways of living in the period beginning c. 1755. After the formality and grandeur of Louis XIV’s Versailles, French aristocrats, including the king himself, were ready for spaces, furniture, clothing, and etiquette that allowed them to turn to matters other than the glorification of France. Beginning before the turn of the eighteenth century, but accelerated by the opportunity opened by the death of the Sun King in 1715, nobles set up their own homes after decades of living under the king’s enormous roof at Versailles, and created a radically different domestic life. Although it was only seven years until Louis XIV’s great-grandson was old enough to take the throne to reign as Louis XV, by 1722 new ideas of privacy, comfort, and intimate home life led to a new design language, the Rococo. All of the elements that are the basis for domesticity as we know it today were developed in this period. A move away from Baroque grandeur and classicism Louis XIV, during his long reign, had established France as a major European economic and political power, not least by the use of design as a strategic propaganda tool. Where the grandeur, drama, and theatricality of the Baroque, as Louis imported it from Rome, had been the perfect tool for portraying the King and his country as supremely powerful, by the early eighteenth century, the Baroque was starting to seem exhaustingly sumptuous. Baroque design was based on the classical language, which the earlier Renaissance artists had delighted in rediscovering, augmenting, and modifying. But by the early decades of the eighteenth century, designers were increasingly turning away from bombastic classicism to other sources, notably the natural world. They began playing with un-classical ideas like asymmetry, movement, linearity, sinuous curves, and realistic natural ornament. The Rococo, as it developed in design, was a sharp turn away from everything the Baroque had become. Jean François de Troy, Reading from Molière, around 1728, oil on canvas, 72.4 x 90.8 cm (Collection of late Marchioness of Cholmondeley, Houghton) Elegance, intimacy, delicacy and curves Where Baroque spaces had been opulent, Rococo rooms were elegant. Grandeur became intimate delicacy. No less carefully designed or meticulously crafted, Rococo was light, fresh, and whimsical, to replace the heavy, fleshy Baroque. The lines of this writing table, as well as its applied ornament and its iconography, all express perfectly the Rococo sensibility. The piece is all curves, more vital and organic than architectural, with cabriole legs (with two curves) that seem to dance, and marquetry of ribbons, leaves and flowers. There’s no message here, no story told or idea conveyed, only pleasure and delight in an object for its own sake. Louis XV’s reign, like the man himself, was a time of lighthearted pursuit of beauty and sensual joie de vivre. The artist This table was designed by Bernard II van Risenburgh, one of a group of furniture makers working for Louis XV and his nobles. They produced new types of objects for new lifestyles, in the new Rococo design language, and using new technologies. Everything about this table is a fresh approach. Van Risenburgh was part of a relatively new guild of furniture specialists called ébénistes, who were responsible for the veneered skin of the piece only; the frame was built by a menusier. While many of the finest craftsmen of the eighteenth century worked only in the royal workshops, Van Risenburgh was unusual in having his own enterprise and selling primarily through retail middle-men known as marchand-merciers, a new-fangled concept. Furthermore, he signed his pieces (BVRB). In keeping with Enlightenment ideas of the eighteenth century which celebrated individuality and personal achievement, increasingly craftsmen were identifying themselves with their work. Van Risenburgh also designed his own gilt-bronze mounts, which created a distinct personal style and help to identify his work. Tables were “in” (especially for women) Tables were the delight of the new Rococo interior.

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