Subject: Art History (Grad) (ARHS)

CRN: 21582

Lecture

St Paul: O'Shaughnessy Education Center 414

  Craig Eliason

In the second half of the eighteenth century, spurred by Enlightenment philosophies and new discoveries of the ancient world, a Neoclassical aesthetic emerged across all the visual arts in Europe. As the name given to this phenomenon suggests, Neoclassicism was both “new”—a radical change from the previous Rococo visual culture—and “classical”—committed to reviving the forms modeled by the ancient Greco-Roman world. Even the most studied emulations of antiquity, though, often betray an unmistakable character of the era in which they were made. What was the appeal of the Greco-Roman world in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Western Europe? Beyond references to the past, what were the key characteristics of the style? How did the movement intersect with revolutionary politics, imperial identity, rationalist philosophy, international travel, and academies of the arts? Does Neoclassicism’s overt relationship to the past obscure the importance it had in laying the foundation for its future—that is, our modern world? We will consider art and design as varied as paintings by David and Kauffmann, sculptures by Canova and Thorvaldsen, architecture by Soufflot and Adam, theoretical writings by Laugier and Winckelmann, and typeface designs by Bodoni and Didot. We will discuss the aesthetics of purity, restraint, and whiteness, and consider how gender maps onto Enlightenment binaries as reflected in the arts. Student research projects can offer a deeper focus on material we cover together, or can extend consideration to other mediums (e.g., costume design, furniture design), other periods (e.g., the “neoclassicism” of mid-twentieth-century Fascist architecture or of late-twentieth-century postmodernist architecture), or other areas (e.g., American Neoclassical sculpture, British colonial architecture in India).

3 Credits