Mascaron (architecture)
In the 11th century, European stonemasons began adding carved foliate mascarons, known as Green Men, to the decoration of churches, an image that early 20th-century scholars suggested had secretly represented a surviving pre-Christian god.
Later it was no longer used until the 18th century, when the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum lead to Neoclassicism, a movement that tried to revive the aesthetic of Classical Greece and Rome.
Some mirrors feature her because in Egypt they were often made of gold or bronze and therefore symbolized the sun disk, and because they were connected with beauty and femininity.
Medusa decorates the architrave of the temple of Didyma, and is intended to frighten the enemies of Apollo, stylized so as to be seen from a distance and allow play of light and shadow.
A certain type of mascaron used in the Greco-Roman world was the bucranium, a bull head or skull, which will be later rediscovered in the Renaissance and used in styles that use the Classical vocabulary of decoration and design.
Some of these objects, like the cong, a straight tube with a circular interior and square outer section, were decorated with highly stylized mascarons.
During the Chinese Bronze Age (the Shang and Zhou dynasties), court intercessions and communication with the spirit world were conducted by a shaman (possibly the king himself).
These bronze vessels had many shapes, depending on their purpose: for wine, water, cereals or meat, and some of them were marked with readable characters, which shows the development of writing.
One of the most commonly used motifs on these vessels was the taotie, a stylized mascaron divided symmetrically, with nostrils, eyes, eyebrows, jaws, cheeks and horns, surrounded by incised patterns.
The forms of Antiquity are coming back into fashion: columns, pilasters, pediments, domes, and statues decorate the buildings of this era.
In the Quattrocento, the last Gothic influences tended to disappear; It was not until the beginning of the 16th century that the decorative faces of Antiquity took their place again in the form of mascarons.
Succeeding Mannerism, and developing as a result of religious tensions between Catholics and Protestants across Europe, Baroque art emerged in the late 16th century.
The name may derive from 'barocco', the Portuguese word for misshaped pearl, and it describes art that combined emotion, dynamism and drama with powerful color, realism and strong tonal contrasts.
Between 1545 and 1563 at the Council of Trent, it was decided that religious art must encourage piety, realism and accuracy, and, by attracting viewers' attention and empathy, glorify the Catholic Church and strengthen the image of Catholicism.
People in Rococo painting by artists like Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste van Loo, François Boucher, or Jean Siméon Chardin have cupid-like faces.
Rarely, for making a building of an object more over the top, mascarons of Native Americans were added, showing them with stereotypical feather headdresses.
Similarly, mascarons of Sub-Saharian Africans were added on buildings from the Place de la Bourse in Bordeaux, France.
[31] Excavations during the 18th century at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which had both been buried under volcanic ash during the 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius, inspired a return to order and rationality.
Compared to the previous styles, Baroque and Rococo, Neoclassical exteriors tended to be more minimalist, featuring straight and angular lines, but being still ornamented.
The Louis XVI style in France shows clearly the strong interest of architects and designers for the volumes, proportions and motifs of ancient Greece and Rome, but their creations still have the aristocratic and cozy vibe of the Rococo.
Similarly, some of the creations of Robert Adam, one of the most well known British architects who designed in the Neoclassical style, still have the delicacy of Rococo, like in the case of the Eating Room from the Osterley Park in London.
A mix of literary, religious, and political factors prompted late-18th and 19th century British architects and designers to look back to the Middle Ages for inspiration.
Because of this an archaeologist, Alexandre Lenoir, was appointed curator of the Petits-Augustins depot, where sculptures, statues and tombs removed from churches, abbeys and convents had been transported.
He organized the Museum of French Monuments (1795-1816), and was the first to bring back the taste for the art of the Middle Ages, which progressed slowly to flourish a quarter of a century later.
The most famous building of this type is the Opéra Garnier in Paris, which combines for example double columns taken from Baroque with rooflines of mascarons and festoons taken from Neoclassicism, on the main facade.
The Belgian and French form is characterized by organic shapes, ornaments taken from the plant world, sinuous lines, asymmetry (especially when it comes to objects design), the whiplash motif, the femme fatale, and other elements of nature.
The geometric ornaments found in Gustav Klimt's paintings and in the furniture of Koloman Moser are representative of the Vienna Secession (Austrian Art Nouveau).
The movement was a blend of multiple characteristics taken from Modernist currents from the 1900s and the 1910s, like the Vienna Secession, Cubism, Fauvism, Primitivism, Suprematism, Constructivism, Futurism, De Stijl, and Expressionism.
Painters, sculptors, designers and architects also found inspiration in non-Western regions, like East Asia, Pre-Columbian Americas or Sub-Saharian African art.
He tried to include in his own buildings qualities that he described as 'inclusion, inconsistency, compromise, accommodation, adaptation, superadjacency, equivalence, multiple focus, juxtaposition, or good and bad space.
