Rococo painting
One forms an intimate, carefree visual document of the way of life and worldview of the eighteenth-century European elites, and the other, adapting constituent elements of the style to the monumental decoration of churches and palaces, served as a means of glorifying faith and civil power.
From France, where it assumed its most typical feature and where it was later recognized as national heritage, Rococo soon spread throughout Europe, but significantly changing its purposes and keeping only the external form of the French model, with important centers of cultivation in Germany, England, Austria, and Italy, with some representation also in other places, such as the Iberian Peninsula, the Slavic and Nordic countries, even reaching the Americas.
[10][11] However, in many respects the Rococo is a simple continuation, indeed a culmination, of Baroque values – the taste for the splendid, for movement and asymmetry, the frequent allusion to Greco-Roman mythology, the emotional bent, the ostentatious pretension, and the conventionalism, in the sense of being governed by pre-established criteria accepted by consensus.
Rococo painting also illustrates, in its first version, the social schism that would lead to the French Revolution, and represents the last symbolic bastion of resistance of an elite distant from the problems and interests of the common people, and that was increasingly threatened by the rise of the middle class, which was educated and began to dominate the economy and even important sectors of the art market and culture in general.
Neither this theme nor this interpretation were, in fact, new; they had existed since the Roman Empire and remained present in Western culture almost without interruption since their origin, both as a simple romantic and poetic artifice and as a resource for psychological escape when times proved hostile or excessively sophisticated, thus becoming a powerful symbol of freedom.
[19] During the 18th century, this topic took on a new color in the deliberate quest to somehow confuse and disorient the audience, removing them from the circumstantial and concrete to throw them into the ambiguous and fluent world of the theater of representation, a practice that otherwise did not find unanimous support and was criticized by many moralists, concerned about the concomitant dissolution of the sense of reality and the firmness of ethical values encouraged by these paintings.
It is also important to point out that, according to the sophisticated culture of the aristocracy, civilization was a necessarily artificial phenomenon, and an educated and polished spectator was expected to be able to make the subtle distinctions between the real and the fictional, to be able to deal with the complexities of art, and to be able to defend himself from crude charlatanism and cheap illusion, indicating the cultivation of his intellect and his erudite baggage.
[22][23] In this way, the Rococo definitely raises in Western art the question of aestheticism, in the very ambiguity that surrounds its representational method and its essential goals, making clear the primordial convention that if painting exists, it exists for an observer and to be looked at, but handing over to future generations the serious problem of, according to Stephen Melville, "to say that what happens to a viewer in front of a painting is fundamentally different from what happens to a person looking at a wallpaper or a landscape through a window," a dialectical element that would become crucial to the modern discussion and validation of art itself, of artistic making and understanding, and of the autonomy of Aesthetics, and which has not yet been satisfactorily resolved.
With this accommodation, religion, previously burdened by the notion of guilt and the threats of the fire and eternal damnation, takes on an optimistic and positive tone, and generates a painting before which the faithful could pray "in hope and joy" and which serves as a bridge between earthly and heavenly happiness.
[31] Rococo, employed in ecclesiastical decoration, was part of the secularization movement that the Catholic Church had been experiencing since the Baroque, removing various obstacles between the sacred and the profane, and served as a new and more engaging way to celebrate the mysteries of faith, but its ornamentalism was also seen by some as a distraction from the primary purposes of sacramental gathering.
Its figures are richly dressed, set against country backdrops, gardens or parks, a model typified in the Fête galante (elegant feast), illustrated so well in Watteau's work, where the aristocrats spend their time in sophisticated entertainments in a dreamy atmosphere not devoid of erotic connotations, reminiscent of the idyllic world supposed to exist in classical antiquity.
The aristocracy formed by the nobles and the rich merchants also dominated power there, but strove to implement a fully capitalist system that solicited – and obtained – the concurrence of the bourgeoisie, who knew that their objectives were common and identified with those of the state, for their own benefit and that of the nation.
On this popular base appeared satirical writers like Jonathan Swift, and artists like William Hogarth, with series of canvases and prints of strong social criticism such as The Career of the Libertine and Marriage à la mode, crudely exposing in a robust and frankly narrative painting the vices of the Francophile elite.
[45] Gainsborough also practiced pure landscape painting, where he developed a style of simplifying the scenery, of nonspecific and theatricalized description, and of altering its basic colors and sense of perspective, artificialisms typical of the Rococo, besides having left behind important work in the field of portraiture.
[49] In Italy, home of the Baroque, this style continued to meet the needs of the local sensibility, and the model of the French Rococo was not followed in its essence, but changed its thematic scope and its significant emphases, expressing itself mainly in monumental decoration.
His personal style was a continuation of the native Baroque, but he adopted a light and luminous color palette, and built lively, agile forms full of grace and movement, which place him perfectly in the orbit of the Rococo, although his tone is always elevated, if not apotheotic, and his theme always either sacred or glorifying.
[53] In the painting of other countries the impact of the Rococo was more limited, but some more or less isolated cases deserve note: in Spain, Goya in his first phase and Ramón Bayeu y Subías; in the United States, John Singleton Copley; in Russia, Dmitry Levitsky, Ivan Argunov and Fyodor Rokotov; in the Netherlands, Rachel Ruysch and Jan van Huysum; in Scandinavia, Carl Gustaf Pilo and Georg Desmarées;[54][55][53] in Portugal Vieira Portuense and Pedro Alexandrino de Carvalho, and in Brazil the already mentioned Master Ataíde.
The Enlightenment questioned the foundations of this society and the model of civilization and culture it proposed, dissolving the hierarchies and modes of patronage that nourished rococo painting, already seen as frivolous, effeminate, elitist, and excessively ornamental, thinking the world from a more egalitarian viewpoint, regardless of traditions, myths, and religions, overturning cradle privileges and establishing new criteria for the acquisition of knowledge, where the clarity of reason and logical and scientific demonstration prevailed over the ambiguous and obscure subtleties of opinion, feeling, and the metaphysical.
This process culminated in the French Revolution and the emergence of Neoclassicism, with a return of artistic ideals based on values of austerity, piety, civility, and ethics, in a reaffirmation of masculine principles and the rehabilitation of moralizing historical painting at the expense of the graceful, intimate, and sensual femininity of the Rococo.
[64] A new interest in the Rococo emerged in the 1940s when Fiske Kimball published his important study The Creation of the Rococo (1943), which attempted to delimit and describe the style on a curiously ahistorical critical basis, but which served to raise a series of new questions that brought to light inconsistencies in its definition, highlighted its complexity, and fueled subsequent scholarly debates,[65] with major contributions by Arnold Hauser in the 1950s, in the 1950s, appreciating style in a deeper and more comprehensive way in the light of Marxism, and of Philippe Minguet and Russell Hitchcock in the 1960s, the latter focusing more on architectural sets,[66] but Victor Tapiè and Myriam Oliveira believe that in the 1970s onwards there was even a regression in research to already outdated concepts, She particularly points to the approaches of Germain Bazin, Anthony Blunt, Yves Bottineau, and Georges Cattaui, who delimit it but submit it to the Baroque, referring to pre-Kimball visions.
[69][70][71] Another positive point of Rococo painting was detected in the reformulation and softening of Christian iconography, translating the elements of faith and portraying its martyrs and saints within a less heavy and oppressive formal frame than that produced during the Baroque, allowing the birth of a more jovial and optimistic devotion, less charged with guilt and reconciling nature with the divine.
Alexander Pope thought so when he declared that "some beauties cannot yet be explained in precepts," and that "there are nameless graces which no method teaches, and which only the hand of a master can reach," qualities that could only be judged by "taste," a subtle element that in Voltaire's words is "a quick discernment, a sudden perception which, like the sensations of the palate, anticipates reflection, and accepts what gives a voluptuous and rare impression and rejects what seems coarse and disgusting.
In sum, for a better understanding of Rococo painting, it is necessary that we first clearly perceive that it is not limited to France, even though it appeared there most fully, typically and essentially, and is the basic reference of the entire style, but manifested itself in a great variety of forms in a vast area of the West, adapting itself to other demands and reflecting very diverse vital experiences and worldviews, and second, when we analyze its more difficult aspects, more paradoxical and more prone to criticism, that we try to penetrate the philosophy that guided that art of charms and fantasies, of visual and intellectual games and veiled allusions, that praised education and refinement against what it judged rude and uncouth, and expressed a voluptuousness and an authentic joy for the simple fact of living in a comfortable situation, which, if it was the prerogative of a few in its time, as we know, today has become the heritage of all through its artistic legacy.
