ROCOCO ART

ROCOCO ART

Some of the terms we use today to label the phases of art
history were originally terms of disparagement. Indeed, negative connotations still cling to the word “Rococo.”
First used as an adjective to designate the tastelessly florid,
it gradually gained respectability and was eventually adopted by art historians. In the period when Rococo flourished it was usually called the “genre pittoresque” and was somewhat summarily lumped together with “Rocaille.” There is some disagreement about its geo— graphical origins. The American scholar Fiske Kimball nid that Rococo began in France towards the end of the reign of Louis XIV. Others view it as a degeneration of 3aroque. As with Baroque, the strict sense of Rococo ended by acquiring a wider connotation embracing much of eighteenth -century art.


Is there such a thing as Rococo sculpture? Some scholars maintain that Rococo is a freakish style limited mainly to jewelry work and the fantasies of whimsical draughtsmen.
The Rococo phenomenon has its roots in the changing tastes of a society emerging from the wars and moral conflicts of the seventeenth century, a society that was acquiring a renewed zest for life and demanding a refined, exuberant, light—hearted art in reaction to the stern, ceremonious, majestic art of the previous century. There was, to be sure, no sudden dramatic break. The old iconographic vocabulary remained unchanged. The old system of values and forms was not rejected outright but was applied a lighter and freer touch. The monarchic culture evoled less rigid institutions and more alluring decorations. The tone was set, more than ever before, by court art. Versailles, with its magnificent buildings and grounds, become the envy of Europe’s princes. At the outset, then, Rococo was a decorative art and sculpture naturally had place in it. A vibrant, irrepressible art, it demanded relief, well as light and colour.


As in Baroque art, the borderline between ornament rd figure remained somewhat vague. Rococo aspired to the symphonic. Architectural innovations lent themselves it its outpouring of fancifulness and inventiveness, an inventiveness that no longer recoiled from asymmetry, startling effects, or the abstractness of hoes that twist around one another and intersect with absurd convolutions. Thanks to differences of national and regional temperament, there was nothing monotonous about this r: willing to court extreme artificiality in order to avoid the humdrum. Nor did Rococo evolve in quite the same way in every country. Its chronology is not uniform. Moreover its stylistic landscape was complicated, to an to greater extent than that of other periods, by the individual careers of its artists. French artists, frustrated from satisfying their personal ambitions by incompetence in the domain of public finance, found work abroad, and as a result French art was exported to a degree that was unprecedented. To repeat an old adage, in the Age of Enlightenment Europe was French. This is not strictly true in
t. For though the decorative arts that developed in Paris workshops reached as far as Wurzburg, Amalienburg, and La- Granja, Italian Baroque nevertheless continued to exert a powerful influence over large portions of Europe.

Nor did Rococo begin to decline at quite the same time in all countries. The Neoclassical reaction set in early in France, towards the middle of the eighteenth century, but it did not begin to have much impact until towards the end of the century. As late as the beginning of the nineteenth century, Rococo exuberance permeates the visionary works of the Brazilian artist Aleijadinho. Thanks to its whimsicalness, Rococo (an astonishingly untyrranical European idiom) produced an enormous variety of expressions, which reflected not only different artistic temperaments but also different social, economic, and political conditions. In trading nations like England and the Netherlands Rococo is more restrained than in South Germany with its monasteries that were veritable bastions of the Counter Reformation and where Baroque art had already prospered as an expression of triumphant Catholicism. But it would be specious to try and establish such clear—cut and distinct categories.


It may seem illogical that Rococo flourished under enlightened despotisms that ought by all rights to have been an ideal terrain for a rational Classicism inspired by antique sources. But artistic phenomena are never that simple, especially when they express a whole civilization. The civilization of the eighteenth century was essentially monarchical, and this at a time when, in spite of the philosophes, monarchies still rested on religion and the Church. One of the most debatable notions in art history, one that is still aired today, is that the religious art of the eighteenth century lacks sincerity. In point of fact, Rococo, especially in sculpture, was perhaps the last great sacred art of the Western world, a world that was still far from becoming secular and where a system of coherent values and principles connecting everyday life to the sacred was by and large still in force.


Take the episcopal palace at Wurzburg, the seat of a prelate who was both a spiritual and temporal ruler and who, wishing to express a greatness that transcended his mere person, called on the best artists of the day, irrespective of their nationality (though all the same admitting to a special liking for whatever was Italian). The stucco work and the statues of pagan gods that were placed as a matter of course in niches in the Kaisersaal are the handiwork of the sculptor Bossi. They are in perfect harmony with Tiepolo’s frescoes and the architecture of Johann Balthasar Neumann, who was deeply influenced by memories of his Italian sojonrns. In fact, they pay tribute to the venerable episcopal see, as does the whole decorative system. The ballet—like gestures of the statues proclaim that this essentially aristocratic art is, first and foremost, a spectacle caught in a perpetual whirlwind of colours and forms. Antonio Bossi, a Swiss sculptor born at Lugano, carved this series of masterpieces towards the middle of the century (between 1749 and 1751 ). He is obviously indebted to the Baroque of Bernini; he nevertheless brings to his work a touch of gracefulness and gaiety that are characteristically Rococo. The medium he employs, stucco, was then producing its finest results, for its malleability accorded perfectly with the zest for life, movement, and the unexpected that was vital to the spirit of Rococo.