Chapter 15
Going Loco with Rococo
In This Chapter
Reeling in the Rococo
Scoping out sexy French art
Checking in with the Brits
Think of Rococo art and architecture as over-the-top Baroque or Baroque on a binge. In the early 18th century, the upper classes — first in France, then all over Europe — rejected Baroque sobriety and got drunk on ornamentation: swirling, fanciful curves; bright pastel colors; dripping gold filigree; and sensuous scenery.
Unlike robust, regal, and dramatic Baroque, Rococo is light, delicate, and playful. Baroque, which was at the service of the Church, lifted people to heaven; Rococo brought people fluttering back to Earth. Sublime spirituality was swapped for elegant sensuality. At the time, the new style was called genre pittoresque (“picturesque style”). The term Rococo didn’t come into vogue until the end of the 18th century, when the style was already passé.
Instead of ecstatic saints in candlelit settings, portraits of imperious kings, and heroic scenes, Rococo artists favored sunbathed, idyllic landscapes inhabited by pleasure-seeking aristocrats like François Boucher’s Lovers in a Park and Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Blindman’s Bluff. They also delighted in painting mythological escapades with naked nymphs frolicking in pastoral settings, such as Boucher’s Diana Leaving Her Bath and Hercules and Omphale.
Gilded Rococo palace ceilings, like the Kaisersaal in Würzburg, Germany (a confection of French, Italian, and German Rococo styles), often feature chubby cherubs eavesdropping from puffy clouds on the party below. Such paintings imply that even angels (at least baby ones) approved of the 18th-century jet-set lifestyle. But to the poor, who paid for the party (because they were the only taxed segment of French society), the whole period had a let-them-eat-cake feel and helped ignite the French Revolution of 1789.
The celebration started when King Louis XIV died in 1715. French aristocrats felt liberated after 72 years under Louis’s autocratic rule. While the new ruler Louis XV, who was only 5, was growing up, the aristocrats partied. The party didn’t stop when Louis matured. French architecture appeared to celebrate with them. Rococo architects transformed palaces into playgrounds. Chateau walls and furnishings, Parisian apartments and salons dripped with flamboyant ornamentation; gilding spread across palace ceilings in webs of gold and silver filigree. The nobility and the new king commissioned artists like Antoine Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard to decorate their chateaux with paintings that depicted the aristocratic life as a nonstop pageant of pleasures.
Rococo design was contagious and spread like wildfire across Europe. It seemed everybody wanted to lighten up, although in southern Germany and Austria, Rococo was harnessed by the Catholic Church. But the flamboyant style didn’t transplant well in sober England. Instead, English artists like William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, as well as the architect Sir Christopher Wren, developed a formal variant of Baroque, geared to English tastes.
Breaking with the Baroque: Antoine Watteau
It took the party a while to heat up. The first great artist of the Rococo, Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), was tame compared to those who appeared later. He depicted scenes of earthly paradise in which elegant aristocrats quietly cavort, watch actors, or listen to musicians. The all-powerful French Royal Academy created a new genre — fêtes galantes (“elegant parties”) — to classify Watteau’s paintings. Watteau’s landscapes are usually dressed in mist, which blends trees, hills, seas, and sky into a poetic space where only beautiful, graceful things can happen. The mistiness also helps to distance the scenes from the real world; any flaws are hidden in these fuzzy, faraway Arcadias.
Watteau often mixed theater and real life in his paintings, which are like plays on canvas. (His teacher, Claude Gillot, was a professional stage scenery painter.) Many of them feature actors from the Italian Commedia dell’arte, a 16th- to 18th-century improvisational theater played by comic stock characters like Harlequin, Columbina, and Pulcinella. In Watteau’s painting Love in the Italian Theater, Harlequin strums his guitar around a glowing torch, while other actors and aristocrats look on in quiet amusement. This painting was actually a little radical for its day, because Commedia dell’arte (which was often risqué) was banned in France during the last years of Louis XIV’s reign (from 1697 to 1716).
Watteau’s Gilles and Four Other Characters from the Commedia dell’Arte (see Figure 15-1) shows a sadder side of the period. Pierrot (a.k.a. Gilles) stands alone on stage to face the viewer, his only audience. He seems to be waiting for applause that he knows will never come. The sad-faced, white-on-white clown has been left out of his companions’ revels. With his traditional oversized clothes, it seems he’ll never fit in.
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Figure 15-1: Watteau’s Gilles and Four Other Characters from the Commedia dell’Arte shows the dark side of the Rococo. Some people got left out. |
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Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
Fragonard and Boucher: Lush, Lusty, and Lavish
François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard revved up the party. Although they depicted the exhibitionist variety of sex from a sanitized distance in their mythological paintings, they also strongly hinted at it in their painterly transcriptions of day-to-day aristocratic life. Couching sexuality in elegant surroundings made it palatable to the tastes of the day.
François Boucher
The paintings of François Boucher (1703–1770) are so sexy, at least by 18th-century standards, that many of his contemporaries, including Denis Diderot (see Chapter 16), condemned some of them as pornographic. But Louis XV’s influential, art-loving mistress, Madame de Pompadour, adored Boucher and his work, so he got away with it.
Boucher’s paintings have the look of a rich woman’s boudoir, so soft and sensual, they seem to exhale French perfume. In his Cupid a Captive, he gently mocks the boy god of love, Cupid, who gets caught in his own snare. Instead of Cupid wounding hearts with his famous flaming arrows, now he’s the prisoner of several women in a pleasure garden. His chains are their arms and legs. One of the nymphs has snatched his arrows, rendering him defenseless.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard
Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) was Boucher’s student, and Boucher’s influence shows in some of Fragonard’s paintings, including The Bathers, which may be even more orgiastic than his teacher’s works. But Fragonard also painted sun-suffused landscapes inhabited by powdered nobles, reminiscent of Watteau’s work. But even in these paintings, there are erotic undercurrents.
At first glance, The Swing (see Figure 15-2) depicts a pleasant afternoon outing: A man pushes a lovely woman on a swing, and a handsome young man sitting in front of her innocently watches. Nearby shadowy putti statues (naked, winged infant boys) observe the entertainment as if they were alive and might join in. But the viewer tends not to notice them immediately. The woman’s luminous pink dress holds the viewer’s attention as she flies through the air, suspended in her pleasure. Closer inspection reveals that one of her shoes has flown off. The wide-eyed man in front of her is dazzled, not because her shoe is flying through the air, but because he can see up her dress. But then again maybe he isn’t gawking. This maybe-he-is/maybe-he-isn’t tension made the painting both titillating and acceptable. It tightrope-walked the line of 18th-century morality.
Though the intended subtext of the painting is certainly erotic, the unintended subtext is that the rich lived in blissful isolation, cushioned by their pleasures from the tribulations of the poor struggling all around them.
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Figure 15-2: Fragonard’s The Swing touts sexuality behind a guise of innocence. |
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Art Resource, NY
Twenty-two years after Fragonard painted The Swing, the French Revolution unleashed the pent-up resentment of the underclasses. By that time, sensual Rococo paintings had fallen out of favor and Fragonard was living in poverty.
Flying High: Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) injected religion back into 18th-century art. He painted many altarpieces for Italian churches in Venice, Milan, Bergamo, and Padua. He is best known for his frescoes (painting on wet or dry plaster), which won him international fame.
He painted sumptuous celestial ceilings in palaces and churches all over Europe, including the Kaisersaal in Würzburg, Germany, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. The main characters in his frescoes are usually pale-colored saints and angels; mythological figures in diaphanous, windswept gowns; or historical figures. Typically, they recline on sun-drenched clouds that float like islands through heaven or Olympus. By the middle of the century, Tiepolo was the most sought-after painter in Europe.
Rococo Lite: The Movement in England
Although Rococo never got a foothold on British soil, English artists still felt its influence like a fresh breeze from across the English Channel. Without becoming flamboyant, a new, lighter look infused English art. The two leading British painters of the period, Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, were both influenced by Watteau, as well as Italian Renaissance and Baroque artists and Dutch and Flemish painting. The third great 18th-century British painter was William Hogarth.
William Hogarth
The woodblock prints of William Hogarth (1697–1764) caricature upper-class Englishmen. Hogarth was one of the few artists of the period who used his talent to critique and mock the upper classes: their excesses, extravagance, and moral depravity. He had trained to become an engraver and later switched to painting. But the engraver in him never died. In fact, he made engravings of some of his paintings so he could sell multiple copies of them. Smart guy.
Like Watteau’s work, Hogarth’s paintings look like theater pieces — in this case, comedies of manners. He created series of paintings that tell stories like cartoon strips. Each painting is a chapter in the story. His first moral painting series is called A Harlot’s Progress. It was a sensation. The series chronicles the conversion of a country bumpkin into a city prostitute and follows her gradual decline. Hogarth even depicts the woman’s horrid death and funeral — as a moral lesson.
He followed this series with a second hit, The Rake’s Progress. This painted story follows the moral collapse of Tom Rakewell. In one of the episodes, The Orgy, Tom drinks himself into a stupor at a brothel. Though a prostitute caresses his chest, he looks too nauseated to notice. In the dark background, a servant holding out a candle looks on aghast at the scene. Clothes lie about in disarray. Some of the women brazenly hold flasks of rum or whiskey; one threatens another with a knife. Beside them, a client chokes a woman who’s flirting with him. The final painting in the series finds Tom Rakewell in a lunatic asylum.
Although Hogarth’s paintings and engravings are intended to be moral lessons, his art never feels preachy. Each painting brims with entertaining and often humorous details.
Thomas Gainsborough
The paintings of Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) have perfect manners. Everything and everyone is in its proper place. His specialty was portraits of English gentry and aristocrats and wholesome English landscapes.
He began as a landscape painter but found that painting portraits was more profitable. Even so, Gainsborough never abandoned landscape painting. He often placed his country ladies and gents in the sedate English countryside. For example, in his great portrait Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, Gainsborough poses the elegantly dressed Andrews couple in a beautiful late-day, countryscape. Mrs. Andrews, attired in a blue taffeta dress and pointed, pink velvet slippers, looks like she’s ready to go to the opera, yet she’s at ease in her rural surroundings. Mr. Andrews, with his trusty English Whippet at his side, appears ready for a foxhunt. But his elegant white jacket and white hose aren’t up for a rustic jaunt. As rural gentry, they’re very much in their element. Yet they’ve obviously never lifted a hoe. They own the land, but they don’t work it. In fact, the landscape looks like it’s been tamed by his gun and her dress. To facilitate their comfort, Gainsborough planted an ornate wrought-iron bench in the midst of the meadow. The bench on which the lady perches and on which the man leans further separates them from the landscape that they dominate.
The British Empire was on the rise during this period. One hundred and fifty years later, Great Britain ruled a quarter of the world’s people. Paintings showing upper-class Englishmen mastering the land were very popular in the mid-18th century.
Sir Joshua Reynolds
Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) brought Italy to England. He’d studied in Rome from 1750 to 1752 and then taken the Grand Tour of Italy. Highly influenced by Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and the Mannerist Giulio Romano, he imported what he called the “great style” to England. As the first president of the Royal Academy of Art, Reynolds helped shape artistic tastes throughout Great Britain.
Reynolds hoped to bring Italian subject matter to England, too — in particular, mythological and historical painting. But British tastes inclined toward portraiture; 16th- and 17th-century foreign painters who’d worked in England, like Hans Holbein and Anthony van Dyck, focused on portraits, helping foster a taste for that kind of painting.
So like his rival Thomas Gainsborough, Reynolds painted portraits. The most striking difference in their styles is in how they posed their models and embedded them in their surroundings. Gainsborough’s models sit like they’re posing for their picture between sips of tea; the background is just that — background. The sitters don’t interact with it. The figures in Reynolds’s portraits are almost always active and dramatically or poetically wedded to the landscape.
Reynolds incorporated the landscapes he found in Italian art into his portraits of English lords and ladies, especially after 1760. Often, he placed English women in Italianesque settings accented with a Greek column or bust or a Roman arch or relief. Frequently, the ladies wear flowing Roman gowns and make grand or poetic gestures. Reynolds was so inspired by Romano that he actually borrowed poses and even figures from his paintings. He said, “Genius . . . is the child of imitation.”
In Lady Sarah Bunbury Sacrificing to the Graces, he transforms Lady Bunbury into a Roman priestess of the Patrician class. Any flaws in the actual woman’s features have been corrected. She is as idealized as a Raphael Madonna.
The settings for Reynolds’s portraits of men are usually heroic. For example, he depicted the British admiral Augustus Keppel, who fought in the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, walking boldly along a darkened stone path backed by Gothic scenery and a tempestuous sea.
Hogarth, Gainsborough, and Reynolds did create a world-class English School of painting as Reynolds had hoped. The next great school of English artists, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, built on their achievements, primarily by rebelling against the aesthetics of Reynolds.