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ROCOCO April 4, 2008

Posted by dodo in : Australia, Austria, Brazil, England, Europe, France, Germany, Greece, Hotels, India, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain, The Nile, USA, Wellington , trackback

After the great days of Baroque, the High Renaissance, led by Bernini and Borromini, and followed variously by Mansart and le Vau in France, Fischer von Erlach and von Hildebrandt in Austria, Zimmerman in Germany, Churriguera in Spain, and Wren,Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh in England, and before a period of Revivalism, France emerged from the reign of Henri IV (reigned 1589-1610) to establish a wealthy bourgeoisie under the political patronage of high taste in the salons of country chateau and hotels. In the next century, during the transitional period from Louis XIV (1638-1715) to the regency of his great grandson, Louis XV (1710-74), a demand for comfort, intimacy and ornament led to the late Baroque variant of Rococo.

The word Rococo derives from the French word rocaille, meaning sea rocks and shells, and it is applied to the highly ornamental and decorative strain of late Baroque architecture. Principally an interior refinement, the Rococo style was made possible by advances in plastering techniques, some of which travelled across the world in the 1703 edition of Joseph Moxon’s Mechanical Exercises, which describes techniques and tools for plastering that were popularized by Robert Adam (1728-92) and his younger brother, James (1732-94). Their work was in a restrained and sophisticated neoclassical style, which signalled the 18th-century age of Revivalism as a predictable reaction against the golden age of German Rococo, a style that was misinterpreted as decadent, ostentatious and an appropriate icon for the col lapse of the Baroque, itself described by the influential English critic John Ruskin (18191900) as “grotesque Renaissance”.

Travel GuidebookHowever, the contribution made by the Rococo style to world architecture is important and twofold. First, by its apparent licentiousness, Baroque-Rococo raised the level of critical inquiry beyond Vitruvian, Albertian and Palladian theory, which held that the aesthetic value of architecture could be judged only by its truthfulness to the prescriptions of antiquity. By its very nature, it demanded that architects be masters of an holistic art that embraced sculpture, painting, craft and extraordinarily sophisticated constructional techniques, an achievement epitomized by Bavarian brothers Cosmas Damian Asam (1686-1739) and Egid Quirin Asam (1692-1750). Second, the Baroque- Rococo represented a stand for originality. This was evident in the work of the French eccentric Claude Nicholas Ledoux (17361806), whose dangerous relationship with the French aristocracy during the French Revolution and subsequent imprisonment caused him to write the treatise L’ architecture (1804), which added fuel to the critical reaction against the Baroque in its claim that globes, cylinders and pyramids were the matrix of constructive art.

But the influence of Ledoux and his contemporaries in England and the rest of Europe was nothing in comparison to the global political events during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The American War of Independence, supported by the French and Spanish, put an end to British colonial rule, ruined the French economy and exhausted the Spanish, after their own war with Britain in 1727-8. George Washington became the first President of the United States in 1789, the year that British convict settlements were established in Australia and Louis XVI bowed the establishment of a constitutional monarchy, which led, in turn to the Revolution and to the French Republic of 1792. While Catherine II reformed Russian law, Napoleon defeated Austria, to be defeated himself by Nelson in the Battle of the Nile, which indirectly resulted in the extension of British rule throughout India. In 1801 Alexander I became the Tsar of Russia, and in 1804-5 Napoleon assumed the titles of Emperor and King of Italy.

The Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist in 1806 when Francis II renounced the title Emperor of Austria, its fall being matched by the rise of the French Empire, which had ambitions to expand into Russia but was ultimately defeated by the Russian winter of 1812. Two years later, the Duke of Wellington forced Napoleon into abdication and exile on Elba, after which the French monarchy was restored under Louis XVIII, together with monarchies in Austria, Prussia and the Netherlands, with Ferdinand I regaining the

Italian throne in 1815, the same year in which Napoleon was finally defeated in the Battle of Waterloo. Greece was liberated from the Turkish yoke and became established as an independent kingdom, while Spain lust Mexico and Peru, and Brazil became independent from Portugal.

All of these extraordinary events occurred, paradoxically, within an age of reason and enlightenment, which produced a synthesis of the arts and science in real and theoretical terms. Georg Hegel’s philosophical work The Science of Logic (1812-16), which proposed a new method of critical inquiry into the nature of reason, was matched by the musical genius of Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1837), who bridged the classical and romantic periods of a European art that was celebrated by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and enacted the life of George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824). Pure science in France combined with applied science in Britain to make possible the industrial revolution, and much of the concomitant wealth went into the patronage of painting, sculpture and architecture

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