A scholar’s creed and a buried city

Most movements begin by inventing something new. This one begins by deciding that everything new had been a mistake, and that the way forward was a thousand years back. Around the middle of the eighteenth century the educated classes of Europe grew tired of the art they had, which was Rococo (the light, ornamental style of the early 1700s, all pastel color, curling lines, and aristocratic flirtation). Rococo was made to please a small rich world, and it pleased it expertly. The Neoclassicists looked at it and saw a dessert trolley where a meal should be.

The picture they pointed to as proof was Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s The Swing (painted around 1767). A young woman in a froth of pink kicks a slipper into the air as she swings through a feathery green garden; below her, half-hidden in the bushes, a young man lies back to look straight up her billowing skirts, while an unsuspecting older man works the ropes behind. It is witty, it is gorgeous, it is paint turned to whipped cream, and it is about nothing on earth except pleasure. That, said the new generation, was exactly the problem. Art had become a toy.

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Fragonard, The Swing, c.1767 · Wallace Collection, London

RightsPublic domain worldwide (Jean-Honoré Fragonard died 1806). Wikimedia Commons.

The hunger for something sterner had a source, and it was the Enlightenment (the eighteenth-century movement of thinkers who put reason, evidence, and public-spiritedness above tradition and royal authority). An age that prized clarity, order, and civic virtue (the idea that a good citizen owes duty to the community, not just to himself) wanted an art to match: serious, rational, and morally useful, the opposite of Rococo’s private fun. The obvious model lay in the deep past. Ancient Greece and the Roman Republic had built a civilization on exactly those public virtues, and their sculpture had already been admired for centuries as the high-water mark of human art. The way forward, plainly, was the way back: to antiquity (the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans), to be imitated rather than improved upon.

Then antiquity, conveniently, came up out of the ground. For centuries the buried Roman towns near Naples had been a rumor under the farmland. Now they were dug. The excavation of Herculaneum began in 1738 and of Pompeii in 1748, both towns smothered by Vesuvius in AD 79 and sealed ever since, both now ordered open under Charles of Bourbon, the King of Naples. For the first time Europeans were looking not at later copies of Roman art but at Roman daily life itself, the rooms, the wall paintings, the furniture, the design, lifted whole out of the ash. It was as if the ancient world had sent up a sample crate. Artists and aristocrats poured south to see it, and the new craze for the antique acquired a name in France even before it had a doctrine: le goût grec, “the Greek taste,” current by 1757.

The doctrine arrived next, and it came not from a painter but from a scholar. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) was a German librarian and antiquarian, often called the father of art history, a man who loved Greek sculpture with an intensity that reads today like a religious conversion. In 1755, in Dresden, he published a slim essay (its first printing ran to about fifty copies) with a long title that amounts to a single command: Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture. Stop inventing, it told artists. Stop chasing novelty. The road to greatness runs through imitating the Greeks, and the supreme quality of Greek art, the thing every painter should chase, he named in a phrase that became the whole movement’s motto: “a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur” ( eine edle Einfalt und eine stille Größe in his German), in both pose and expression. Not drama. Not display. A calm, restrained, dignified gravity, like a Greek statue that has nothing left to prove.

One honest footnote travels with that famous line. The English everyone now quotes, “quiet grandeur,” is the modern standard translation. When the line first crossed into English, in the Swiss-British painter Henry Fuseli’s translation of 1765, it read “a noble simplicity and sedate grandeur.” The sense is the same; the smoother wording is later. It is a small thing, but Winckelmann wrote the creed of an art obsessed with getting the antique exactly right, so it is worth getting his own words exactly right too.

So the founding text of a movement of severe, drawn, moral paintings is a piece of art criticism, written by a man who could not paint. The first to try translating it into an actual picture was Winckelmann’s own friend, the German painter Anton Raphael Mengs, whose ceiling fresco (a painting laid straight onto wet plaster) Parnassus of 1761 (Apollo among the Muses, arranged with the cool clarity of a frieze, a band of figures set in a shallow line across the surface, like the carved relief that runs across a temple) is often called the first programmatic Neoclassical painting: the doctrine turned, gingerly, into paint. It would take another thirty years, and a Frenchman with no gift for gentleness, to turn the creed into something that could frighten people.