CLASSICISM.

Classicism has two dominant meanings in the West. The first concerns the Greeks of the sixth and fifth centuries b.c.e. and their influence, first on the Romans and then on Western cultures from the Renaissance on. The second meaning, evolved from the first, concerns the quality of a work—its style, its structure, and to some extent its content, always with the quality of the Greek models in mind. The Oxford English Dictionary definition, "The principles of classic literature or art; adherence to … a classical style," comprehends both meanings. The word classicism has become a common term since its first use in the nineteenth century. Classicism spread across Europe from Italy to Germany, to France, to Russia, to England, with the place and the time of its usage shading its meaning. It remains a useful term, with contextual clues indicating its intended meaning.

The intellectual and aesthetic outflow of the Greeks was prodigious and the extant aesthetic, philosophical, historical, and political writings have had a phenomenal impact on Western culture. Homer's epics (c. 800 b.c.e.), the poetry of Sappho (seventh century b.c.e.) and Pindar (sixth century b.c.e.); the dramas of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes, and Aristophanes (fifth century b.c.e.); the sculptures of Phidias; the oratory of Pericles and the writings of Plato and Aristotle (fifth and fourth centuries b.c.e.) are but some of the most prominent Greek contributions to Western culture. In the works of these and other Greeks, future generations have found what has come to be understood as the features of classicism: beauty, balance, proportion, formal structure, intellectual vigor and depth, rational content supported by symmetrical form, often accompanied by a sense of humor and skillful satire. All of these characteristics are manifested in a humanist context. Unfortunately, much of our knowledge of this great outpouring comes to us secondhand because the originals no longer exist, although we have some fragments of the writings—a few poems of Sappho and some works of Aristotle, for example—and some remains of aesthetic works, such as the Elgin Marbles, the sculpture of Hera, friezes of the battle of the centurians, and drawings on pottery. These remains have been studied for centuries.

Much of what we know of Greek contributions comes from two sources: writings about them and copies of them. Aristotle in his Poetics analyzed and commented on Greek drama, vastly amplifying the evidence from the few extant dramas. Longinus illuminated the style and purpose of art. Much of what we know of Greek sculpture comes from Roman copies, and much of what we know of Greek and Roman architecture comes from Vitruvius, the Roman architect who wrote about architecture in De re architectura (first century c.e.), the manuscript of which was found in the fifteenth century and translated into many languages.

The Romans and Medieval Europe

The Romans, conscious of Greek art and thought, intentionally copied the Greeks. The first neoclassical age was really the Roman one between about the first century c.e. and the fifth century c.e. A good deal of what we now call classicism is a Roman continuation and expansion of Greek thought and aesthetic ideas and values. Fortunately, most of the Roman works are extant, and the writings of the poets Horace, Ovid, and Virgil, as well as the orators and prose writers including Cicero, Cato, Pliny the Elder, and Quintilian, have greatly enriched the classical tradition. Latin had a vigorous life all through the medieval period. It was the lingua franca not only of the church but of the universities, which started in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as well as most serious writing.

The Renaissance

The next neoclassical period, which we call the Renaissance, exploded in Italy under the patronage of such personages as the Medicis and Pope Leo X. The Renaissance with its focus on secular life, fortified by the availability of the important literary works of the Romans and by translations of the Greeks into Latin, sometimes via Arabic, and then by the study of Greek, enabling educated people to read Greek originals, created the great flowering of classicism. Fortified by copious commentary on the ancients from such scholars as Pico della Mirandola and Ficino and stimulated by such scholars as the humanist Erasmus, educated people across Europe talked about classical language, art, architecture, and ideas. Petrarch wrote sonnets in the vernacular. Botticelli painted the beautiful Birth of Venus. Great works of poetry, painting, architecture, and sculpture appeared first in Italy in the mid-fourteenth century, and then surged across Europe, into France, Germany, the Netherlands, England, and elsewhere.

An excellent illustration of this sweep of classicism across Europe and into America is in architecture. Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), probably the most influential architect in Western history, rejected the medieval Gothic structures, turning instead to classical antiquity for models. He not only created beautiful classical buildings in northern Italy, but he published his ideas, complete with goals, models, dimensions, materials, and methods of construction. Designers such as the English architect Inigo Jones read Palladio's books and went to see his buildings, then went back home to construct Palladian architecture, the most famous being the classic Queen's House in Greenwich (1616). Its simple, clean, symmetrical elegance contrasted strongly with Tudor architecture. Over a century later, Alexander Pope wrote a 204-line poem on English architecture ("Moral Essays: Epistle IV, Of the Use of Riches,"1734), praising the good taste of Lord Burlington, who discriminately applied Palladian ideas, and satirizing noblemen who built expensive mansions lacking in harmony and proportion. Palladian architecture moved across Europe, into parts of Asia, and especially to the Americas, dominating colonial architecture in the United States. Buildings across the world illustrate Palladio's influence: symmetrical structures with balanced vertical and horizontal lines, grand staircases, Greek pillars and Roman arches, porticoes and frescoes, pediments and loggias, statues in the Greek style. In each building, every part contributes to a harmonious, unified whole.

Neoclassicism

As with architecture, almost all fields were affected by classicism, especially literature. The rich collection of Greek and Roman writings, the theories of Aristotle and Longinus, and the considerable body of accumulating Italian and French literary criticism inspired many to write in imitation (mimesis) of the ancients, observing the "rules" they thought inherent in the ancient writings. The flourishing literary criticism included, for example, long discussions of the unities of time, place, and action, of decorum, and of high moral quality. France for a time became the artistic center of this new neoclassicism. Although Racine, Corneille, Molière, Boileau, and others were successful in espousing and observing the rules of classicism, an individual genius elevated their writing. The rules were followed less successfully in Joseph Addison's correct and popular, though stiff Cato, but Dryden and Pope in England, and Goethe and Schiller in Germany wrote many inspired classical works.

In the twenty-first century we speak of many creators prior to the early nineteenth century as being classical or neoclassical. Classicism has a recognizable core of ideas that draws creators and critics to it again and again. Behind classicism is the innate desire to make accessible the civilizing influence of great art, music, literature, and architecture. The painters Jacques-Louis David in France (1748–1825) and Joshua Reynolds in Britain (1723–1792) were influential classicists who not only painted but also put their theories into print. Even music, which has no extant models from the ancients, produced classicists: The music of Haydn, Mozart, and the early Beethoven has a strong, clear structure. Their dominant sonata form—orderly, complete, balanced—gives shape and purpose to the chaos of sound.

By the late eighteenth century the neoclassical movement began to burn itself out as artists turned elsewhere for inspiration. In a sense, classicism is an ideal not a reality, since humans almost compulsively veer into irregularities or even rebel against ideals. Classicism tried to give answers, but multitudinous questions remained. Hence countermovements arose, which critics have termed Romantic, with its concern for self-expression, and baroque, with its intentional rejection of balance and harmony. Classicism's closed form, with its completeness, balanced proportion, solid repose, and clean structure, often became a more open form, with restless parts and unstressed edges. The classical The Ambassadors (1533) of Hans Holbein (1497–1543), for example, has a symmetrical structure with clear, distinct figures. In contrast, in the baroque Christ Washing the Feet of His Disciples (1556) of Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti, 1518–1594), Christ at the center right of the picture is smaller than the figures on the left, and the colors and shapes blend into one another.

Though theoretically classicism aspires to produce the best art, in reality much of the best art veers from the classical or outright rebels against it. The classical critic Samuel Johnson has pointed out the many deviations from classicism of William Shakespeare's plays but still recognized their greatness. Much art has elements of classicism. Mary Cassatt's (1844–1926) many paintings, for example, have classical beauty, balance, and repose, but contiguous mothers and daughters blend. The much-admired works of Paul Klee (1879–1940) or Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) demonstrate rejection of classicism. Note the restless parts and unstressed edges of Klee's Remembrance of a Garden or Pollock's Moon Woman.

Conclusion

Still, during the many centuries of admiring and imitating the Greeks, the term classicism has evolved to describe an ideal, a set of aspirations that humans keep returning to. The style of classicism tends to be clear, elegant, precise, rational; the structure, to be formal, balanced, cohesive, closed; the content, to be uplifting, idealized, humanist. Classicism does not have as strong a pull as it used to, in part because it can be pushed into absolutism, and humans are increasingly seeing the world in relative terms. Classical artists from the past—Phidias, Virgil, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian—will always be with us. But there are also modern exponents of classicism ranging from poets such as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden to literary critics including Irving Babbitt and Jacques Barzun, from artists such as Paul Cézanne and William Bailey to musicians like Sergey Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, and Béla Bartók. So ingrained is the term classicism that many critics use it to describe contemporary forms of art, such as jazz, or even cuisine. It implies a standard of excellence only rarely achieved. Postmodernism saw an almost total rejection of classicism in the late twentieth century, but reaction might well lead to a revival of classicism in some form or another.

See also Aesthetics ; Arts ; Periodization of the Arts .

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Gwen W. Brewer