The Rise of Neoclassicism and the Flourishing of the Baroque Arts (17th–18th Century)

During the 17th and 18th centuries, European arts, literature, theater, music, and architecture were heavily influenced by Greco-Roman models, marking the emergence of Neoclassicism. However, in architecture and the visual arts, the period was still dominated by the Baroque style, characterized by grandeur, drama, and elaborate decoration.

In music, the Baroque period saw the development of complex polyphonic and contrapuntal techniques, as well as the birth of opera, oratorio, and cantata, laying the groundwork for later classical and Romantic music traditions.

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Neoclassicism and the Baroque in Visual Arts and Architecture

• Neoclassicism emerged as a revival of Greco-Roman ideals, emphasizing harmony, symmetry, and simplicity.
• Despite this trend, architecture remained largely Baroque, featuring:
  • Elaborate ornamentation and curvaceous forms.
  • Dramatic contrasts of light and shadow.
  • Monumental scale and theatrical effects.
• In painting and sculpture, artists such as Caravaggio, Peter Paul Rubens, and Gian Lorenzo Bernini brought Baroque dynamism and emotion to religious and mythological subjects.

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The Evolution of Baroque Music

The Baroque period (c. 1600–1750) was marked by the rise of:

• Opera – A dramatic, fully staged musical form combining singing, instrumental music, and theatrical performance.
• Oratorio – A large-scale musical work for choir, soloists, and orchestra, often based on biblical stories (e.g., Handel's Messiah).
• Cantata – A shorter vocal work, typically performed in churches or courts, featuring recitative and arias.

Instrumental music flourished, leading to:

• The development of fugue, concerto, sonata, and suite.
• Innovations by Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel, who explored contrapuntal (interweaving) techniques and harmonic progressions.

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New Musical Instruments of the Era

The 17th and 18th centuries also saw the invention and refinement of several musical instruments, including:

• Clarinet (early 18th century) – A woodwind instrument with a rich, expressive tone.
• Pedal harp – An advancement that allowed greater versatility in key changes.
• Harmonica – A free-reed wind instrument, later popularized in folk and blues music.
• Accordion – A portable, bellows-driven instrument with both melody and harmony capabilities.

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Conclusion: A Dynamic Era of Art and Music

The 17th and 18th centuries were a period of artistic evolution, where Baroque exuberance coexisted with Neoclassical ideals. While Neoclassicism would eventually dominate literature and architecture, the Baroque period revolutionized music, theater, and visual arts, leading to the creation of some of the most enduring works in European cultural history.

Giuseppe Crespi was born in Bologna to Girolamo Crespi and Isabella Cospi.

His mother was a distant relation of the noble Cospi family, which has ties to the Florentine House of Medici.

He is nicknamed "the Spanish One" (Lo Spagnuolo) because of his habit of wearing tight clothes characteristic of Spanish fashion of the time.

He was apprenticed by age twelve with Angelo Michele Toni (1640–1708).

He had worked from the ages of fifteen to eighteen under the Bolognese Domenico Maria Canuti.

The Roman painter Carlo Maratti, on a visit to Bologna, is said to have invited Crespi to work in Rome, but Crespi declined.

Maratti's friend, the Bolognese Carlo Cignani, had invited Crespi in 1681–82 to join an Accademia del Nudo for the purpose of studying drawing, and he had remained in that studio until 1686, when Cignani relocated to Forlì and his studio was taken over by Canuti's most prominent pupil, Giovanni Antonio Burrini.

Crespi from this time hence has worked independently of other artists.

He is said to have had a camera optica in his house for painting.

He had by the 1690s completed various altarpieces, including a Temptation of Saint Anthony commissioned by Count Carlo Cesare Malvasia, now in San Niccolò degli Albari.

He has journeyed to Venice, but surprisingly, never to Rome.

Bearing his large religious canvas of Massacre of the Innocents and a note from Count Vincenzo Rannuzi Cospi as an introduction, Crespi had fled in the middle of the night to Florence in 1708, and gained the patronage of the Grand Duke Ferdinand I de' Medici.

He had been forced to flee Bologna with the canvas, which while intended for the Duke, had been fancied by a local priest, Don Carlo Silva, for himself.

The events surrounding this episode have become the source of much litigation, in which Crespi, at least for the next five years, finds the Duke a firm protector.

Crespi, an eclectic artist, is a portrait painter and a brilliant caricaturist, and is also known for his etchings after Rembrandt and Salvator Rosa.

He could be said to have painted a number of masterpieces in different styles.

He paints few frescoes, in part because he refuses to paint for quadraturists, though in all likelihood, his style would not have matched the requirements of a medium often used at this tie for grandiloquent scenography.

He is not universally appreciated: Lanzi quotes Mengs as lamenting that the Bolognese school should close with the capricious Crespi.

Lanzi himself describes Crespi as allowing his "turn for novelty at length to lead his fine genius astray".

He finds Crespi includes caricature in even scriptural or heroic subjects, he cramps his figures, he "fell in to mannerism", and paints with few colors and few brushstrokes, "employed indeed with judgment but too superficial and without strength of body". (Luigi, Lanzi (1847). Thomas Roscoe. ed. The History of Painting in Italy; from period of the revival of the arts to the eighteenth century. Henry G. Bohn; Digitized by Googlebooks from Oxford University copy on June 31, 2007. pp. 162–165.)

Crespi is best known today as one of the main proponents of baroque genre painting in Italy.

Italians, until the seventeenth century, had paid little attention to such themes, concentrating mainly on grander images from religion, mythology, and history, as well as portraiture of the mighty.

In this they differ from Northern Europeans, specifically Dutch painters, who have a strong tradition in the depiction of everyday activities.

There are exceptions: Annibale Carracci, the Bolognese Baroque titan of fresco, had painted pastoral landscapes, and depictions of homely tradespeople such as butchers.

Before him, Bartolomeo Passerotti and the Cremonese Vincenzo Campi had dallied in genre subjects.

In this tradition, Crespi also follows the precedents set forth by the Bamboccianti, mainly Dutch genre painters active in Rome.

Subsequently this tradition will also be upheld by Piazzetta, Pietro Longhi, Giacomo Ceruti and Giandomenico Tiepolo to name a few.

Crespi paints many kitchen scenes and other domestic subjects.

The painting of Searching for Fleas (1709–10) depicts a young woman readying for sleep and supposedly grooming for a nagging pest on her person.

Crespi paints a celebrated series of canvases, the Seven Sacraments, around 1712; the series now hangs in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.

Originally completed for Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni in Rome, and upon his death passing to the Elector of Saxony, these imposing works are painted with a loose brushstroke, but still maintain a sober piety.

Making no use of hieratic symbols such as saints and putti, they utilize commonplace folk to illustrate sacramental activity.

Rachel Ruysch, who had been inducted  into the painters' guild in The Hague in 1701, had been invited in 1708 to work for the court in Düsseldorf and serve as court painter to Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine; she will remain working for him and his wife from until the prince's death in 1716.

Ruysch will live eighty-five years and her dated works establish that she had painted from the age of fifteen until she was an octogenarian.

About a hundred paintings by her are known.

The background of the paintings are usually dark.

Ruysch is also noted for her paintings of detailed and realistic crystal vases.

Born in The Hague, Ruysch had moved to Amsterdam when she was three when her father Frederik Ruysch, a famous anatomist, and botanist, was appointed a professor there.

He has gathered a huge collection of rarities in his house.

She had assisted her father decorating the prepared specimen in a liquor balsamicum with flowers and lace.

Ruysch had been apprenticed at fifteen to Willem van Aelst, a prominent Delft painter, known for his flower paintings.

In 1693 she had married a portrait painter, Juriaen Pool (1666–1745), with whom she has ten children.

Her sister Pieternel is married to Jan Munnicks, a young man who draws flowers in the Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam.

Ruysch is extremely pious.

Antoine Watteau was born in the town of Valenciennes, which had recently passed from the Spanish Netherlands to France.

His father was a master tiler.

Showing an early interest in painting, he had been apprenticed to Jacques-Albert Gérin, a local painter.

Having little to learn from Gérin, Watteau had left n about 1702 for Paris, where he had found employment in a workshop at Pont Notre-Dame, making copies of popular genre paintings in the Flemish and Dutch tradition; it was in this period that he had developed his characteristic sketchlike technique.

He was employed in 1703 as an assistant by the painter Claude Gillot, whose work represented a reaction against the turgid official art of Louis XIV's reign.

Watteau had become acquainted in Gillot's studio with the characters of the commedia dell'arte (its actors had been expelled from France several years before), a favorite subject of Gillot's that will become one of Watteau's lifelong passions.

Afterward, he had moved to the workshop of Claude Audran III, an interior decorator, under whose influence he began to make drawings admired for their consummate elegance.

Audran is the curator of the Palais du Luxembourg, where Watteau has been able to see the magnificent series of canvases painted by Peter Paul Rubens for Queen Marie de Medici.

The Flemish painter will become one of his major influences, together with the Venetian masters he will later study in the collection of his patron and friend, the banker Pierre Crozat.

Watteau had tried in 1709 to obtain the Prix de Rome and was rejected by the Academy.

He tried again in 1712 and was by then considered so good that, rather than receiving the one-year stay in Rome for which he had applied, he had been accepted as a full member of the Academy.

Watteau is expected to present the customary reception piece.

Although he has been given unusual freedom in choosing a subject for his painting, his failure to submit a work has brought several reprimands.Meanwhile, Watteau has worked on numerous private commissions that his rising reputation have brought him.

Finally, in January, 1717, the Academy calls Watteau to task, and in August of this year he presents his painting, which had been painted quickly in the preceding eight months.

Once submitted, the painting causes the Academy to invent a new classification for it, since the subject is so striking and new.

This results in the fête galantes (elegant fêtes or outdoor entertainments), a genre that will subsequently be practiced by imitators of Watteau, such as Jean-Baptiste Pater and Nicolas Lancret.

The painting portrays a "fête galante"; an amorous celebration or party enjoyed by the aristocracy of France during the Régence after the death of Louis XIV, which is generally seen as a period of dissipation and pleasure, and peace, after the somber last years of the previous reign.

The work celebrates love, with many cupids flying around the couples and pushing them closer together, as well as the statue of Venus (the goddess of sexual love).

There are three pairs of lovers in the foreground.

While the couple on the right by the statue are still engaged in their passionate tryst, another couple rises to follow a third pair down the hill, although the woman of the third pair glances back fondly at the goddess’s sacred grove.

At the foot of the hill, several more happy couples are preparing to board the golden boat at the left.

With its light and wispy brushstrokes, the hazy landscape in the background does not give to any clues whether it is spring or fall, dawn or dusk.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had accompanied her husband to Vienna, and thence to Adrianople and Constantinople.

Edward had been recalled in 1717, but they remain until at Constantinople, where January 19, 1718, he has a daughter, who will grow up to be Mary, Countess of Bute.

The Montagus return to England after an unsuccessful delegation between the Austrian and Ottoman empires.

Watteau’s La Surprise, painted around 1718, was known only through a copy in the Royal Collection before the original was found during a routine insurance valuation in 2007.

The oil painting shows an actor playing a guitar on a stone bench looking across at a couple locked in an amorous embrace.

The action is watched by a small dog in the corner.

The painting is sold at auction on July 8, 2008 for fifteen million Euros; this sets a world record price for a painting by Watteau.

The story of Mary Wortley Montagu’s voyage from Constantinople to London and of her observations of Eastern life is told in Letters from Turkey, a series of lively letters full of graphic descriptions; Letters is often credited as being an inspiration for subsequent female traveler/writers, as well as for much Orientalist art.

Not only is Lady Mary the first European woman to travel in many of the places she had visited; she is also the first European woman to have witnessed the private lives of Islamic women, as they are utterly closed to males.

During her visit, she had been sincerely charmed by the beauty and hospitality of the Turkish women she encountered, and she recorded her experiences in a Turkish bath with a keen eye for detail.

While in Turkey, she also had recorded a particularly amusing incident in which a group of Turkish women, horrified by the sight of the corset she was wearing, exclaimed that "the husbands in England were much worse than in the East, for [they] tied up their wives in little boxes, the shape of their bodies".

Lady Mary returns to the West with knowledge of the Ottoman practice of inoculation against smallpox, known as variolation.

She had had the embassy surgeon, Charles Maitland, in March 1718 inoculate her five-year-old son.

Before starting for the East she had met Alexander Pope, and during her absence he had written her a series of extravagant letters, which appear to have been chiefly exercises in the art of writing gallant epistles.

While Pope may have been fascinated by her wit and elegance, Lady Mary's replies to his letters reveal that she was not equally smitten.

Very few letters pass between them after Lady Mary's return, and various reasons have been suggested for the subsequent estrangement and violent quarrel.

The last of the Istanbul letters to Pope purports to have been written on November 1, 1718, from Dover

It contains a parody on Pope's Epitaph on the Lovers Struck by Lightning.

The manuscript collection of these letters is passed round a considerable circle, and Pope may have been offended at the circulation of this piece of satire

Jealousy of her friendship with Lord Hervey has also been alleged, but Lady Louisa Stuart says Pope had made Lady Mary a declaration of love, which she had received with an outburst of laughter

In any case Lady Mary always professes complete innocence of all cause of offense in public.

Lady Mary writes that nowhere else are women as free as they are in the Ottoman Empire.