Western Art: 1720 to 1732

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jan van Huysum is the brother of Jacob van Huysum, the son of the flower painter Justus van Huysum, and the grandson of Jan van Huysum I, who is said to have been expeditious in decorating doorways, screens and vases.

A picture by Justus is preserved in the gallery of Brunswick, representing "Orpheus and the Beasts in a wooded landscape", and here we have some explanation of his son's fondness for landscapes of a conventional and Arcadian kind; for Jan van Huysum, though skilled as a painter of still life, believes himself to possess the genius of a landscape painter.

Half his pictures in public galleries are landscapes, views of imaginary lakes and harbors with impossible ruins and classic edifices, and woods of tall and motionless trees—the whole very glossy and smooth, and entirely lifeless.

The earliest dated work of this kind is that of 1717, in the Louvre, a grove with maidens culling flowers near a tomb, ruins of a portico, and a distant palace on the shores of a lake bounded by mountains.

Giovanni Paolo Pannini, known mainly as one of the vedutisti or (veduta or view painters"), had as a young man trained at Piacenza as a stage designer.

He had moved in 1711 to Rome, where he had studied drawing with Benedetto Luti and become famous as a decorator of palaces, including the Villa Patrizi (1718–1725) and the Palazzo de Carolis (1720).

As a painter, Pannini is best known for his vistas of Rome, in which city's antiquities he takes a particular interest.

He paints, for example, in 1720 a grand perspective of Saint Peter's Basilica.

Among his most famous works are the interior of the Pantheon, and his vedute — paintings of picture galleries containing views of Rome.

Pannini had in 1719 been admitted to the Congregazione dei Virtuosi al Pantheon.

Antoine Watteau, back in France in 1720 after a year in London, had in in only eight days painted the now-famous signboard for the shop of his art dealer friend Gersain: it portrays an art dealer's shop in which a morose painting of Louis XIV is being symbolically stored away, as if to mark the end of his great reign.

Although there are a number of figures, the protagonist of the picture is painting itself, as if Watteau at the end of his life—though young, he is ill and will soon die—were consecrating his art to eternity.

Watteau is by now worn down, perhaps from tuberculous laryngitis; he will die in 1721 a few months before his thirty-seventh birthday.

Some of the finest of Jan van Huysum's fruit and flower pieces have been in English private collections: those of 1723 are in the earl of Ellesmere's gallery.

Giovanni Antonio Canal was born in Venice as the son of the painter Bernardo Canal, hence his mononym Canaletto ("little Canal"), and Artemisia Barbieri.

Bernardo Bellotto is his nephew and pupil.

Canaletto had served his apprenticeship with his father and his brother and began in his father's occupation, that of a theatrical scene painter.

Inspired by the Roman vedutista Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Canaletto had started painting the daily life of the city and its people.

After returning from Rome in 1719, he had begun painting in his topographical style.

His first known signed and dated work is Architectural Capriccio (1723, Milan, in a private collection).

Studying with the older Luca Carlevarijs, a moderately talented painter of urban cityscapes, he had rapidly become his master's equal.

The painter Alessandro Marchesini, who was also the buyer for the Lucchese art collector Stefano Conti, had inquired in 1725 about buying two more 'views of Venice', when the agent informed him to consider instead the work of "Antonio Canale... it is like Carlevaris, but you can see the sun shining in it." (J.G. Links, Canaletto and his patrons, Granada Publishing/Paul Elek Ltd., London 1977. p. 1.)

Much of Canaletto's early artwork is painted "from nature", differing from the customary practice of completing paintings in the studio.

Some of his later works do revert to this custom, as suggested by the tendency for distant figures to be painted as blobs of color—an effect produced by using a camera obscura, which blurs farther-away objects.

However, his paintings are always notable for their accuracy: he records the seasonal submerging of Venice in water and ice.

Canaletto's early works remain his most coveted and, according to many authorities, his best.

One of his early pieces is The Stonemason's Yard which depicts a humble working area of the city.

The Stonemason's Yard (formally known as Campo S. Vidal and Santa Maria della Carità), unsigned and undated, is attributed and dated by stylistic clues.

The informal scene is thought to have been painted for a Venetian patron, rather than a foreign visitor to Venice, in the mid to late 1720s.

it is considered one of Canalettto's finest works.

Aert de Gelder has spent his life in Dordrecht, except for a period of time in about 1661 when he had been Rembrandt's pupil in Amsterdam.

The only Dutch artist of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century to paint in the tradition of Rembrandt's late style, his biblical paintings—e.g., Scenes from the Passion (circa 1715)—feature warm color and atmospheric light.

In his portraits—e.g., The Family of Herman Boerhave (circa 1722; Louvre, Paris)—his bold, broad manner of brushwork and surface texture contrasts markedly with the refined techniques and smoothly finished canvases of his contemporaries.

Johann Michael Rottmayr has brought the Italian Renaissance north of the Alps, just as Hans Adam Weissenkircher had brought to the southern Alps and the court of the Princes of Eggenberg in Graz.

Rottmayr has worked from 1689 onward in Salzburg, where he is employed as the general painter of the Prince-Bishop of Salzburg.

Born in Laufen an der Salzach, Salzburg, now Germany, he had received his education from Johann Carl Loth in Venice, along with his Laufen-born contemporary, Weissenkircher.

Jean Siméon Chardin was born in Paris, the son of a cabinetmaker, and rarely left the city.

He will live on the Left Bank near Saint-Sulpice until 1757, when Louis XV grants him a studio and living quarters in the Louvre.

Chardin had entered into a marriage contract with Marguerite Saintard in 1723, whom he will not marry until 1731.

He serves apprenticeships with the history painters Pierre-Jacques Cazes and Noël-Nicolas Coypel, and in 1724 became a master in the Académie de Saint-Luc.

According to one nineteenth-century writer, at a time when it was hard for unknown painters to come to the attention of the Royal Academy, he first found notice by displaying a painting at the "small Corpus Christi" (held eight days after the regular one) on the Place Dauphine (by the Pont Neuf).

Van Loo, passing by in 1720, bought it and later assisted the young painter. (Édouard Fournier, Histoire du Pont-Neuf, 1862)

Upon presentation of The Ray in 1728, he was admitted to the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture.

The Ray, hung from a chain and gutted, reads like a Crucifixion.