Neoclassical Art is a severe and unemotional form of art harkening back to the grandeur of ancient Greece and Rome. Its rigidity was a reaction to the overbred Rococo style and the emotional charged Baroque style. The rise of Neoclassical Art was part of a general revival of interest in classical thought, which was of some importance in the American and French revolutions.
Important Neoclassicists include the architects Robert Smirke and Robert Adam, the sculptors Antonio Canova,Jean-Antoine Houdon and Bertel Thorvaldsen, and painters J.A.D. Ingres, Jacques-Louis David and Anton Raphael Mengs.
Around 1800, Romanticism emerged as a reaction against Neoclassicism. It did not really replace the Neoclassical style so much as act as a counterbalancing influence, and many artists were influenced by both styles to a certain degree.
Neoclassical Art was also a primary influence on 19th-century Academic Art
Giovanni Battista Piranesi 1720-1778 Italian Engraver
Biography
Piranesi was born in Mogliano Veneto, near Treviso, then part of the Republic of Venice. His brother Andrea introduced him to Latin and the ancient civilization, and later he studied as an architect under his uncle, Matteo Lucchesi, who was Magistrato delle Acque, a Venetian engineer who specialized in excavation.
From 1740 he was in Rome with Marco Foscarini, the Venetian envoy to the Vatican. He resided in the Palazzo Venezia and studied under Giuseppe Vasi, who introduced him to the art of etching and engraving. After his studies with Vasi, he collaborated with pupils of the French Academy in Rome to produce a series of vedute (views) of the city; his first work was Prima parte di Architettura e Prospettive (1743), followed in 1745 by Varie Vedute di Roma Antica e Moderna.
The Pyramid of Cestius, etching.From 1743 to 1747 he sojourned mainly in Venice where, according to some sources, he frequented Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. He then returned to Rome, where he opened a workshop in Via del Corso. In 1748-1774 he created a long series of vedute of the city which established his fame. In the meantime Piranesi devoted himself to the measurement of much of the ancient edifices: this led to the publication of Antichità Romane de' tempo della prima Repubblica e dei primi imperatori ("Roman Antiquities of the Time of the First Republic and the First Emperors"). In 1761 he became a member of the Accademia di San Luca and opened a printing facility of his own. In 1762 the Campo Marzio dell'antica Roma collection of engravings was printed.
The following year he was commissioned by Pope Clement XIII to restore the choir of San Giovanni in Laterano, but the work did not materialize. In 1764 Piranesi started his sole architectural works of importance, the restoration of the church of Santa Maria del Priorato in the Villa of the Knights of Malta in Rome, where he was buried after his death, in a tomb designed by Giuseppi Angelini.
In 1767 he was created knight of the Papal States. In 1769 his publication of a series of ingenious and sometimes bizarre designs for chimneypieces, as well as an original range of furniture pieces, established his place as a versatile and resourceful designer.[1] In 1776 he created his famous Piranesi Vase, his best known work as a 'restorer' of ancient sculpture. In 1777-78 Piranesi published Avanzi degli Edifici di Pesto, (Remains of the Edifices of Paestum) a collection of views of Paestum.
He died in Rome in 1778 after a long illness.
Gavin Hamilton 1723-1798 Scottish Painter
Gavin Hamilton (1723, Lanark – January 4, 1798, Rome) was a Scottish neoclassical history painter, who is more widely remembered for his hunts for antiquities in the neighborhood of Rome. He came from the prominent family for which the town of Hamilton was named, which was headed by the Dukes of Hamilton.
Hamilton was educated at the University of Glasgow and studied in Rome in the 1740s, under the master Agostino Masucci. After a brief return home, he did some portrait painting in London, and returned to Rome in 1756 where he lived for the rest of his life.
Aside from a few portraits of friends, the Hamilton family and British people on the Grand Tour, most of his paintings, many of which are very large, were of classical Greek and Roman subjects. His most famous is a cycle of six paintings from Homer's Iliad, which, as engraved by Domenico Cunego, were disseminated widely and were enormously influential. Also influential was Hamilton's Death of Lucretia (1760s), also known as the Oath of Brutus, which inaugurated a series of "oath paintings" that include Jacques-Louis David's famous Oath of the Horatii (1784).
He painted the altar piece of the Scottish national church in Rome, Sant'Andrea degli Scozzesi, depicting the Martyrdom of St Andrew.
"Venus giving Paris Helen as his wife" by Hamilton (1782-1784), held by the Palazzo Braschi, RomeAs an art dealer and archaeologist he undertook excavations at Hadrian's Villa in 1769-1771, at first occasioned by the need of marble for his sculptor to restore sculptures. His excavators reopened the outlet of a low-lying swampy area and "after some weeks' work underground by lamp-light and up to the knees in muddy water" retrieved sculptures from the muck where they had been thrown with timber when the sacred grove was levelled (Smith 1901:308). From 1771 Hamilton excavated other sites in the environs of Rome: Cardinal Chigi's Tor Colombaro, 1771-72, Albano, 1772, Monte Cagnolo 1772-73, Ostia 1774-75, the Villa Fonseca on the Caelian Hill in Rome, "Roma Vecchia" (the Villa dei Quintili), ca 1775 Castel di Guido and Gabii.[1] Many of the works of art recovered were sold to Hamilton's British clients, most notably to Charles Townley and to William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne at Shelburne, later Lansdowne House, London.[2]
Gavin Hamilton worked closely with Giovanni Battista Piranesi
In 1785 he bought the version now at the National Gallery, London, of Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks and sent it to London for sale.
Gavin Hamilton's success, in what were already marginally shady undertakings, for the pope, in addition to claiming one-third of all excavated works, had the right to forbid export of outstanding treasures,[3] lay in his generous offerings to the Museo Pio-Clementina, and his generosity in buying excavating rights from landowners.
