PAINTING

PAINTING. Renaissance artists broke decisively from their medieval predecessors by looking to nature as their guide in the art of painting. Through observation and imitation, artists strove to construct a lucid depiction of their world. Mathematical principles were applied to establish a canon of proportions, aided immeasurably by the study of antique, classical sculpture. Painters experimented with perspective—the technique of depicting forms and their spatial relationships on a flat surface to create the illusion that the viewer is looking through a window—and brought it to ever greater levels of perfection.

In terms of technique, these illusionistic achievements were aided by the growing use of oil over tempera. The oil medium allowed the painter to apply pigment in a nuanced and fluid manner, with the added advantage that the transparency of the oil allowed for layering of color to describe light and shadow. Painting on wood panel continued to be popular, especially in northern Europe. Canvas, however, was growing in favor as it was easier to size and prepare for painting. By the sixteenth century, some artists exploited the weave of coarse canvases to accentuate the reflection of light and the appearance of brushwork, as did painters in Venice. Copper, slate, and marble were also adopted as supports. Artists appreciated their ultrasmooth surfaces and their ability to be fashioned into circular formats. These strictly pictorial skills were complemented by the growing sophistication of artists in animating figures through the use of gesture and expression. Painters increasingly looked to the devices of poetry for inspiration in creating an expressive pictorial language.

During the first three decades of the sixteenth century in Italy, referred to historically as the High Renaissance, the practice of observing and imitating the natural world expanded to include the emulation and idealization of the artist's experience of nature. Raphael (born Raffaello Sanzio), Leonardo da Vinci, and Michelangelo Buonarrotti are the artists associated with the apogee of these developments in central Italy and Rome, and renowned for interpreting these achievements with their own distinct vision. The pictorial conventions of this fertile period of art established a classical ideal of beauty that endured for centuries. Florentine artists in particular regarded drawing, with its emphasis on line, as fundamental to the structure of a painting. In addition, drawing, or disegno, was believed to be the direct conduit through which an artist's intellectual concept for a painting was expressed. Disegno thus assumed an intellectual as well as practical importance.

Venice too was a highly important center of painting in the sixteenth century. Venetian painters adopted a practice emphasizing the sensual qualities of color and light. Brushwork or facture was paramount to these results. Titian (born Tiziano Vecellio), along with Paolo Veronese and Tintoretto (born Jacopo Robusti), are artists associated with creating this painterly idiom where subjects are treated with a breadth and liberty of execution. This intuitive and painterly approach, in which color serves to structure the painting, was known as colore. The controversy between Venetian colore and central Italian disegno was already acknowledged by the artists and theorists of the sixteenth century. These two fundamentally distinct ways of seeing and reproducing the world in paint, one regarded as rational, the other as sensual and emotional, would compete for authority repeatedly in the theory and practice of painting.

By the end of the 1520s, a new style of painting, which has come to be known as mannerism (from the Italian maniera), presented itself. Mannerism was characterized by an appreciation for artistic invention and novelty. Artists employed charged, expressive colors in unusual combinations, elongated and unnatural proportions for the description of human form, and favored crowded, spatially compressed compositions. There are two prevailing interpretations of this style. One views mannerism as a reaction to the political and social instability in Europe at this time, including the Sack of Rome by King Charles V in 1527 and the trauma of the Reformation. Another interpretation sees mannerist artists pursuing a continuing refinement of the ideals of the Renaissance that became increasingly stylized and removed from nature in inspiration. Mannerism can perhaps be defined as the first, highly self-conscious art movement of the modern era. Jacopo da Pontormo from Florence and Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola of Parma, called Il Parmigianino, worked in this style. In northern Europe, subjects of an esoteric, titillating, and erotic nature were especially popular with mannerist painters, notably Joachim Wtewael from Utrecht and Haarlem-born Cornelis van Haarlem.

THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The seventeenth century witnessed major changes in the visual arts caused by a confluence of significant social, political, cultural, and economic events, which in turn contributed to the development of new styles of painting, often categorized into national schools. However, the pictorial devices European artists employed for structuring their paintings shared many characteristics that together suggested a period style historians called the baroque. For example, artists embraced naturalism with a new vigor. Bold experiments were carried out in the depiction of space, light, and the suggestion of time, all in the service of creating a pictorial illusion. Palettes deepened, assuming the warmer, saturated colors of autumn.

Still life, landscape, and genre themes were embraced as worthy subjects independent of religious and historical painting. Scientific discoveries, trade with the East, and treasures from the New World provoked innovative ways of seeing and representing the world. States of mind, particularly transcendence, emotions such as fear, pain, and pleasure, all challenged artists' descriptive abilities. This dynamic period of pictorial innovation was driven by the desire to appeal directly to the senses, to close the gap between the illusion of the painting and the living world of the spectator.

Italy. The Catholic Church, which set out to reform itself in response to the Reformation, played an important role in the creation of this new baroque style of painting in Italy. Religious painting, as the visual manifestation of church doctrine, was also subject to reform. Two cardinals in particular, Gabriele Paleotti of Bologna and Federigo Borromeo of Milan, became actively involved in educating artists about the proper interpretation of sacred imagery. Artists took up the standard to create paintings that were clear, emotive, and illustrative of the new Christian piety. The great reformers of Italian painting at the cusp of the seventeenth century were Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, from the town of the same name in Lombardy, and Annibale Carracci of Bologna. Caravaggio's influence was immediate and profound albeit short-lived. Carracci created a new style that established the standards for baroque painting through the next century.

Caravaggio revolutionized painting by depicting powerfully naturalistic scenes, inspired by everyday reality, where neither figures nor place were idealized. Overtly dismissive of traditional pictorial conventions, he was considered by his peers to be what we would call in today's language "avant garde." Supper at Emmaus (1601–1602, National Gallery, London) illustrates his direct and clear narrative structure enlivened by the dramatic, almost severe contrast of light and dark. Working from posed models, Caravaggio imbues his paintings with a vitality and naturalism that give them the impression of tableaux vivants. Settings are spare and participants common in type, suggestive more of genre painting than a religious episode of miraculous revelation.

Bold perspective devices implicate the viewer in the drama. In the immediate foreground, the edge of a realistically depicted basket of fruit sits partly off the table. One apostle's sharply foreshortened hand appears to reach out of the picture plane into the spectator's space. The intimacy of presentation invites an experience of surprise akin to that of the apostles as Christ reveals himself to them. In this regard, Caravaggio was a superior painter of Counter-Reformation subjects and a key innovator of the baroque style. So great and widespread was Caravaggio's influence over the next two decades that his many followers in France, Holland, and Spain have come to be known as Caravaggisti.

Carracci is credited with initiating the reform of painting in Italy and thereby creating a new and accessible pictorial language. His approach was to study nature, antique sculpture, and the achievements of his High Renaissance forebears. To this practice he added the theory of imitation and emulation, drawing on each category's perfections. With a sense of true historic awareness, Annibale synthesized the divergent regional styles in sixteenth-century Italy, including the competing aesthetic of central Italian disegno and Venetian colore. In so doing, he reshaped, with clarity and vigor, the great tradition of Italian painting and provided his contemporaries and followers with a means to achieve their own styles by using this method.

Carracci's fresco decoration for the Farnese Gallery in Rome (1597–1604) exemplified the new style in which he reinvented the classicizing idiom of history painting with wit and charm. His detailed preparatory drawings were of great pedagogical importance to contemporary artists for they indicated the necessity of drawing as professional practice, particularly in the composition of ambitious history paintings. The baroque illusionism introduced by Carracci reached its full potential a generation later in the ceiling fresco of the Triumph of the Name of Jesus, painted by Giovanni Battista Gaulli in 1676–1679 at the Church of Il Gesù in Rome. Here the period taste for spectacle is realized through painted illusions of infinity. Celestial figures appear to descend from heaven's vault above into the spectator's space within the church, blurring the boundaries between the real and unreal.

Rome became a mecca for foreign artists who came to absorb its riches and return home to spread the new style. Secular and ecclesiastic commissions burgeoned. Sophisticated connoisseurs welcomed this new wave of artistic experiment and ferment. Two French painters, Nicolas Poussin from Les Andelys and Claude Lorrain (born Claude Gellée) from Nancy, enjoyed just such patronage. Though they spent the majority of their careers in Italy, they profoundly influenced the direction of seventeenth-century painting in their native France.

France. In France, patronage flowed from the court that cultivated a strict unity of style and content to extol the virtues of the monarchy. King Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715), known as the Sun King, established in 1648 the Académie Française, which eventually institutionalized all art education and practice. A hierarchy of subjects suitable for an artist to paint was established, with history painting regarded as the highest form of intellectual expression. Genre and still life painting were relegated to the bottom of the list. Rationality, order, and harmony became hallmarks of the academic French style. Its champion was Poussin. Having experienced the heady mix of styles current in Rome, Poussin immersed himself in classical studies of art and literature. It was the consummate relationship of theory and practice in his art, based on composition and drawing, for which he was most admired. Great intellectual effort underlies the construction of Poussin's paintings, where every motif is calculated and planned and nothing is extraneous. Carefully placed vertical and horizontal accents lead the eye to the subject or serve as stately backdrops for its unfolding. Poussin's deeply reflective pictures, such as The Finding of Moses (1638, Louvre, Paris), are infused with the spirit of classicism in which the expression and mood of the subject are rendered with calm and grandeur.

Claude Lorrain, along with Poussin, created the tradition of the ideal landscape, a practice that endured until the nineteenth century. He specialized in depictions of an idyllic Roman countryside in which pastoral and biblical themes are presented in a quiet and timeless manner. Lorrain's gifts as an illuminist are evident in the range of naturalistic light effects he produced. The sun, the source of light in his compositions, is placed just beyond the horizon to suggest a particular time of day. The frequent addition of ancient ruins in his compositions contributes to the impression of time and its passing. Above all, it is the beauty of nature that seems to be his subject.

The Netherlands. Violent political and religious conflicts during the sixteenth century fractured the Low Countries into two nations, a Protestant Dutch Republic in the north and a Catholic Flanders in the south that remained under Spanish political control. Despite these harrowing events, the two countries contributed mightily and imaginatively to the history of European painting in the seventeenth century. Flemish painters combined the dynamism of baroque art with the realism and primary palette that had characterized Netherlandish painting since Jan van Eyck. Peter Paul Rubens, from Antwerp, took these strengths of his homeland and combined them with an Italian love of form and composition acquired during eight years in Italy. His exuberant personal style, based on keen observation, a sensual, robust nature, and a deeply humanistic outlook, is joyous and uplifting. Rubens's confident brushwork contributed mightily to the vitality of his figures.

A devout Catholic, Rubens articulated the philosophy of the Counter-Reformation by creating works of immediacy, power, and beauty to strengthen the worshiper's faith and encourage devout conduct. Thus, Rubens portrayed in Saint Ignatius Loyola (1621–1622, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena) the founder of the Society of Jesus as a Christian hero, caught up in a moment of rapture. Rubens was not limited to Catholic subjects, as he created dazzling allegories for sovereigns throughout Europe as well as portraits of great psychological depth.

Dutch painting presents a significantly different character and style from contemporary European painting. Because of its strict Protestant ethos that viewed religious imagery as idolatrous, Dutch art eschewed overtly religious themes in favor of a rich variety of subjects inspired by the immediate environment, including landscape, still life, portraiture, and genre. Effectively separate from the Italian model of patronage, where artists worked primarily through religious or noble commissions, Dutch artists participated in an open market. Holland's prosperous international trade spawned a vital middle class, which sought to appoint its homes with art that was familiar and comfortable, that inspired pride and was appreciated for its verisimilitude. Style varied from the fine, almost scientifically descriptive paintings of Gerrit Dou to the more vigorous, impastoed expression of Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn and his followers where the process of painting was evident. Recent scholarship has concerned itself with the degree to which Dutch painting was strictly mimetic or emblematic, that is, a vehicle for hidden symbolism that the consumer would have recognized.

Dutch painters tended to specialize in one genre but frequently made innovative contributions. Frans Hals of Haarlem, known for his energetic brushwork and unforgettable character portraits of smiling figures, brought a new look to the commemorative group portrait in paintings such as the Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Militia Company (1626–1627, Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem), where the scene is animated by the participants' gestures and expressions, and the dynamic accents of colored sashes and drapery. Occupations, leisure time, and domestic episodes provided endless inspiration to the witty pictorial observations of Leiden-born artists Jan Steen and Gabriel Metsu. Their Delft contemporary, Jan Vermeer, one of the greatest artists of the seventeenth century, took an approach to genre painting that was more about the art of painting than its anecdotal descriptiveness. Vermeer's use of camera obscura may have contributed to the simplification of form, light, and color that characterizes his carefully composed interiors in which the subject performs a task with quiet concentration.

Pictorially, the United Netherlands was well served by its landscape painters who sympathetically depicted its variety of dunes, canals, seascapes, and cityscapes. Jacob van Ruisdael from Haarlem created vast panoramas with emphatic horizons. In View of Alkmaar (1670–1675, Museum of Fine Art, Boston), banks of hedges slicing through the landscape are backlit by the sun, creating strong contrasts of light and shade and a palpable illusion of space and depth.

Rembrandt, the greatest Dutch painter, was devoted equally to painting, printmaking, and drawing. His continuous practice of experimentation with each medium enabled him to surmount previous limitations, both practical and theoretical. From the 1630s and 1640s onward Rembrandt was the premier portraitist of Amsterdam. He captured the physical characteristics of his sitters, and his skillful manipulation of light added an expressive value and suggested mood. His keen sensitivity to human psychology manifested itself in his thematic works as well. In his mature paintings, which often depicted Old Testament stories, such as Bathsheba (1654, Louvre, Paris), he favored presentations that were highly naturalistic, unidealized, and intimate. Settings were minimal and extraneous details eliminated. He used light sparingly and dramatically to suggest the internal, mental state of the subject. More than simply presenting a pictorial narrative, Rembrandt managed to convey the complexity and pathos of the moment as it occurred to his subject. As he matured, he adopted an increasingly monochromatic palette with a thick, layered paint application that called attention to the process of painting and served to better express his individuality and creativity.

Spain. By the seventeenth century Spain wielded political power over Flanders and much of Italy. The ensuing diplomatic ties exposed Spanish artists to artistic exchange. Royal and private collections grew and provided examples of artistic developments elsewhere in Europe but above all from Italy. At the same time, Spain was a highly conservative Catholic country, and its zealous participation in the Counter-Reformation witnessed the birth of punitive tribunals such as the Inquisition. Such a social and cultural underpinning was not conducive to revolutionary picture making. Nevertheless, artists including Francisco de Zurbarán, Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velázquez, and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo created work of great feeling while drawing on the contemporary concerns associated with baroque art, especially that of involving the viewer in the subject of the painting and appealing to the emotions. Here, the Spanish predilection for intense physicality—an earthy quality with overtones of mortality—played an important role.

Spanish religious sentiment found significant expression in the austere religious mysticism of Zurbarán. Whether depicting saints in ecstasy or a simple still life, the resulting image was intense and realistic. He embraced the descriptive technique and pictorial devices of Caravaggio, placing his saints in dark, nondescript spaces where the strong, focused light accentuates plastic form and describes tactile values. The compelling emotional intensity of his paintings appealed to the monastic orders of Seville who provided the majority of his commissions and viewed his works as pictorial expressions of their religious vocation. Later in the century, Murillo's engaging and innovative approach to religious subject matter gave a more sensual and tender expression to Catholic art. He specialized in visionary scenes and images of the Virgin in which her beauty and compassion were stressed. He adopted a loose painting technique and lightened the dark Spanish palette. In his late work, transparent glazes were applied to enrich the effects of light.

Velázquez's early works in his native Seville, such as An Old Woman Cooking Eggs (1618, National Gallery, Edinburgh), were boldly naturalistic and palpably three-dimensional, enhanced by his use of strong contrasts of light and shadow. His career was tightly bound to the Spanish monarchy. Two voyages to Italy, in 1629–1631 and 1649–1651, made a great impression on him and had a liberating effect on his style as he adopted a freer paint application that, while it acknowledged the process of painting, did not reduce the semblance of his subjects. Indeed, he painted some of the most innovative and realistic portraits of the baroque era, including Las Meninas (The maids of honor; c. 1656, Prado, Madrid), the strikingly complex and unique family portrait of King Philip IV.

THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The eighteenth century witnessed profound changes in politics and culture. The philosophy of Enlightenment thinkers and the development of modern science provoked a change of taste in literature and the visual arts. Institutional and court-based systems of patronage that had prevailed during the seventeenth century declined. In their place, a growing bourgeois culture exerted its influence and effected a corresponding change in the style and subject matter of painting. Baroque art's formality, rhetorical gesture, and didacticism gave way to a taste that was tolerant, gracious, and lighthearted in conception. Dark palettes and dramatic light-dark contrasts were replaced with pastel colors and subtler approaches to illumination. Paint handling loosened in tandem with a growing appreciation for brushwork. Antiacademic theorists, including the French critic Roger de Piles, promoted the painterly colorism of Rubens over the cerebral emphasis on line represented by Poussin and all that those differences entailed. The resulting controversy between the Rubénistes and the Poussinistes, as it was called, would be reenacted in the nineteenth century by the French painters Eugène Delacroix and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres.

The hierarchy of subjects, with history painting as the most elevated theme for an artist to paint, continued as a doctrine in the academies. However, themes of social and particularly domestic life were eagerly developed with great romantic and comic flair by painters including Antoine Watteau, Pietro Longhi, and William Hogarth. Pastoral idylls and mythological themes, especially those depicting amorous encounters, were popular. Portraiture, always in demand, assumed lyrical, even daring liberties of intimacy, as evidenced in one of François Boucher's most enchanting portrayals, Madame de Pompadour (1756, Alte Pinakothek, Munich). Rococo is the historical term for this eighteenth-century style.

Italy. Rome in particular and Italy in general continued to dominate the artistic culture of Europe. Tourists traveled to Italy to study its ancient and contemporary treasures. This popular sojourn, known as the "grand tour," encouraged the purchase of souvenirs, often in the form of paintings. Vedute or view paintings were especially popular. They combined the recognizable cityscape and its monuments with the picturesque activities of the citizenry absorbed in their daily activities. Canaletto (born Giovanni Antonio Canal) and Francesco Guardi from Venice, and Giovanni Paolo Pannini from Rome were three of its most accomplished practitioners. In View of the Molo toward the Santa Maria della Salute with the Dogana de Mare (1770s, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena), Guardi presents the glittering, ever-changing character of the Venetian lagoon with a silvery palette and lively brushwork composed of quick touches of paint on the surface. In the continuous sweep of sea and sky and the activity of the boatmen, Guardi poetically suggests the Adriatic light that made Venice so beloved a destination.

Italian painters also traveled outside of Italy to accept commissions to decorate the various palaces of Europe. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo from Venice was the popular court painter to the monarchs of Europe, especially in Germany and Spain. He brought the tradition of grand ceiling paintings to audacious heights of creativity and illusionism. In his hands, the art of fresco painting achieved a technical brilliance that was unrivaled in Europe. Tiepolo's lofty gods and goddesses, airborne in painted kingdoms composed of sunlight and clouds, played the protagonists in complex pictorial narratives that proclaimed the nobility and inspiration of his patrons, as in the frescoes at the Kaisersaal of the Residenz at Wurzburg (1750–1753).

France. In France, the death of King Louis XIV in 1715 and the royal court's move from Versailles to Paris heralded a new ease and willingness to pursue pleasure in both aristocratic and bourgeois society. This new spirit, which found expression in the elegant interiors of Parisian hotels and the paintings that hung there, is perfectly illustrated in the complex and charming paintings of Antoine Watteau of Valenciennes. In his celebrated "painted conversations," graceful young couples, dressed in contemporary fashion, convene in fantasy garden settings. Rarely portrayed close-up, they are observed, but remain ambiguous. The impression conveyed is one of quiet reverie. Like Rubens before him, whom he much admired, Watteau relied on the suggestive and emotive qualities of color to achieve his effects. With deft brushwork, he describes the shimmering qualities of fabric, verdant foliage, and the soft illumination of the sun. The scenes are suggestive of a theatrical or operatic performance.

The overtly joyous and pleasure-loving character of the rococo finds expression in the work of Jean-Honoré Fragonard of Grasse. In the Happy Lovers (1760–1765, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena), a young couple enjoys each other's company in a secluded, rustic retreat. The scene is embroidered with patterns of branches, leaves, and flowers that are as charming as the subject itself. Fragonard used a palette of pastel colors, applied thickly in full strokes to create a voluptuous surface that is complementary to the subject.

Paris-born Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin was the greatest painter of still lifes in the eighteenth century. His deceptively simple pictures composed of humble utensils and foodstuffs from the kitchen belie the carefully arranged visual relationships of the motifs. Their impression is one of casual informality. Chardin rendered objects as one might see them without attempting to make them pretty. He worked directly from the motif, varying his brushstroke to match the texture of each surface. Sharp dabs of his brush tip onto the surface of the canvas suggested the softness of rabbit fur. Indeed, the illusion of physicality in his objects stems in part from his brushwork that could be rough and scumbled in its application. His technique and choice of subject were a source of inspiration to nineteenth-century painters. Chardin also created some of the most intimate and touching views of the preoccupations of women and children. These tender and contemplative views of domestic life were unprecedented in France. Return from the Market (1739, Louvre, Paris) shows the quiet absorption of a lone maid who is completely unaware of and does not interact with the spectator.

England. England was a Protestant country ruled by a monarchy whose powers since the seventeenth century had been mediated by Parliament. The British saw themselves as pragmatic and unfettered by doctrines and superstitions that informed the conduct of other European cultures. To this end, they were sympathetic to the ideals of the Enlightenment. British paintings illustrate the belief in humankind's capacity to improve itself, and they celebrate a simple, natural way of life.

This said, a true national school of painting with recognizable characteristics was slow to emerge. Art production in England had been long dominated by foreign artists, beginning with the German Hans Holbein in the sixteenth century and later by continental artists including Anthony Van Dyck and Orazio Lomi Gentileschi from Italy, to name a few. Aristocratic and royal collectors sought the paintings of the most highly regarded artists of the Italian, French, and Flemish schools. They seldom commissioned works from their native artists. The grand tour, in which the well-to-do British extended their education by studying on the Continent, further contributed to the influx of foreign works of art in private collections.

In the eighteenth century a recognizable school of British painting finally asserted itself. Like the Dutch a century earlier, the English had no need for lofty allegory or religious subjects. Portraiture and the circumstances of daily life presented the greatest thematic interest. William Hogarth of London, for example, was mainly celebrated for his witty and satirical pictorial narratives in which the teeming life of London is the subject. This genre, which Hogarth himself identified as "modern moral subjects," had its roots in the paintings of the Dutch school and in themes treated in contemporary British literature.

A consummate storyteller, Hogarth appropriated observable character types and described their rise and fall through greed, carelessness, and disease. His pictorial narratives developed in serial form, each canvas illustrating an episode. Each series carried a name, such as Marriage à la mode (1743–1745, National Gallery, London). The paintings are composed as though taking place on a stage with precisely described and crisply painted settings and costumes. Hogarth's main source of income from these paintings came from the copperplate engravings he based on them, which became immensely popular throughout Europe. It should be borne in mind that reproductive prints based on similar paintings were not only an important source of income for artists, but also a method by which artists advertised their style and creativity throughout Europe during this century.

Joshua Reynolds of Plympton and Thomas Gainsborough from Sudbury were two of England's greatest painters. Reynolds created a style of portraiture that resonated with the artist's study of and appreciation for the art of Italy, especially the masters of the High Renaissance. A supporter of the theoretical underpinnings of painting, he was the first president and cofounder of the Royal Academy of Art in England. Gainsborough pursued a more intuitive approach. Although his early landscapes reveal a strong Dutch influence, his palette was lighter and made liberal use of silvery tones in the highlights, as in the portrait, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (1748–1749, National Gallery, London). Linear rhythms throughout provide a sense of the life of nature. The artist's phenomenal range of light blues and grays, and his technical facility with the brush—lighter colors are scumbled over darker ones while maintaining their integrity on the surface—are characteristic of the ease and suavity of rococo painting. The informal presentation of the couple, whereby they appear comfortable and confident in their role as landed gentry, is well suited to the ideals of the age of Enlightenment.

Spain. In Spain, Francisco de Goya's career extended from the rococo to the beginning of the Romantic period in the nineteenth century. Like Rembrandt before him, his technical and imaginative powers as an artist found expression in drawing, painting, and printmaking. A gifted portraitist, Goya depicted the royal family and Spanish nobility with an unpretentious honest realism. Occasionally, his lack of flattery, as in the important painting Charles IV and His Family (1800, Prado, Madrid), assumes discomforting overtones in its suggestion of ridicule. At the same time, he exploited the decorative possibilities of color and facture in describing the fabrics, medals, and jewelry with a flurry of brushwork that hints at abstraction. Goya's mature thematic repertoire, apart from portraiture, was revolutionary in its disregard for the hierarchy of subjects promoted by academies of painting. Instead, he portrayed the great passions of Spain like bullfighting, and the folly and irrational superstitions of his countrymen. He experimented with new pictorial structures. Tradition was sacrificed to achieve his personal artistic vision. In his wrenching depiction of Spanish rebels facing a firing squad of French soldiers during the Napoleonic invasion, The Second of May 1808 (1814, Prado, Madrid), Goya brings the subject of history painting to the present with a realism and passion that introduce the modern era.

NEOCLASSICISM

The profound political and social changes wrought by the French Revolution impacted all institutions in France and sent shock waves throughout Europe. The delightful subjects and ornament of the rococo style of painting were replaced with sober themes of moral and civic purpose, and a structured style of painting that relied on the classic lines and proportions of Greek and Roman art. This style was informed by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which promoted rationalism and secularism, and by the renewed interest in classical art and history that was stimulated by major archaeological discoveries in Italy during the eighteenth century. This new artistic expression is known historically as neoclassicism.

See also Academies of Art; Art; Baroque; Britain, Art in; Florence, Art in; France, Art in; Mannerism; Naples, Art in; Neoclassicism; Netherlands, Art in; Rococo; Rome, Art in; Spain, Art in; Venice, Art in.

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GLORIA WILLIAMS