Neoclásica

During the latter half of the 18th century, a revival of classicism, called neoclassicism, occurred (Neoclassical Art and Architecture). Much inspiration was derived from the archaeological excavations then taking place in Italy and elsewhere in the Mediterranean area. Also important was an influential essay written by the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, praising ancient Greek sculpture.

A favorite ancient work during the 18th century was the Apollo Belvedere (Roman copy of a Greek original, late 4th century BC, Vatican Museums, Rome), which the Italian Antonio Canova adapted in his marble Perseus with Medusa's Head (1801, Metropolitan Museum). Canova also turned to the ancients for his sculpture of Napoleon's sister, Maria Paulina Borghese as Venus Victrix (1805-7, Galleria Borghese). Bertel Thorvaldsen, a Danish sculptor living in Rome, was so famous in his day for his works inspired by the antique that a special museum was built (begun 1839) in Copenhagen as a memorial to him. Thorvaldsen's contact with Canova is evident in his first deliberately classicist work, Jason (1803, Thorvaldsen's Museum, Copenhagen), based on the Roman copy of the ancient Greek Doryphorus (5th century BC, Museo Nazionale, Naples).

His other sculptures were influenced by his restoration of the pediment marbles of the Late Archaic Greek Temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina. Although his name is not well known beyond the confines of his native Sweden, Johan Tobias Sergel was an excellent late 18th-century sculptor, synthesizing neoclassical subject matter with baroque dynamism, as in Faun (1770-74) and Mars and Venus (1804), both in the National Museum, Stockholm. The English artist John Flaxman is perhaps best remembered for his delicately modeled classical reliefs that ornament Wedgwood pottery; he also executed sepulchral monuments. His fine line drawings illustrating the classic works of Homer, Aeschylus, Hesiod, and Dante had a greater impact on European art, however, than his sculpture.

The French sculptor Jean Antoine Houdon incorporated some classical concepts in the full-length marble George Washington (1788-92, State Capitol, Richmond, Virginia) and in Diana (1777, Louvre). His finest works, however, are portrait busts whose liveliness and naturalism go beyond the confines of classicism. In the U.S., several sculptors were affected by the spirit of neoclassicism, among them Horatio Greenough, Hiram Powers, Thomas Crawford, Erastus Dow Palmer, and Harriet Hosmer. All but Palmer studied in Italy, and all produced figural sculpture in accordance with classical canons-in general, uninspired works, based on outdated academic formulas. Greenough's colossal marble statue George Washington (1841, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), based on the Greek sculptor Phidias's lost Olympian Zeus (5th century BC), portrayed Washington half nude.

This subjected Greenough to ridicule by an American public unable to understand his artistic concepts. Powers, on the other hand, achieved critical and financial success with his marble Greek Slave (1843; one of seven versions, Newark Museum, Newark, New Jersey), a female nude based on the Medici Venus (Roman copy of 4th-cent. Greek original, Uffizi, Florence). See American Art and Architecture.

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