ROCOCO ARCHITECTURE

A Research on Architectural Styles Trough Out The Ages

by Einstein Schwartz Gaspar Maulad

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Rococo or "Late Baroque", is an 18th-century artistic movement and style, which affected several aspects of the arts including painting, sculpture, architecture, interior design, decoration, literature, music and theatre. The Rococo developed in the early part of the 18th century in Paris, France as a reaction against the grandeur, symmetry and strict regulations of the Baroque, especially that of the Palace. In such a way, Rococo artists opted for a more jocular, florid and graceful approach to Baroque art and architecture.

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Rococo art and architecture in such a way was ornate and made strong usage of creamy, pastel-like colors, asymmetrical designs, curves and gold. Unlike the more politically focused Baroque, the Rococo had more playful and often witty artistic themes. With regards to interior decoration, Rococo rooms were designed as total works of art with elegant and ornate furniture, small sculptures, ornamental mirrors, and tapestry complementing architecture, reliefs, and wall paintings. The Rococo additionally played an important role in theatre.

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Towards the end of the 18th century, Rococo started to fall out of fashion, and it was largely supplanted by the neoclassic style. In 1835 the Dictionary of the French Academy stated that the word Rococo "usually covers the kind of ornament, style and design associated with Louis XV's reign and the beginning of that of Louis XVI". It includes therefore, all types of art produced around the middle of the 18th century in France. The word Rococo is seen as a combination of the French rocaille, meaning stone, and coquilles, meaning shell, due to reliance on these objects as motifs of decoration.

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The term Rococo may also be interpreted as a combination of the Italian word "barocco" (an irregularly shaped pearl, possibly the source of the word "baroque") and the French "rocaille" (a popular form of garden or interior ornamentation using shells and pebbles), and may be used to describe the refined and fanciful style that became fashionable in parts of Europe during the eighteenth century. Owing to Rococo love of shell-like curves and focus on decorative arts, some critics used the term to derogatively imply that the style was frivolous or merely modish.

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When the term was first used in English in about 1836, it was a colloquialism meaning "old-fashioned". As a matter of fact, the style received harsh criticism, and was seen by some to be superficial and of poor taste, especially when compared to neoclassicism; despite this, it has been praised for its aesthetic qualities, and since the mid-19th century, the term has been accepted by art historians. While there is still some debate about the historical significance of the style to art in general, Rococo is now widely recognized as a major period in the development of European art.

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Although Rococo is usually thought of as developing first in the decorative arts and interior design, its origins lie in the late Baroque architectural work of…

FRANCESCO BORROMINI

Born in 1599 andDied in 1667

GUARINO GUARINI

Born in 1624 andDied in 1683

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Italian architects of the late Baroque or early Rococo were wooed to Catholic (Southern) Germany, Bohemia and Austria by local princes, bishops and prince-bishops. Inspired by their example, regional families of Central European builders went further, creating churches and palaces that took the local German Baroque style to the greatest heights of Rococo elaboration and sensation.

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An exotic but in some ways more formal type of Rococo appeared in France where Louis XIV's succession brought a change in the court artists and general artistic fashion. By the end of the king's long reign, rich Baroque designs were giving way to lighter elements with more curves and natural patterns. These elements are obvious in the architectural designs of Nicolas Pineau. During the Régence, court life moved away from Versailles and this artistic change became well established, first in the royal palace and then throughout French high society.

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The delicacy and playfulness of Rococo designs is often seen as perfectly in tune with the excesses of Louis XV's reign. The 1730s represented the height of Rococo development in France. The style had spread beyond architecture and furniture to painting and sculpture, exemplified by the works of…

JEAN-ANTOINE WATTEAU

Born in 1684 andDied in 1721

FRANÇOIS BOUCHER

Born in 1703 andDied in 1770

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. Rococo still maintained the Baroque taste for complex forms and intricate patterns, but by this point, it had begun to integrate a variety of diverse characteristics, including a taste for Oriental designs and asymmetric compositions. The Rococo style was spread by French artists and engraved publications.

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In Great Britain, Rococo was always thought of as the "French taste" and was never widely adopted as an architectural style, although its influence was strongly felt in such areas as silverwork, porcelain, and silks, and Thomas Chippendale transformed British furniture design through his adaptation and refinement of the style. William Hogarth helped develop a theoretical foundation for Rococo beauty. Though not intentionally referencing the movement, he argued in his book, Analysis of Beauty (1753), that the undulating lines and S-curves prominent in Rococo were the basis for grace and beauty in art or nature.

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The development of Rococo in Great Britain is considered to have been connected with the revival of interest in Gothic architecture early in the 18th century. The beginning of the end for Rococo came in the early 1760s as figures like Voltaire and Jacques-François Blondel began to voice their criticism of the superficiality and degeneracy of the art. Blondel decried the "ridiculous jumble of shells, dragons, reeds, palm-trees and plants" in contemporary interiors. By 1785, Rococo had passed out of fashion in France, replaced by the order and seriousness of neoclassical artists like Jacques-Louis David. In Germany, late 18th century Rococo was ridiculed as Zopf und Perücke ("pigtail and periwig"), and this phase is sometimes referred to asZopfstil.

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Rococo remained popular in the provinces and in Italy, until the second phase of neoclassicism, "Empire style", arrived with Napoleonic governments and swept Rococo away. There was a renewed interest in the Rococo style between 1820 and 1870. The British were among the first to revive the "Louis XIV style" as it was miscalled at first, and paid inflated prices for second-hand Rococo luxury goods that could scarcely be sold in Paris. But prominent artists like Eugène Delacroix and patrons like Empress Eugénie also rediscovered the value of grace and playfulness in art and design.

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Rococo architecture, was a lighter, more graceful, yet also more elaborate version of Baroque architecture, which was ornate and austere. Whilst the styles were similar, there are some notable differences between both Rococo and Baroque architecture, one of them being symmetry, since Rococo emphasized the asymmetry of forms, whilst Baroque was the opposite. The styles, despite both being richly decorated, also had different themes; the Baroque, for instance, was more serious, placing an emphasis on religion, and was often characterized by Christian themes. Rococo architecture was an 18th-century, more secular, adaptation of the Baroque which was characterized by more light-hearted and jocular themes.

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Other elements belonging to the architectural style of Rococo include numerous curves and decorations, as well as the usage of pale colors. There are numerous examples of Rococo buildings as well as architects. Amongst the most famous include…

CATHERINE PALACE

The Catherine Palace in Russia

QUELUZ NATIONAL PALACE

The Queluz

National Palace in Portugal

CHINESE HOUSE

The Chinese House in Potsdam

CHARLOTTENBURG PALACE

The Charlottenburg Palace in Germany

CHÂTEAU DE VERSAILLES

The Château de Versailles in France

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Architects who were renowned for their constructions using the style include Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli, an Italian architect who worked in Russia and who was noted for his lavish and opulent works, Philip de Lange, who worked in both Danish and Dutch Rococo architecture, or Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann, who worked in the late Baroque style and who contributed to the reconstruction of the city of Dresden, in Germany. Rococo architecture also brought significant changes to the building of edifices, placing an emphasis on privacy rather than the grand public majesty of Baroque architecture, as well as improving the structure of buildings in order to create a healthier environment.