Renaissance - (1400-1800 AD) The term Renaissance, adopted from the French equivalent of the Italian word rinascita, meaning literally "rebirth," describes the radical and comprehensive changes that took place in European culture during the 15th and 16th centuries, bringing about the demise of the Middle Ages and embodying for the first time the values of the modern world.
The consciousness of cultural rebirth was itself a characteristic of the Renaissance. Italian scholars and critics of this period proclaimed that their age had progressed beyond the barbarism of the past and had found its inspiration, and its closest parallel, in the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome.
(also see Renaissance Architecture)
The movement was fashioned after the style of Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267 - 1337)
Giotto di Bondone
The Mourning of Chist 1305
Fresco, Cappella dell'Arena, Padua
Romanticism - Artistic and intellectual movement that originated in the late 18th century and stressed strong emotion, imagination, freedom from classical correctness in art forms, and rebellion against social conventions.
Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.
Casper David Friedrich
"Morning in the Riesengebirge"
Schloss Charlottenburg
1810-1811 AD (CE)
Rococo-
The Rococo is a name for the dominant style of a European art in first half of the eighteenth century.
" This style received its name in the nineteenth century from French émigrés, who used the word to designate in whimsical fashion the old shellwork style (style rocaille), then regarded as Old Frankish, as opposed to the succeeding more simple styles. Essentially, it is in the same kind of art and decoration as flourished in France during the regency following Louis XIV's death, and remained in fashion for about forty years (1715-50). It might be termed the climax or degeneration of the Baroque, which, coupled with French grace, began towards the end of the reign of Louis XIV to convert grotesques into curves, lines, and bands (Jean Bérain, 1638-1711). As its effect was less pronounced on architectural construction than elsewhere, it is not so much a real style as a new kind of decoration, which culminates in the resolution of architectural forms of the interiors (pilasters and architraves) by arbitrary ornamentation after the fashion of an unregulated, enervated Baroque, while also influencing the arrangement of space, the construction of the façades, the portals, the forms of the doors and windows. The Rococo style was readily received in Germany, where it was still further perverted into the arbitrary, unsymmetrical, and unnatural, and remained in favor until 1770 (or even longer); it found no welcome in England. In Italy a tendency towards the Rococo style is evidenced by the Borrominik Guarini, and others. The French themselves speak only of the Style Régence and Louis XV, which, however, is by no means confined to this one tendency. "
Excerpt from the Catholic Encyclopedia
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XIII
Copyright © 1912 by Robert Appleton Company
Online Edition Copyright © 1999 by Kevin Knight
Nihil Obstat, February 1, 1912. Remy Lafort, D.D., Censor
Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
Head
chalk
Antoine Watteau
born: Valenciennes, France;1684
died: Paris, France; 1721
Baroque (16th-18th century) - era in the history of the Western arts roughly coinciding with the 17th century. Its earliest manifestations, which occurred in Italy, date from the latter decades of the 16th century, while in some regions, notably Germany and colonial South America, certain of its culminating achievements did not occur until the 18th century. The work that distinguishes the Baroque period is stylistically complex, even contradictory. In general, however, the desire to evoke emotional states by appealing to the senses, often in dramatic ways, underlies its manifestations. Some of the qualities most frequently associated with the Baroque are grandeur, sensuous richness, drama, vitality, movement, tension, emotional exuberance, and a tendency to blur distinctions between the various arts.
Carravaggio
The Inspiration of Saint Matthew 1602
Oil on canvas, 9' 8 1/2" x 6' 2 1/2"
Contarelli Chapel
Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome
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