NEOCLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE
Neoclassical architecture is an architectural style produced by the neoclassical movement that began in the mid-18th century. Inits
purest form it is a style principally derived from the architecture of Classical antiquity, the Vitruvian principles and the architecture of the
Italian architect Andrea Palladio.
In form, Neoclassical architecture emphasizes the wall rather than chiaroscuro and maintains separate identities to each of its parts. The
style is manifested both in its details as a reaction against the Rococo style of naturalistic ornament, and in its architectural formulae as
an outgrowth of some classicising features of Late Baroque. Neoclassical architecture is still designed today, but may be labelled New
Classical Architecture for contemporary buildings
By the mid 18th century, the movement broadened to incorporate a greater range of Classical influences, including those from Ancient
Greece. The shift to neoclassical architecture is conventionally dated to the 1750s.
International neoclassical architecture was exemplified in Karl Friedrich Schinkel'sbuildings, especially the Old Museum in Berlin, Sir John
Soane'sBank of England in London and the newly built White House and Capitol in Washington, DC of the nascent American Republic.
The style was international.
Indoors, neoclassicism made a discovery of the genuine classic interior, inspired by the rediscoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum.
The new interiors sought to recreate an authentically Roman and genuinely interior vocabulary. Techniques employed in the style
included flatter, lighter motifs, sculpted in low frieze-like relief or painted in monotones en camaïeu("like cameos"), isolated medallions
or vases or busts or bucraniaor other motifs, suspended on swags of laurel or ribbon, with slender arabesques against backgrounds,
perhaps, of "Pompeiianred" or pale tints, or stone colors. The style in France was initially a Parisian style, the Goûtgrec("Greek style"),
not a court style; when Louis XVI acceded to the throne in 1774, Marie Antoinette, his fashion-loving Queen, brought the "Louis XVI"
style to court..
However there was no real attempt to employ the basic forms of Roman furniture until around the turn of the century, and furniture-
makers were more likely to borrow from ancient architecture, just as silversmiths were more likely to take from ancient pottery and
stone-carving than metalwork: "Designers and craftsmen ... seem to have taken an almost perverse pleasure in transferring motifsfrom
one medium to another
Neoclassicism continued to be a major force in academic art through the 19th century and beyond—a constant antithesis to Romanticism or Gothic
revivals—although from the late 19th century on it had often been considered anti-modern, or even reactionary, in influential critical circles.[