 Return form Cythera (the island of eternal youth and love, sacred to Aphrodite) Antonine Watteau c.1717 Louvre, Paris |
The Rococo style developed in a period of transition as the power of the aristocracy declined and that of the new middle class slowly increased. It didn't take long for the Catholics to catch up with our Protestant entrepreneurs.
With this shift in power came a decline in the responsibility for the running of government; the aristocracy found itself out of the loop of major decision making and it turned more and more inward. Their only reason for existence seemed to be the pursuit of pleasure, touched by a melancholy, as though, on an unconscious level, they shared an awareness of their imminent demise.
By the middle eighteenth century, the Baroque era (and its sub-style, the Rococo) gave way to the Age of Reason and a return to a more conservative/classical movement, Neoclassicism, which would persist as a dominate style in France until the early nineteenth century. But before that, the Rococo style would be a major influence throughout Catholic Europe. As today, the fashion world looked to Paris as the "style" setter, the other monarchies throughout Europe looked to Paris as the epitome of Royal Fashion and were quick to follow her lead. Today the Rococo Style Architecture can be seen in palaces and churches, not only in Europe, but throughout the world that was then dominated by the Catholic monarchs.
 The Bathers Jean-Honore Fragonard c.1765 |
 Cupid a Captive Francois Bougher c.1754 |
The change in economic
and polital structure would shift the power to the bourgeois who viewed
Baroque, and especially Rococo, art as decadent aristocratic art forms.
It was considered a vulgar and excessive display of squandered wealth
and power by an oppressive totalitarian government. For along with those
"classical" ideas of order, balance and restraint came the idea of the
individual living in a free democratic society. We are on the brink of
revolution... in France and America. In France, one of it's leading artists
and a propagandist for the revolution was Jacque Louis David.
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