Neoclassicism is the style that brought the art of ancient Greece and Rome, its marble statues and carved temples, back into European painting from about 1760 to 1850. Its painters drew figures with firm outlines and gave them the calm poses of statues.
They chose stories of duty and sacrifice. The best-known example is Jacques-Louis David's The Oath of the Horatii, painted in 1784 and now in the Louvre in Paris.
The painters themselves never called their work Neoclassical. They believed they were returning to the true spirit of the antique, and the label was only coined at the end of the nineteenth century, as a criticism: these pictures, it implied, merely copied the ancients.
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Their idea of the antique was partly imagined. Its most influential guide, the German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann, had never seen Greece. In 1755 he published an essay praising the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of Greek art, and that same year he settled in Rome.
The marble statues he studied there were white, and he turned that whiteness into a rule. In his History of the Art of Antiquity, published in 1764, he wrote that color contributes to beauty but is not beauty itself, and that a body is all the more beautiful the whiter it is.
Painters and sculptors took him at his word for more than a century, and the white marble of Rome became their picture of the ancient world.
Two buried cities and a ceiling in Rome
Winckelmann's call for simplicity reached painters who were already tired of the art around them…
What You'll Discover
What ancient statues really looked like.
Why no ancient text describes the oath David painted.
How David built a picture like a stage.
How a murder of 1793 became an ancient death.
A cartoon duel between drawing and color.