Neoclassicism is the style that brought the art of ancient Greece and Rome back into European painting, from about 1760 to 1850. Its painters drew figures with firm outlines, gave them the stillness of statues and chose stories of duty and sacrifice. Its best-known example is Jacques-Louis David's The Oath of the Horatii, painted in 1784 and now in the Louvre in Paris.
The name came much later. The painters themselves saw their work as a return to the true spirit of the antique. The word Neoclassicism was only coined at the end of the nineteenth century, and at first it was meant as a criticism, a way of calling these pictures borrowed and second-hand.
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The antiquity these painters wanted to return to was partly imagined, and the man who described it most influentially had never seen Greece. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, a German scholar, published an essay in 1755 that praised the "noble simplicity and quiet grandeur" of Greek art. The same year he settled in Rome. He never made the journey to Greece itself.
In his History of the Art of Antiquity, published in 1764, Winckelmann 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, and for more than a century his view dominated the way Europe pictured ancient art.
The statues he admired had in fact been painted, in bright colors that time had worn away. Marco Leona, the chief scientist of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, calls their whiteness "an accident of time and nature." The style that set out to revive antiquity was built, in part, on that accident.
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