All Neoclassical Art

The academic classical revival movement in European and American sculpture and painting from roughly the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, arising alongside renewed archaeological interest in Greek and Roman antiquity and a reaction against the ornamental excess of the preceding Rococo style, favoring restrained, idealized classical form, clear outline and morally serious classical or mythological subject matter. Its leading sculptors, including the Italian Antonio Canova and the Danish Bertel Thorvaldsen, and painters and draughtsmen working in its idiom across France, Denmark and the young United States, drew directly on ancient Greek and Roman sculpture as a stylistic and thematic model, in deliberate contrast to both the preceding Rococo and the Romantic movement that followed and reacted against Neoclassicism's own restraint. Divinity Atlas artworks placed in this group are sculptures, drawings or paintings the holding museum or reference literature identifies with a named artist working in this documented Neoclassical idiom, distinguished from the ancient originals that inspired the movement and from the eighteenth century Rococo and nineteenth century Romantic art that frame it on either side.