ROCOCO IN FRANCE AND ITALY

This is my tenth and final piece on the Rococo style I enjoy so much. I have written on the tremendous Rococo treasures in Germany, especially Southern Germany, in Central and Eastern Europe, touched on those in Spain and her old Empire and celebrated the great Rococo collections of England. This brief article sketches in some of the surviving Rococo glories of France and 18^th century Italy.

The Triumph of Galatea by Jean-Baptiste van Loo (1720)

The Embarkation for Cythera by Antoine Watteau (1719)

The term “Rococo” was invented by the French, as a combination of Rocailles (stones) and Coquilles (sea-shells). It was often used disparagingly but the style, a witty and graceful extension of the overpowering Baroque, soon became the mode and influenced many art forms. One of the most striking French manifestations of the Rococo spirit is in the world of painting with the compositions of Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher, Lancret and van Loo. These works were often fantastical, heavy with classical allusion, carefree and patrician. Another notable French medium for Rococo was in porcelain, where delicate sculpture was perfected in biscuit colour by the Sèvres factories, especially by the master Etienne Maurice Falconet.

Falconet: The Teaching of Love

Sevres Rococo candle-holders

            

Rococo is associated with the long absolutist reign of Louis XV (1723-74): Mme de Pompadour was an eager patroness. The French, being ever-fashionable, in time dropped the Rococo style for the later revolutionary and Napoleonic certainties of Neo-Classicism. They were astonished when English collectors paid good money for “yesterday’s art” in the 1820’s salerooms.

Italy took to Rococo in many fields, not least in architecture. Italy was fragmented into at least 8 sovereign states and each had its own cultural idiosyncrasies. The House of Savoy ruled in Piedmont and in 1729 commissioned the talented architect Filippo Juvarra to build the lavish Royal Hunting Lodge of Stupinigi outside Turin. This is an astonishing Rococo interior to a Baroque exterior serving as the main reception palace for Savoy state functions.

Stupinigi Hunting Lodge, Turin

In the Spanish Bourbon fiefdom of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Rococo flowered in the delicate, fanciful porcelain produced by the Capodimonte factories outside Naples from 1743. 

Porcelain decoration at Capodimonte Palace

Rococo found a natural home in surrealistic Venice, then in 18^th century decline, but still ruled by her Doge and replete with cultural icons. The great painter Gianbattista Tiepolo, whose apotheoses enliven many a church and who had lavished his genius on the Bishop’s Palace at Würzburg, was commissioned in 1746 to produce the lovely frescoed Ballroom at the Palazzo Labia depicting the love of Antony and Cleopatra. Appropriately this Rococo palace was the venue for one of the 20^th century’s last great costumed balls in 1953 attended by the “glitterati” including Dali, Christian Dior and launching the career of Pierre Cardin. 

Palazzo Labia, Venice, with frescoes by Tiepolo

My pieces on Rococo are those of an enthusiastic amateur and not those of a scholar. I know that I have only provided a glimpse of this ravishing style but I hope I have stimulated some to visit and enjoy these lovely places and objects. From pilgrimage churches to monastic libraries, from palaces to chapels, from porcelain figurines to paintings, desks and snuff-boxes, the Rococo spirit brings grace and joy to enrich our lives.

SMD

28.03.15

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2015