The Culture of Old Regime Europe371ornately decorated, the extravagantly expressed.
Whether looking at the energetic statues of Bernini,
paintings of suffering martyrs by Caravaggio, or the
voluptuous pastel nudes of Rubens, the viewer was over-
whelmed by the lavish baroque style. Architects brought
baroque emotions to palaces and churches, composers
brought them to oratorios and fugues, artisans even
sought the baroque style in gilded chairs and writing ta-
bles. This style culminated in an extravagant artistic
style, characterized by fanciful curved forms and elabo-
rate ornamentation, known as rococo (see illustration
20.1). Frederick the Great’s Sans Souci Palace was ro-
coco—there a warrior king could write French poetry,
compose flute music, and dispute philosophers in a home
he helped to design, with the gaudy yellow walls and the
plump cherubs a soldier wanted.
Historians chiefly remember the high culture of the
eighteenth century for the reaction against the baroque
style. A revival of the styles and aesthetics of the classi-
cal Graeco-Roman world rapidly supplanted the
baroque during the middle decades of the century.
The elegant simplicity of classical architecture—
characterized by symmetry, mathematical proportions,
the harmony of forms, and severe rules—became a
vogue in the 1740s after archaeologists began to exca-
vate the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum,
which had been buried (and preserved) by volcanic ash
in A.D. 79. A classical revival swept European architec-
ture, producing such masterpieces as the Romanov
Winter Palace in St. Petersburg (now the Hermitage
Museum), La Scala opera house in Milan, and the Royal
Crescent in Bath, England. In some cases, neoclassical
buildings closely resembled classical structures built
eighteen hundred years earlier (see illustration 20.2).
Classicism soon came to dominate the arts of the
eighteenth century. Histories of the ancient world, such
as Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Em-
pire,became popular reading together with the ancients
themselves. Universities required Latin and Greek of
their students, and in some countries an honors degree
in classics became the best route to a high-paying job
or a government post. Painters, sculptors, dramatists,
poets, and composers all mined classical literature for
inspiration. The French painter Jacques-Louis David,
for example, inspired a generation of politicians with
his dramatic canvases depicting stirring moments in
Roman history. Music was perhaps most shaped by
eighteenth-century classicism. The strict attention to
form, the mathematical precision, the symmetry
learned from architecture became the basis of a newllustration 20.1
Secular Rococo Architecture.As the monarchs of Europe
emulated the French Bourbons in building lavish new palaces,
they did not make precise copies of Versailles. Instead they
built luxurious homes in the newest architectural style. The
Wittelsbach family, who ruled the south German state of
Bavaria, were among the most active builders, and their palaces
included Schloss Nymphenburg at Munich, whose gilded ro-
coco “Hall of Mirrors” is shown here.