Neoclassicism
Antiquity gets summoned again, this time in the name of reason and order. It started underground. Herculaneum was excavated in 1738, Pompeii in 1748, and antiquity emerged in its real, physical form. In 1755, Winckelmann described its beauty as 'noble simplicity and calm grandeur'. The Academy and the Salon made this style official orthodoxy. And the next generation would make new art precisely by challenging that orthodoxy. A wall, it turns out, also raises up the people who climb over it. There is something odd in the foundations of this style, though, seen from here. Winckelmann's noble simplicity and quiet grandeur was drawn out of white marble. But ancient sculpture had been painted (see Greece and Rome in the origins zone). It is white because two thousand years took the pigment off. The ideal Europe institutionalised as orthodoxy was, in other words, a copy of what things looked like after the colour flaked away. Two centuries of orthodoxy stood on a misunderstanding. That does not make the style pointless. David's paintings became the face of the Revolution and of Napoleon's years, and it was precisely because this wall existed that everyone from Romanticism to Impressionism had something to climb over. Sometimes what comes out of a misunderstanding is what moves the next hundred years.