Style developed in Europe, England, and Latin America during the 17th and 18th cent. Its essential characteristic is an emphasis on unity, a balance among diverse parts. Architecture took on the plastic aspects of sculpture and, along with sculpture, was enhanced by the chiaroscuro (high-contrast) effects of painting. Works in all media were produced on a grand scale. Illusionism increased an unequaled sense of drama, energy, and mobility of form.

Music

Period and style of composition and performance prevailing from the last decades of the 16th cent. to the beginning of the 18th cent. The 16th-cent. revolt against the Polyphony of the Renaissance gave rise to an emphasis on the character of individual voices and instruments and also on the use of harmony in composition. Use of the older church modes was replaced by major and minor tonality as the basis of composition. Principal forms of vocal writing of the period included the opera, oratorio, and cantata; instrumental writing included the sonata, concerto, and overture. Later baroque forms were the fugue, choral prelude, and the toccata, a free form for keyboard instruments.

In the strictest sense, this is a term used to characterize the art, literature, and aesthetics created by the ancient Greeks and Romans. Broadly speaking, the term classical may be used to characterize any style or period of creative work distinguished by qualities that are mainly suggestive of, or derived from, classical Greek or Roman art, literature, and aesthetics. Chief among these qualities are a sense of conscious restraint in the handling of themes and a sense of rational ordering and proportioning of forms. In architecture, the classical orders are the three Greek orders—the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—and the two Roman additions to them—the Composite and the Tuscan.

In an even broader sense, the term classical may be applied to all art and music, to a specific historical period in art and music (about 1750 to 1820), to historically significant systems of thought, and to traditional concepts of form. Thus, the three laws of motion formulated by the English mathematician, physicist, and astronomer Sir Isaac Newton are part of a classical system of celestial mechanics, and a ballet presented in a traditional mode is characterized as a classical ballet.

International nihilistic movement among European artists and writers, 1916-22. It originated in Zürich with the French poet Tristan Tzara and stressed absurdity and the role of the unpredictable in artistic creation. Carried to New York by Jean Arp, Max Ernst, and Marcel Duchamp, these principles were eventually modified to become the basis of surrealism. Duchamp's celebrated Mona Lisa adorned with mustache and goatee and George Grosz's's caricatures are characteristic Dadaist works. The literary manifestations of Dada were mostly nonsense poems-meaningless and random word combinations.

Italian school of painting, sculpture, and literature that flourished from 1909, when Filippo Marinetti's first manifesto of futurism appeared, until the end of World War I. It portrayed the dynamic character of 20th-cent. life, glorified war and the machine age, and favored the growth of Facism.

late-19th-cent, French school. It was generally characterized by the attempt to depict transitory visual impressions, often painted directly from nature, and by the use of broken color to achieve brilliance and luminosity.

Music

a French movement of the late 19th and early 20th cent. It was begun by Claude DEBUSSY as a reaction to the emotionalism of romantic music. Using new chord combinations and exotic rhythms and scales, Debussy developed a style in which atmosphere and mood take the place of strong emotion or a story.

Art produced in Europe and North America from about 1750 through the early 1800s, marked by the emulation of Greco-Roman forms. More than just an antique revival, neoclassicism was linked to contemporary political events. Neoclassical artists at first sought to replace the sensuality and what they viewed as the triviality of the rococo style with a style that was logical, solemn in tone, and moralizing in character. When revolutionary movements established republics in France and America, the new governments adopted neoclassicism as the style for their official art, by virtue of its association with the democracy of ancient Greece and republican Rome. Later, as Napoleon rose to power in France, the style was modified to serve his propagandistic needs. With the rise of the romantic movement, a preference for personal expression replaced an art based upon fixed, ideal values.

Music

A term most often referring to music that was composed between the two world wars and that avoided the exaggerated gestures and complex forms of late romanticism. Instead, such music adopted more clearly perceptible themes and revived forms of earlier periods.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was formed at the end of 1848 in London. The prime movers were three young artists - John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rosetti. They recruited painters James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens, sculptor Thomas Woolner and Rosetti's brother William. They chose the name to protest against the principles that had dominated European art since the time of Raphael, master of Italian renaissance. Their aim was to paint 'directly from nature', conveying also a spiritual or moral message. Around 1860 the second phase included William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, who began producing pictures on chivalric and mythical themes.

an attempt to describe human behavior and surroundings or to represent figures and objects exactly as they act or appear in life. Attempts at realism have been made periodically throughout history in all the arts; the term is, however, generally restricted to a movement that began in the mid-19th century, in reaction to the highly subjective approach of romanticism. The difference between realism and naturalism is harder to define, however, and the two terms are often used interchangeably. The distinction lies in the fact that realism is concerned directly with what is absorbed by the senses; naturalism, a term more properly applied to literature, attempts to apply scientific theories to art.

Series of literary and cultural movements in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. These movements began in Italy and eventually expanded into Germany, France, England, and other parts of Europe. Participants studied the great civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome and came to the conclusion that their own cultural achievements rivaled those of antiquity. Their thinking was also influenced by the concept of humanism, which emphasizes the worth of the individual. Renaissance humanists believed it was possible to improve human society through classical education. This education relied on teachings from ancient texts and emphasized a range of disciplines, including poetry, history, rhetoric (rules for writing influential prose or speeches), and moral philosophy.

style of 18th-century painting and decoration characterized by lightness, delicacy, and elaborate ornamentation. The rococo period corresponded roughly to the reign (1715-74) of King Louis XV of France. Its exact origins are obscure, but it appears to have begun with the work of the French designer Pierre Lepautre, who introduced arabesques and curves into the interior architecture of the royal residence at Marly, and with the paintings of Jean-Antoine Watteau, whose delicate, color-drenched canvases of lords and ladies in idyllic surroundings broke with the heroic Louis XIV style.

Term applied to literary and artistic movements of the late 18th and 19th cent., in revolt against Classicism and against philosophical rationalism, with its emphasis on reason. Spurred in part by the libertarian and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, the romantics are associated with belief in a return to nature and in the innate goodness of humans, as expressed by Jean Jacques Rousseau; admiration for the heroic and for the individuality and imagination of the artist; exaltation of the senses and emotions over reason and intellect; and interest in the medieval, exotic, primitive, and nationalistic.

Influenced by Freudianism, dedicated to expressing the imagination as revealed in dreams, free of the conscious control of reason and convention. Founded (1924) in Paris by André Breton with his Manifesto of Surrealism, it can be traced back to French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, and Guillaume Apollinaire and to the Italian painter Giorgio de Chirico. In literature, surrealism was confined almost exclusively to France, and was based on the associations and implications of words. Its adherents included Paul Éluard and Jean Cocteau, famous for his surrealist films. In art the movement was dominant in the 1920s and 30s. Salvador Dali and Yves Tanguy used dream-inspired symbols such as melting clocks. Max Ernst and René Magritte used incongruous elements realistically painted. These verists differed from absolute surrealists, such as Joan Miró, who used images from the subconscious.