1. Enlightenment and the Arts

2. Given what you already know about the Enlightenment, what would you expect to find in the arts?
Order
Rationality
Rules

3. Dates Art: later part of 1700s Music: 1750-1810
Literature: 1688 (Glorious Revolution) –1789 (French Revolution)

4. Names of this period Classical (for music)
Neoclassical (for art and literature)
Reason?
No examples in music from Classical Greece/Rome

5. David’s Oath of the Horatii
Oath of Horatii
David’s Oath of the Horatii

6. Characteristics of Neo-classical Art
Statuesque figures
Moralizing message
Clear, orderly
Subdued colors
Setting “in a box”

7. David’s The Death of Socrates

8. Classical Music
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

9. Characteristics of Classical Music
Balanced phrases (or periodic phrases)
“Building blocks” of music
Musician as craftsman
Aristocratic audiences in salons
Patronage system

10. Characteristics of Neoclassical Literature
Purpose of literature: teach and delight (moral impulse)
Represent “nature”
Orderliness/decorum
Rules
Those rules of old discovered not devised
Are Nature still, but Nature methodized.
Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism
Genres
Heroic couplets

11. Characteristics of Neoclassical Literature (cont.)
Wit and clever language
True wit is Nature to advantage dressed
What oft was thought but ne-er so well expressed;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.
Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism
Poet as craftsman
Humans in society

12. Genres
Drama
Unities
Action
Time
Place

13. Satire Holding up human folly for examination and ridicule
Hoping through wit and laughter to bring about correction
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels

14. Novel Some novels had Neo-classical elements
In many ways, though, the novel runs counter to many Neo-classical impulses
Middle class life
Affordable—serialized
Middle class readers