Neoclassical architecture, which began in the mid-eighteenth century, looks to the classical past of the Graeco-Roman era, the Renaissance, and classicized Baroque to convey a new era based on Enlightenment principles. This movement manifested in its details as a reaction against the Rococo style of naturalistic ornament, and in its architectural formulas as an outgrowth of some classicizing features of Late Baroque. In its purest form, Neoclassicism is a style principally derived from the architecture of Classical Greece and Rome. In form, Neoclassical architecture emphasizes the wall and maintains separate identities to each of its parts.
The first phase of Neoclassicism in France is expressed in the "Louis XVI style" of architects like Ange-Jacques Gabriel (Petit Trianon, 1762–68). Ange-Jacques Gabriel was the Premier Architecte at Versailles, and his Neoclassical designs for the royal palace dominated mid eighteenth-century French architecture.
Ange-Jacques Gabriel. Château of the Petit Trianon
The Petit Trianon in the park at Versailles demonstrates the neoclassical architectural style under Louis XVI.
After the French Revolution, the second phase of Neoclassicism was expressed in the late eighteenth-century Directoire style. The Directoire style reflected the Revolutionary belief in the values of republican Rome. This style was a period in the decorative arts, fashion, and especially furniture design, concurrent with the post-Revolution French Directoire (November 2, 1795 - November 10, 1799). The style uses Neoclassical architectural forms, minimal carving, planar expanses of highly grained veneers, and applied decorative painting. The Directoire style was primarily established by the architects and designers Charles Percier (1764–1838) and Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine (1762–1853), who collaborated on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, which is considered emblematic of French neoclassical architecture.
Arc de Triomphe
The Arc de Triomphe, although finished in the early nineteenth century, is emblematic of French neoclassical architecture that dominated the Directoire period.
Though Neoclassical architecture employs the same classical vocabulary as Late Baroque architecture, it tends to emphasize its planar qualities rather than its sculptural volumes. Projections, recessions and their effects on light and shade are more flat. Sculptural bas-reliefs are flatter and tend to be framed in friezes, tablets or panels. Its clearly articulated individual features are isolated rather than interpenetrating, autonomous, and complete in themselves.
Even sacred architecture was classicized during the Neoclassical period. The Panthéon, located in the Latin Quarter of Paris, was originally built as a church dedicated to St. Geneviève and to house the reliquary châsse containing her relics. However, during the French Revolution, the Panthéon was secularized and became the resting place of Enlightenment icons such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Designer Jacques-Germain Soufflot had the intention of combining the lightness and brightness of the Gothic cathedral with classical principles, but its role as a mausoleum required the great Gothic windows to be blocked. In 1780, Soufflot died and was replaced by his student, Jean-Baptiste Rondelet.
Jacques-Germain Soufflot (original architect) and Jean-Baptiste Rondelet. The Panthéon.
Begun 1758, completed 1790.
Similar to a Roman temple, the Panthéon is entered through a portico that consists of three rows of columns (in this case, Corinthian) topped by a Classical pediment. In a fashion more closely related to ancient Greece, the pediment is adorned with reliefs throughout the triangular space. Beneath the pediment, the inscription on the entablature translates as, "To the great men, the grateful homeland." The dome, on the other hand, is more influenced by Renaissance and Baroque predecessors, such as St. Peter's in Rome and St. Paul's in London.
Intellectually, Neoclassicism was symptomatic of a desire to return to the perceived "purity" of the arts of Rome. The movement was also inspired by a more vague perception ("ideal") of Ancient Greek arts and, to a lesser extent, sixteenth-century Renaissance Classicism, which was also a source for academic Late Baroque architecture. There is an anti-Rococo strain that can be detected in some European architecture of the earlier eighteenth century. This strain is most vividly represented in the Palladian architecture of Georgian Britain and Ireland.
Lord Burlington. Chiswick House
The design of Chiswick House, in West London, was influenced by that of Palladio's domestic architecture, particularly the Villa Rotunda in Venice. The stepped dome and temple façade were clearly influenced by the Roman Pantheon.
The trend toward the classical is also recognizable in the classicizing vein of Late Baroque architecture in Paris. It is a robust architecture of self-restraint, academically selective now of "the best" Roman models. These models were increasingly available for close study through the medium of architectural engravings of measured drawings of surviving Roman architecture.
French Neoclassicism continued to be a major force in academic art through the nineteenth century and beyond—a constant antithesis to Romanticism or Gothic revivals.