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NEO-CLASSICISM Neo-Classicism originated in Rome and spread like wildfire in reaction to the utter excesses of the early Baroque and especially the Rococo periods. During this time, scenes from Roman history became popular again. In a neo-classical work of art, composition is balanced, colours are bright and the work has soul. Artists at this time started to copy and imitate antique art. Hence their emphasis on proper subject matter; and hence their attempts to emphasize details to an overall design, to employ in their work concepts like symmetry, proportion, unity, harmony, and grace, which would facilitate the process of delighting, instructing, educating, and correcting the social animal which they believed man to be, they saw man as an imperfect being, inherently sinful, whose potential was limited. They replaced the Renaissance emphasis on the imagination, on invention and experimentation, and on mysticism with an emphasis on order and reason, on restraint, on common sense, and on religious, political, economic and philosophical conservatism, because of the revolution that had arisen. They maintained that man himself was the most appropriate subject of art, and saw art itself as essentially pragmatic--as valuable because it was somehow useful--and as something which was properly intellectual rather than emotional. The English Neoclassical movement, predicated upon and derived from both classical and contemporary French models, as critical statements of Neoclassical principles that embodied a group of attitudes toward art and human existence, ideals of order, logic, restraint, accuracy, "correctness," and decorum, which would enable the practitioners of various arts to imitate or reproduce the structures and themes of Greek or Roman originals. Neoclassicism was an art movement based on the revival of the arts and ideals of ancient Greece and Rome. Artists working in the neoclassical style used ideas and motifs that would evoke the values of the ancient Roman republic, with which the U.S. government and public wished to associate themselves. Neoclassicism, which emphasised moderation and rational thought, dominated European and Euro-American architecture and art from the mid-18th century to the late 19th century.
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