Classicism

Classicism is an artistic language of the seventeenth to the early nineteenth century that took the art of ancient Greece and Rome as its model and elevated the ideals of reason, order and harmony. In contrast to the turbulence of the Baroque, Classicism affirms clarity, balance and the subordination of feeling to the discipline of form. Its aesthetic rests on the cult of clear drawing, which prevails over color, on a strict symmetrical composition, a calm rhythm and a noble restraint of gesture. Artists sought to depict not the accidental but the typical and the ideal, so they preferred heroic subjects from ancient history, mythology and civic virtue, meant to edify the viewer. Its formal marks are the plastic completeness of figures, as if carved from sculpture, local color, clear contours, a wing-like construction of space and the rational lucidity of the whole order of the work. The leading painter of Classicism was Nicolas Poussin, and in the age of Neoclassicism, Jacques-Louis David with his civic pathos and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. In architecture the style produced ordered palaces and rotundas that spread to Ukrainian lands as well: the classicist ensembles of Kyiv and Poltava and palace-and-park complexes such as the estate at Kachanivka. In Ukrainian painting the work of Dmytro Levytsky and Volodymyr Borovikovsky approaches the classicist tradition. Classicism established the idea of art as a school of taste and morality, and its expressive order long remained the basis of European artistic education.