Eros and Neoclassicism
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Neoclassicism was a reaction against rococo frivolity and the lax morals of the ancien regime.
Yet, under closer scrutiny, neoclassical puritanism proves to be hypocritical or at least superficial, much like Greuze's moral paintings. Even in the work of Jacques-Louis David himself, the pope of neoclassicism and the effective dictator of the arts after the French Revolution, prurient details as the bare-breasted woman in his Sabine Women crop up.
Also strains of homoeroticism are evident in his Death of Bara and paintings of Patroclus and Hector. Also there was Pierre-Paul Prud'hon's Venus and Adonis, Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson's Endymion Asleep and Pierre Narcisse Guérin (1771–1833)'s Jeune fille en buste. More by Guérin here[1].
In Italy there was Canova and in Great Britain Fuseli.
In a sense this voluptuous counterreaction within neoclassicism against the Winckelmannian aesthetic ("The only way for us to become great lies in the imitation of the Greeks") must have been influenced by the work of Sir William Hamilton, Richard Payne Knight, Vivant Denon, Baron d'Hancarville, which showed an interest in ancient erotica. In print, this resulted in Priapées et sujets divers (Hamilton and Vivant Denon), The Worship of Priapus (Knight) and the more fanciful Veneres et Priapi, uti observantur in gemmis antiquis (d'Hancarville), all published during the 1770s and 1780s.
The question thus became which example of the Greeks to follow: the Apollonian asensual style proposed by Winckelmann, or the Dionysian style proposed by these archeological researchers of Greek and Roman prurience.
Also to consider is Winckelmann's closeted homosexuality evident in his descriptions of male heroic nudity of the Greek sculpture.
See also
