Description
The chart is an interactive lineage map. Neoclassicism sits at the center, on a timeline that runs from older movements at the top to newer ones at the bottom. The movements that influenced it appear above it, any parallel movements it developed alongside sit on its own row, and the movements it later influenced appear below. Every line is a real, cited connection between two movements: a solid line is an influence historians broadly agree on, and a dashed line is an indirect, parallel, or contested link.
For Neoclassicism (c. 1760 – 1850), it traces two movements that shaped it, all well-established links: the Renaissance and Rococo; it runs alongside one parallel movement, a well-established link: Academic art; it fans out to one movement it went on to influence, a well-established link: Romanticism.
Neoclassicism, also spelled Neo-classicism, emerged as a Western cultural movement in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that drew inspiration from the art and culture of classical antiquity. Neoclassicism was born in Rome, largely due to the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann during the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Its popularity expanded throughout Europe as a generation of European art students finished their Grand Tour and returned from Italy to their home countries with newly rediscovered Greco-Roman ideals. The main Neoclassical movement emerged from the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, and reached its peak in the early-to-mid-19th century, eventually competing with Romanticism. In architecture, the style endured throughout the 19th, 20th, and into the 21st century. Read more ↗