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Definition: neoclassicism from The Macquarie Dictionary
1.

a late 18th- and early 19th-century revivalist art and architectural style, deriving directly from classical models.

neoclassicism

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Movement in art, architecture, and design in Europe and North America about 1750–1850, characterized by a revival of classical Greek and Roman styles. Leading figures of the movement were the architects Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Robert Adam ; the painters Jacques-Louis David , Jean Ingres , and Anton Mengs; the sculptors Antonio Canova, John Flaxman, Bertel Thorvaldsen, and Johann Sergel; and the designers Josiah Wedgwood, George Hepplewhite, and Thomas Sheraton. Neoclassicism replaced the rococo style and was inspired by the excavation of the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which began in 1748. Also influential were the cultural studies and theories of the German art historian Johann J Winckelmann (which revived Greek styles). Winckelmann identified the most important elements of classical art as being ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’. Neoclassical artists sought to capture these qualities by copying classical styles and subject matter (mainly by using columns, pediments, …
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Full text Article Neoclassicism

From The Classical Tradition
Eighteenth-century architects, artists, and designers did not describe their work as "neoclassical" but did view it as an attempt to recreate "the true style of the ancients." Their aim was thus scarcely different from that of Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) and his followers during the…
| 3,116 words
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Full text Article neoclassicism

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
Movement in art, architecture, and design in Europe and North America about 1750–1850, characterized by a revival of classical Greek and Roman styles. Leading figures of the movement were the architects Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and Robert Adam ; the painters Jacques-Louis David , Jean Ingres , and…
| 268 words
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Full text Article neoclassicism

From The New Penguin Dictionary of Music
The revival of older (especially 18th-century) aspects of style, language and form in a distinctly different context, especially in music of the 1920s-30s - an instance of what was later termed POSTMODERNISM . The separate presence of old and new is crucial, and the source of neoclassicism's…
| 370 words
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Full text Article Neoclassical

From The Harvard Dictionary of Music
A stylistic classification most commonly applied to the works of Stravinsky from Pulcinella (1920) to The Rake's Progress (1951). Its chief aesthetic characteristics are objectivity and expressive restraint, its principal technical ones, motivic clarity, textural transparency, formal balance, and…
| 371 words
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Full text Article neoclassicism

From Shakespeare's Theatre: A Dictionary of His Stage Context
The imitation of the classics was pre-eminent during the Renaissance , named for the supposed rebirth of knowledge of classical culture, largely resulting from its greater availability through printed books and the translations solicited by publishers from humanist scholars. Though many of these…
| 490 words
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Full text Article neoclassicism

From The Oxford Companion to Theatre and Performance
Historical/critical term, describing European drama, literature, and the fine arts that acknowledged the influence of the literary culture of Greece and Rome. A fairly recent coining, it is absent from general dictionaries and from specialist works of reference until about 1930. In its most…
| 994 words
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Full text Article Neoclassical Economics

From The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Business, Labor, and Economic History
“Neoclassical economics” refers to theories that assume that individual preferences, productive abilities, and initial endowments explain prices and income distribution through rational choice by individuals interacting through markets. Thorstein Veblen coined the term “neo-classical” in 1900 to…
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Full text Article neoclassical economics

From Routledge Dictionary of Economics
The school of economics emerging in the UK and the USA in the late nineteenth century, after ‘the Marginal Revolution’, marshall , edgeworth , pareto , wicksell and walras being its most prominent founders. Building on marginal analysis, it dominates much of US economics today, especially at Chicago…
| 280 words
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Full text Article Neoclassical architecture

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Revival of Classical architecture during the 18th and early 19th centuries. The movement concerned itself with the logic of entire Classical volumes, unlike Classical revivalism ( see Greek Revival ), which tended to reuse Classical parts. Neoclassical architecture is characterized by grandeur of…
| 203 words
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Full text Article Neoclassical Synthesis

From Gale Encyclopedia of U.S. Economic History
Neoclassical synthesis is a term coined by MIT economist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson (1915–2009). The theory combines the principles of neoclassical economics, which was considered mainstream economic theory from about 1870 to 1935, with the principles of Keynesian economics, which were…
| 2,067 words
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