From Romanticism to Post-Impressionism [antikvár]

A -JL J^ s we pass well into die second half of the twentieth century, our perspective of the nineteenth century becomes clearer. There is no doubt that the painting of the past century signifies a glorious chapter in the universal history of art and at the same time a triumph of French genius. Baroque was the flourishing and dominant art style in Europe up to the nineteenth century. Among the contributions of several great and small nations, those of the Italians attracted the most attention. What was the distinguishing feature of this Baroque art? In a yearbook of some fifty years ago, since then gathering the dust of oblivion on the shelves, Tibor Gerevich tried to define it as follows: "Masses in lively distribution, the animated play of light and shadow, restless lines; in painting and sculpture the buoyant inner life of the figures reflected in powerful and often passionate move- ments, a certain pathetic eloquence, an apparently forcible search for effect, are the characteristics [of this art]." By the close of the eighteenth century7, after some two hundred years of flourishing, not only Baroque art, but also its strongest inspiration, Italian creative genius, seemed to lose its original impetus. Tiepolo, the last great Italian master of the Baroque, was no longer initiating, but concluding an approach; the inspirators of the new style, the Rococo, were French. There was litde doubt that from then on France would assume leadership for some time to come—certainly for the entire nineteenth century. French painting, the leading art of the nineteenth century, rose again and again like the miraculous phoenix, and with its unique spirit and inventiveness soared ahead preceding all other trends. Classicism in its very essence was of French origin, though it owed a great deal to Winckelmann, with his awakening to the legacy of antiquity, and to the etcher Piranesi, in his attempt to derive a new idiom from Roman ruins. But these two only provided the backdrop for the art of David and Ingres, who marched in the forefront, just as the four successive periods of style were led again by French masters: Delacroix having been the pre-eminent figure of Romanticism, Courbet of Realism, Manet of Impressionism, and Cézanne of Post-Impressionism. This did not mean, of 5