The political ideal of classicism. Ethical and aesthetic program The main pathos of his works

Classicism

Classicism is one of the most important trends in the art of the past, an artistic style based on normative aesthetics, requiring strict adherence to a number of rules, canons, and unities. The rules of classicism are of paramount importance as means to ensure the main goal - to enlighten and instruct the public, turning it to sublime examples. The aesthetics of classicism reflected the desire to idealize reality, due to the refusal to depict a complex and multifaceted reality. In theatrical art, this direction established itself in the works, first of all, of French authors: Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, Moliere. Classicism had a great influence on the Russian national theater (A.P. Sumarokov, V.A. Ozerov, D.I. Fonvizin, etc.).

Historical roots of classicism

The history of classicism begins in Western Europe at the end of the 16th century. In the 17th century reaches its highest development, associated with the heyday of the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV in France and the highest rise of theatrical art in the country. Classicism continued to exist fruitfully in the 18th and early 19th centuries, until it was replaced by sentimentalism and romanticism.

As an artistic system, classicism finally took shape in the 17th century, although the concept of classicism itself was born later, in the 19th century, when an irreconcilable war was declared on it by romance. “Classicism” (from the Latin “classicus”, i.e. “exemplary”) presupposed a stable orientation of new art towards the ancient style, which did not mean simply copying ancient models. Classicism also maintains continuity with the aesthetic concepts of the Renaissance, which were oriented towards antiquity.

Having studied the poetics of Aristotle and the practice of Greek theater, the French classics proposed rules of construction in their works, based on the foundations of rationalistic thinking of the 17th century. First of all, this is strict adherence to the laws of the genre, division into higher genres - ode, tragedy, epic and lower ones - comedy, satire.

Laws of classicism

The laws of classicism are most characteristically expressed in the rules for constructing tragedy. The author of the play was, first of all, required that the plot of the tragedy, as well as the passions of the characters, be believable. But the classicists have their own understanding of verisimilitude: not just the similarity of what is depicted on stage with reality, but the consistency of what is happening with the requirements of reason, with a certain moral and ethical norm.

The concept of a reasonable predominance of duty over human feelings and passions is the basis of the aesthetics of classicism, which differs significantly from the concept of the hero adopted in the Renaissance, when complete personal freedom was proclaimed, and man was declared the “crown of the Universe.” However, the course of historical events refuted these ideas. Overwhelmed by passions, the person could not make up his mind or find support. And only in serving society, a single state, a monarch who embodied the strength and unity of his state, could a person express himself and establish himself, even at the cost of abandoning his own feelings. The tragic collision was born on a wave of colossal tension: hot passion collided with inexorable duty (in contrast to the Greek tragedy of fatal predestination, when the human will turned out to be powerless). In the tragedies of classicism, reason and will were decisive and suppressed spontaneous, poorly controlled feelings.

Hero in the tragedies of classicism

The classicists saw the truthfulness of the characters' characters in strict subordination to internal logic. The unity of the character of the hero is the most important condition for the aesthetics of classicism. Generalizing the laws of this direction, the French author N. Boileau-Depreo, in his poetic treatise Poetic Art, states: Let your hero be carefully thought out, Let him always remain himself.

The one-sidedness and internal static character of the hero does not exclude, however, the manifestation of living human feelings on his part. But in different genres these feelings are manifested in different ways, strictly according to the chosen scale - tragic or comic. N. Boileau says about the tragic hero:

A hero in whom everything is petty is only suitable for a novel,

Let him be brave, noble,

But still, without weaknesses, no one likes him...

He cries from insults - a useful detail,

So that we believe in its credibility...

So that we crown you with enthusiastic praise,

We should be moved and moved by your hero.

Let him be free from unworthy feelings

And even in weaknesses he is powerful and noble.

To reveal human character in the understanding of the classicists means to show the nature of the action of eternal passions, unchangeable in their essence, their influence on the destinies of people. Basic rules of classicism. Both high and low genres were obliged to instruct the public, elevate its morals, and enlighten its feelings. In tragedy, the theater taught the viewer perseverance in the struggle of life; the example of a positive hero served as a model of moral behavior. The hero, as a rule, a king or a mythological character, was the main character. The conflict between duty and passion or selfish desires was always resolved in favor of duty, even if the hero died in an unequal struggle. In the 17th century The idea became dominant that only in serving the state does an individual gain the opportunity for self-affirmation. The flourishing of classicism was due to the establishment of absolute power in France, and later in Russia.

The most important standards of classicism - the unity of action, place and time - follow from those substantive premises discussed above. In order to more accurately convey the idea to the viewer and inspire selfless feelings, the author should not have complicated anything. The main intrigue should be simple enough so as not to confuse the viewer and not deprive the picture of its integrity. The requirement for unity of time was closely linked to unity of action, and many different events did not occur in the tragedy. The unity of place has also been interpreted in different ways. This could be the space of one palace, one room, one city, and even the distance that the hero could cover within twenty-four hours. Particularly bold reformers decided to stretch the action for thirty hours. The tragedy must have five acts and be written in Alexandrian verse (iamb hexameter). The visible excites more than the story, But what the ear can tolerate, sometimes the eye cannot tolerate. (N. Boileau)

Related information.

Classicism (from Latin classicus - exemplary) is the artistic style of European art of the 17th-19th centuries, one of the most important features of which was the appeal to ancient art as the highest example and reliance on the traditions of the High Renaissance. (from Latin classicus - exemplary) - the artistic style of European art of the 17th-19th centuries, one of the most important features of which was the appeal to ancient art as the highest example and reliance on the traditions of the High Renaissance. Bordeaux The city is famous for its ensembles of squares in the style of classicism (XVIII century)

M.F.Kazakov. Petrovsky Palace Russian classicism is one of the brightest pages in the history of world architecture.

V.I. Bazhenov. Pashkov house - 1788

O. Montferrand. St. Isaac's Cathedral - 1830

A.N. Voronikhin. Kazan Cathedral - 1811 And the Kazan Cathedral spread its hands. Embracing the blue evening... I. Demyanov.

Classicism in sculpture Fidelity to the ancient image. Heroic and idyllic compositions. Heroic and idyllic compositions. Idealization of military valor and wisdom of statesmen. Idealization of military valor and wisdom of statesmen. Public monuments. Public monuments. Contradiction with accepted moral standards. Contradiction with accepted moral standards. Absence of sudden movements, external manifestations of emotions such as anger. Absence of sudden movements, external manifestations of emotions such as anger. Simplicity, harmony, consistency of the composition of the work. Simplicity, harmony, consistency of the composition of the work.

Classicism in painting Interest in the art of ancient Greece and Rome. Systematization and consolidation of the achievements of the great artists of the Renaissance. Systematization and consolidation of the achievements of the great artists of the Renaissance. A meticulous study of the heritage of Raphael and Michelangelo, imitating their mastery of line and composition. A meticulous study of the heritage of Raphael and Michelangelo, imitating their mastery of line and composition. Simplicity, harmony, consistency of the composition of the work. Simplicity, harmony, consistency of the composition of the work. Social, civil issues. Social, civil issues. The main characters are kings, generals, statesmen. The main characters are kings, generals, statesmen. Support of classicism through funding of academic institutions. Support of classicism through funding of academic institutions.

Ideas about the reasonable patterns of the world, the beauty of nature, moral ideals

Objective reflection of the surrounding world

Striving for reasonable clarity of harmony, strict simplicity

Formation of aesthetic taste

Restraint and calmness in expressing feelings

Rationalism and logic in actions

Rococo is...

a style in the art of the 18th century, characterized by a predilection for refined and complex forms, bizarre lines reminiscent of the silhouette of a shell.

43. Rokail is…… the main element of the Rococo style ornament, reminiscent of the shape of a curl of a shell and strange plants.

44. Mascaron is…. type of sculptural decoration of a building in the shape of a human or animal head full face

45. Sentimentalism is... This is a direction in literature and art of the second half of the 18th century, characterized by an increased interest in human feelings and an emotional attitude towards the world around us, where love for man and nature comes first.

Which of the outstanding architectural structures of classicism is called the “Fairytale Dream”

The residence of the French kings on the outskirts of Paris is the Palace of Versailles.

47. Principles of urban planning in the era of classicism:

Creating an ideal city with buildings made according to a single plan. The urban ensemble is designed in the form of a square or rectangle in plan. Inside them, a strictly regular rectangular or radial ring system of streets with a city square in the center is planned.

48. Why is the work of N. Poussin called the pinnacle of classicism in painting?

N. Poussin - founder of the classicism style. Turning to themes of ancient mythology, ancient history, and the Bible, Poussin revealed the themes of his contemporary era. With his works he raised a perfect personality, showing and singing examples of high morality and civic valor.

N. Poussin

49. What unites the greatest masters "gallant genre"- A. Watteau and F. Boucher

A world of complex love affairs and life against the backdrop of pristine nature.

Name the composers of Viennese classicism.

A – Joseph Haydn, B – Wolfgang Mozart, C – Ludwig van Beethoven

A B C

51. Symphony is...(consonance) a work for a symphony orchestra, consisting of 4 parts, where the first and last parts have the same keys, and the middle ones are written in keys related to the main one, which is determined

History of Russian literature of the 18th century Lebedeva O. B.

Aesthetics of classicism

Ideas about the laws of creativity and the structure of a work of art are determined to the same extent by the epochal type of worldview as the picture of the world and the concept of personality. Reason, as the highest spiritual ability of man, is conceived not only as an instrument of knowledge, but also as an organ of creativity and a source of aesthetic pleasure. One of the most striking leitmotifs of Boileau’s “Poetic Art” is the rational nature of aesthetic activity:

Along a dangerous path as slippery as ice

You should always go towards common sense.

Whoever leaves this path dies immediately:

There is one path to reason, there is no other.

From here arises a completely rationalistic aesthetics, the defining categories of which are the hierarchical principle and normativity. Following Aristotle, classicism considered art to be an imitation of nature:

Don’t torment us with the incredible, disturbing the mind:

And the truth is sometimes unlike the truth.

I will not be delighted with wonderful nonsense:

The mind does not care about what it does not believe.

However, nature was by no means understood as a visual picture of the physical and moral world, presented to the senses, but rather as the highest intelligible essence of the world and man: not a specific character, but its idea, not a real historical or modern plot, but a universal human conflict situation, not given landscape, but the idea of a harmonious combination of natural realities in an ideally beautiful unity. Classicism found such an ideally beautiful unity in ancient literature - it was precisely this that was perceived by classicism as the already achieved pinnacle of aesthetic activity, the eternal and unchanging standard of art, which recreated in its genre models that very highest ideal nature, physical and moral, which art should imitate. It so happened that the thesis about imitation of nature turned into an injunction to imitate ancient art, where the term “classicism” itself came from (from the Latin classicus - exemplary, studied in class): Let nothing separate you from nature.

An example would be Terence's painting:

A gray-haired father scolds his son who has fallen in love ‹…›

No, this is not a portrait, but life. In such a picture

The spirit of nature lives in the gray-haired father and son.

Thus, nature in classic art appears not so much reproduced as modeled on a high model - “decorated” with the generalizing analytical activity of the mind. By analogy, one can recall the so-called “regular” (i.e., “correct”) park, where the trees are trimmed in the form of geometric shapes and symmetrically planted, the paths have the correct shape, sprinkled with multi-colored pebbles, and the water is enclosed in marble pools and fountains. This style of gardening art reached its peak precisely in the era of classicism. The desire to present nature as “decorated” also results in the absolute predominance in literature of classicism of poetry over prose: if prose is identical to simple material nature, then poetry, as a literary form, is certainly an ideal “decorated” nature.”

In all these ideas about art, namely as a rational, ordered, standardized, spiritual activity, the hierarchical principle of thinking of the 17th-18th centuries was realized. Within itself, literature also turned out to be divided into two hierarchical series, low and high, each of which was thematically and stylistically associated with one - material or ideal - level of reality. Low genres included satire, comedy, and fable; to the high – ode, tragedy, epic. In low genres, everyday material reality is depicted, and a private person appears in social connections (while, of course, both the person and reality are still the same ideal conceptual categories). In high genres, man is presented as a spiritual and social being, in the existential aspect of his existence, alone and along with the eternal fundamentals of questions of existence. Therefore, for high and low genres, not only thematic, but also class differentiation turned out to be relevant based on the character’s belonging to one or another social stratum. The hero of low genres is a middle-class person; high hero - a historical figure, a mythological hero or a fictional high-ranking character - usually a ruler.

In low genres, human characters are formed by base everyday passions (stinginess, hypocrisy, hypocrisy, envy, etc.); in high genres, passions acquire a spiritual character (love, ambition, vindictiveness, a sense of duty, patriotism, etc.). And if everyday passions are clearly unreasonable and vicious, then existential passions are divided into reasonable - social and unreasonable - personal, and the ethical status of the hero depends on his choice. He is unambiguously positive if he prefers a reasonable passion, and unambiguously negative if he chooses an unreasonable one. Classicism did not allow halftones in ethical assessment - and this also reflected the rationalistic nature of the method, which excluded any mixture of high and low, tragic and comic.

Since in the genre theory of classicism those genres that reached the greatest flowering in ancient literature were legitimized as the main ones, and literary creativity was thought of as a reasonable imitation of high models, the aesthetic code of classicism acquired a normative character. This means that the model of each genre was established once and for all in a clear set of rules, from which it was unacceptable to deviate, and each specific text was aesthetically assessed according to the degree of compliance with this ideal genre model.

The source of the rules were ancient examples: the epic of Homer and Virgil, the tragedy of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Seneca, the comedy of Aristophanes, Menander, Terence and Plautus, the ode of Pindar, the fable of Aesop and Phaedrus, the satire of Horace and Juvenal. The most typical and illustrative case of such genre regulation is, of course, the rules for the leading classic genre, tragedy, drawn both from the texts of ancient tragedians and from Aristotle’s Poetics.

For the tragedy, a poetic form was canonized (“Alexandrian verse” - iambic hexameter with paired rhyme), a mandatory five-act structure, three unities - time, place and action, high style, a historical or mythological plot and a conflict, suggesting a mandatory situation of choice between reasonable and unreasonable passion, and the process of choice itself was supposed to constitute the action of the tragedy. It was in the dramatic section of the aesthetics of classicism that the rationalism, hierarchy and normativity of the method were expressed with the greatest completeness and obviousness:

But we, who respect the laws of reason,

Only skillful construction captivates ‹…›

But the scene requires both truth and intelligence.

The laws of logic in the theater are very strict.

Do you want to bring a new type to the stage?

Please combine all the qualities of the face

And maintain the image from beginning to end.

Everything that was said above about the aesthetics of classicism and the poetics of classicist literature in France applies equally to almost any European variety of the method, since French classicism was historically the earliest and aesthetically most authoritative embodiment of the method. But for Russian classicism, these general theoretical principles found a unique refraction in artistic practice, since they were determined by the historical and national characteristics of the formation of the new Russian culture of the 18th century.

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The era of classicism is the time from approximately the middle of the 18th to the middle of the 19th century. The characteristic features of the aesthetics of classicism are its normativity, i.e. the desire to establish strict rules of artistic creativity. The artistic and aesthetic canons of classicism are clearly focused on examples of ancient art: transferring the themes of plots, characters, situations from ancient classics to the modern era and filling them with new content.

The philosophical basis of the aesthetics of classicism was rationalism (one of the founders of which was Rene Descartes), ideas about the regularity and rationality of the world. From here follow the ideological and aesthetic principles of classicism: 1. consistency of form, 2. harmonious unity of images created in art, 3. the ideal of beautiful, ennobled nature, 4. affirmation of the idea of statehood, the ideal hero, 5. resolution of the conflict between personal feeling and public duty in favor of the latter.

There is also a hierarchy of genres, dividing them into higher (tragedy, epic) and lower (comedy, fable, satire). The orientation of the art of classicism towards clarity of content, a clear statement of social problems, aesthetic pathos, and the height of the civic ideal made it socially significant and of great educational importance. The aesthetic theory of classicism found its most complete expression in works such as “The Poetic Art” of N. Boileau (1674).

Unity of action - the play must have one main plot, subplots are kept to a minimum.
Unity of place - the action corresponds to the same place in the space of the play.
Unity of time. Nicola Boileau in his Poetic art” formulated the three unities as follows: “Let one event, occurring in one place on one day, keep the theater filled to the end.” A guide on how to write correctly. Criticized the authors: there is no need to describe everyday situations. It's worth being a poet only if you have poetic talent.

“Elementary rules of verbal art” by C. Batteux (1747), in the doctrines of the French Academy.

The most developed genres during the period of classicism were tragedies, poems and odes.

Tragedy is a dramatic work that depicts the struggle of a strong personality with insurmountable obstacles; such a struggle usually ends in the death of the hero. Classical writers based the tragedy on the clash (conflict) of the hero’s personal feelings and aspirations with his duty to the state. This conflict was resolved by the victory of duty. The plots of the tragedy were borrowed from the writers of ancient Greece and Rome. As in the Greco-Roman tragedy, the characters were depicted either positive or negative, with each person representing one spiritual trait, one quality: positive courage, justice, etc., negative - ambition, hypocrisy.

Ode is a solemn song of praise in honor of kings, generals, or victories won over enemies.

The greatness of man was revealed in the struggle between the material and the spiritual. The personality was affirmed in the fight against “passions” and freed from selfish material interests. The rational, spiritual principle in a person was considered as the most important quality of personality.

Diderot in his work "The Paradox of the Actor" talks about the actor. Simplicity and truth, bringing the actor's intonations closer to the intonations of simple human speech, without posture and false pathos - this is what was required from the new actor. The actor must understand feelings with his mind and evoke them in the viewer.

Four major literary figures contributed to the establishment of classicism in Russia: A.D. Kantemir, V.K. Trediakovsky, M.V. Lomonosov and A.P. Sumarokov.

Karamzin “Poor Liza”

O.P. Sumarokov is rightfully considered the creator of the canon of Russian classical tragedy and comedy. He has written nine tragedies and twelve comedies. Sumarokov’s comedy also adheres to the laws of classicism. “To make people laugh madly is the gift of a vile soul,” said the playwright. He became the founder of the social comedy of manners; every comedy of his has a moral.

The pinnacle of Russian classicism is the work of D.I. Fonvizin, the creator of a truly original national comedy, who laid the foundations of critical realism in the middle of this system.

Usually the period of classicism is associated with the Viennese classics - Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. Why are they called “Viennese classics”? They all lived in Vienna, which at that time was considered the capital of musical culture. The term “Viennese classics” was first used by the Austrian musicologist Kiesewetter in 1834 in relation to Haydn and Mozart. Later, other authors added Beethoven to this list. The Viennese classics are often called representatives of the First Viennese School.

These great composers of the Viennese school are united by their virtuoso mastery of different styles of music and compositional techniques: from folk songs to polyphony (simultaneous sound, development and interaction of several voices or melodic lines, melodies). Viennese classics created a high type of instrumental music, in which all the wealth of figurative content is embodied in a perfect artistic form. This is the main feature of classicism.