ROCOCO STYLE

style in interior design, the decorative arts, painting, architecture, and sculpture that originated in Paris in the early 18th century but was soon adopted throughout France and later in other countries, principally Germany and Austria. It is characterized by lightness, daintiness, grace, elegance, and an excessive use of curving, natural forms in ornamentation. The word Rococo is derived from the French word rocaille, which denoted the shell-covered rockwork that was used to decorate artificial grottoes. At the outset the Rococo style represented a reaction against the grand ponderousness of Louis XIV's Palace of Versailles and the official Baroque art of his reign. Several interior designers, painters, and engravers, among them Pierre Le Pautre, J.-A. Meissonier, Jean Berain, and Nicolas Pineau, developed a lighter and more intimate style of decoration for the new residences of nobles in Paris, and the style was disseminated throughout France by means of engravings. In the Rococo style, walls, ceilings, and moldings were decorated with delicate interlacings of curves and countercurves based on the fundamental shapes of the C and the S, as well as with shell forms and other natural shapes. Asymmetrical rather than symmetrical design was the rule. Light pastels, ivory white, and gold were the predominant colours, and Rococo decorators frequently used mirrors. Excellent examples of French Rococo are the Salon de M. le Prince (completed 1722) in the Petit Chteau at Chantilly, decorated by Jean Aubert, and the salons (begun 1732) of the Htel de Soubise, Paris, by Germain Boffrand (q.v.). The decorative arts of the period from 1715 to 1745 exemplify the Rococo tendencies admirably, for it was a style well-suited to furniture, tapestry, porcelain, goldwork, and silverwork. Rococo painting in France began with the graceful, gently melancholic paintings of Antoine Watteau, culminated in the playful and sensuous nudes of Franois Boucher, and ended with the freely painted genre scenes of Jean-Honor Fragonard. Rococo portraiture had its finest practitioners in Jean-Marc Nattier and Jean-Baptiste Perroneau. French Rococo painting in general was characterized by easygoing and frivolous treatments of mythological and courtship themes, rich and delicate brushwork, a relatively light tonal key, and sensuous colouring. Rococo sculpture was notable for its small and intimate scale. From France the Rococo style spread in the 1730s to the Catholic German-speaking lands, where it was adapted to a brilliant style of religious architecture that combined French elegance with south German fantasy as well as with a lingering Baroque interest in dramatic spatial and plastic effects. Some of the most beautiful of all Rococo buildings outside France are to be seen in Munichfor example, the refined and delicate Amalienburg (173439), in the park of the Nymphenburg palace, and the Residenztheater (175053; rebuilt after World War II), both by Franois de Cuvillis. Among the finest German Rococo pilgrimage churches are the Vierzehnheiligen (begun 1743), near Lichtenfels, in Bavaria, designed by Balthasar Neumann (q.v.), and the Wieskirche (begun 1745), near Munich, built by Dominikus Zimmermann and decorated by his elder brother Johann Baptist Zimmermann. G.W. von Knobelsdorff and Johann Michael Fischer also created notable buildings in the style, which utilized a profusion of stuccowork and other decoration. In Italy the Rococo style was concentrated primarily in Venice, where it was epitomized by the large-scale decorative paintings of Giambattista Tiepolo. The urban vistas of Francesco Guardi and Canaletto were also influenced by the Rococo. Meanwhile, in France the style had already begun to decline by the 1750s when it came under attack from critics for its triviality and ornamental excesses, and by the 1760s the new, more austere movement of Neoclassicism began to supplant the Rococo in France. The term Rococo is sometimes used to denote the light, elegant, and highly ornamental music composed at the end of the Baroque periodi.e., from the 1740s until the 1770s. The earlier music of Joseph Haydn and of the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart can thus be termed Rococo, although the work of these composers more properly belongs to the emerging Classical style.