Neoclassical

In the fine arts, Neoclassicism is a movement of the second half of the eighteenth century, corresponding to the Enlightenment and the Are of Reason. It arose,like the English landscape garden, as a reaction to the pomposity of the Baroque. Following the example of literary critics, art critics looked back to the glories of Rome, and then Greece, as revealing a noble simplicity and reasoned calm. The movement was encouraged by the German art historian Winckelmann and by the excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum after 1738. In architecture, Neoclassicism led to the work of the Adam brothers in England, Ledoux in France and Jefferson in America. In music, Neoclassical refers to a twentieth century reaction to the excesses of Romanticism.