A severe, toned-down variant of the exuberant Catholic baroque style, especially prevalent in architecture and art created during the reign of the seventeenth-century French king Louis XIV. Buildings in this style employ grandiose scale tempered by a sober classical design featuring symmetry and decorative restraint.
history
In works of art, the subject area or category constituted by scenes from mythology, religion, and major historical events. The highest ranked category in Western art between ca. 1400 and 1900.
genre
The subject area and artistic category focusing on commonplace scenes from everyday life.
rococo
An eighteenth-century style in art, interior design, and decorative art that grew out of the baroque but is more delicate, playful, and intimate; originally called "the style of Louis XV."
neoclassicism
Rising to prominence in the second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, a style of art and architecture built upon the ideals, forms, subject matter, and symbolism of the classical art and architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. Across the arts, the neoclassical ("new classical") style is broadly characterized by heroic grandeur, formal clarity, and emotional restraint.
