Disparate modes of artistic expression are often described in purely oppositional terms—and the aesthetic assumptions that underlie them are too often misunderstood to be mutually exclusive. In reality, different idioms often have characteristics in common and can sometimes be combined and overlapped in interesting and effective ways. Occasionally, however, a movement emerges that positions itself in direct opposition to a preexisting tradition, which makes its compatibility with its precursor an ostensible impossibility.

One might argue that this is the case with Classicism and Romanticism. While there are aspects of both that have become fundamental to the modern artistic lexicon, we should remind ourselves that in their purest forms they are fundamentally adversarial.

CLASSICISM

The term “Classical” is too often used generically when referring to something that is timeless and elegant, reflective of high-end tastes and elitist tendencies. The notion that any art object deemed Classical belongs in a rarified realm has become commonplace, the assumption being that it exhibits a deference toward time-honored but vaguely defined principles regarding both form and content.

But Classical is an aesthetic designation that references a particular time and place, namely, Ancient Greco-Roman culture from approximately 500 BCE to 475 CE The beginning and end dates of that epochal classification refer to the great flowering of Athenian culture in the fifth century BCE and the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire toward the end of the fifth century CE, respectively.

While Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome were two distinct civilizations, they generally shared enough core characteristics—cultural, theological, political, and aesthetic—that scholars have traditionally grouped them both under the umbrella heading Classical Greco-Roman, or simply Classical, as an organizing device.

Classical culture's understanding of Art and Beauty mirrored, to a great degree, what it believed to be the foundational principles of any great civilization and its attendant communities. In order to understand the defining characteristics of Classical Art, we must first examine Classical culture's relationship to civilization as a concept. To the Classical mind, civilization represented a contract that human beings enter with one another to ensure the imposition of a clearly defined order and to avoid the brutality and vagaries of an uncivilized existence.