Andreas Schluter (1664-1714), in his numerous tombs and in the Expiring Warriors of the Arsenal of Berlin, displays the vigorous and realistic Baroque of Germany, and Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (1656-1723), in his Trinity Column in the Grabenstrasse, Vienna, illustrates its exuberance and joyousness. George Raphael Donner (1693-1741), the greatest Germanic sculptor of the i8th century, anticipates in his Fountain of the New Market, Vienna, the reaction towards classicism that brings the century to a close.
In England, the Tomb of the Elder Pitt, Westminster Abbey, by John Bacon (1740-1799); in Holland the opulent Pulpit in Brussels Cathedral, by Hendrik Verbruggen (1655-1724) ; and in Spain the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception by Juan Mar tinez Montanes (157o-1649) are characteristic examples of the national Baroque schools.
About the end of the i8th century an antiquarian enthusiasm, common to all European countries, created a reaction towards the classic in architecture, painting and sculpture. A widespread interest in aesthetic theory—a phase of that social and intellectual ferment that preceded the Revolution—prompted the wide accep tance of an aesthetic system in which the ancient masterpieces, revealed anew by the discoveries and writings of archaeologists, are held up as the perfect models for modern imitation. When, at the beginning of the 19th century, the triumph of Napoleon, putting an end to the monarchial order which had sustained the Baroque tradition, gave the arts a patronage whose taste had been formed, not in court or in church, but in the pages of the orists and the galleries of museums, literary and academic influ ences became dominant in art. The static and generalized Greek statues, as revealed in a world of Latin copies, once more appear in the arts of painting and sculpture: life and movement, picture and emotion, portraiture and costume disappear before the Roman conqueror whose austere taste tolerates neither sentiment or story, neither religion or nature.
The new art, to which the name Neo-Classicism is given, differs from that of the Renaissance in its more complete and intransigent imitation of classic statues. The Renaissance artists, excepting a few of the minor masters of the 16th century, never created statues which directly reproduce in subject, pose, proportion, and surface treatment the models of antiquity. To them the antique
was an inexhaustible source of inspiration, a mine of technical precedents, not a mould into which their own free and individual life was to be compressed. The antique was a language in whose musical cadences they expressed their own thoughts. To the Neo Classic artist the antique was a system, a discipline, an inflexible and impersonal canon imposed upon him by authority.
Antonio Canova (1757-1822), an Italian, was the great master of the Neo-Classic. His Perseus, in the Vatican, reproduces directly the Apollo Belvedere; his Venus Italica, in the Pitti Gallery, Florence, is the Venus di Medicis of the Uffizi. In his portraits— such as the Pauline Buonaparte of the Villa Borghese, Rome—he gives to his contemporaries the simplified forms, the tranquil poses, the generalized features of Roman statues, and stripping them of their clothing, he gives to their bodies the sensuous charm of Praxitelian muscles. But he does not always escape the Baroque influence as his famous Cupid and Psyche, in the Louvre, shows; and there are many of his works, such as the Hebe, in the National Gallery of Berlin, in which nature and an almost Gallic feeling for elegance and warmth put to rout his academic principles. He was a greater man than his theories; to his fine taste and generous character, no less than to the temper of his time, he owed his immense popularity.
Bertel Thorwaldsen a Dane who lived in Rome, whose coldly archaeological work had a tremendous vogue throughout the 19th century ; Johann Heinrich Danneker (1758 1841), born in Stuttgart, who sometimes softened his correct style with touches of Baroque tenderness; and Johann Gottfried Schadow (1764-1850), who returns more than once to nature for inspiration, are the important figures among the Neo-Classicists. The Adonis, by Thorwaldsen, in the Glyptothek in Munich; the Ariadne, by Danneker, in Frankfort; and the Princesses Louise and Friederike, by Schadow, in the Royal Palace of Berlin, are examples of their work. The Neo-Classic is represented in Eng land by such sculptures as the Earl of Mansfield Monument, by John Flaxman, in Westminster Abbey, and in America by the California of Hiram. Powers (1805-1873) in the Metropolitan Museum, and by the Clytie of William H. Rinehart (1825-1874) in the Peabody Institute, Baltimore.