'Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera', by Antoine Watteau
Rococo does not have a good press . It is usually associated with ornamental excess , not to say corny. “It was very rococo”, we say of a mocha cake, of an opinion column, of the hairstyle of the presenter of the New Year's Eve chimes. And we never mean anything nice.
And yet, rococo must always be defended. Especially the French Rococo . During the 17th century -the Baroque- the whole of Europe was suffocated by wars and famine, by the power games of the leaders, the excess of kneelers and the shortage of food, which gave rise to an art as sublime as it was gloomy. where everything was warnings, admonitions and scoldings. But with the change of century other winds began to blow , and while the Enlightenment was forged in the world of ideas, at plastic arts one was beginning to appear new meat, fresher and more enjoyable than the grass of worms that the baroque painters had sold us. Everything became both more earthy and lighter, and that's something to be thankful for.
They more or less coincide with our tastes, in Venice, in Naples and above all in Paris they had another way of seeing things, and accordingly they proposed a bourgeois universe, sexy and an amoral point that refreshed the panorama. Longhi, Tiepolo, Giaquinto, Fragonard, Boucher, Greuze, Vigée-Lebrun. Chardin in his way. But, above all of them, for me it will always be Antoine Watteau.
Antoine Watteau
Perhaps since the heights of the international Gothic there had not been a painter so refined, and not so melancholy either. This melancholia his is the main contribution he made to a sensuality that maybe in a boucher it went from obvious, and in a Fragonard of elaborate To verify it, you only have to see his masterpiece, 'Pierrot' , one of the most beautiful and saddest pictures of all that there is.
But in 'Pilgrimage to the island of Cythera' , painted by Watteau over five years as a work for admission to the Academy of Rome , hardly any of that sadness is appreciated. It represents a human group about to embark for the Aegean island where according to the Greek myth the goddess aphrodite . Several of the characters carry crooks and capes as if they were indeed pilgrims, but his Santiago de Compostela is the homeland of love . The mast of the ship fades in the distance due to the effect of the aerial perspective, and it is heading towards it the retinue led by the winged cupids sent by the goddess herself. There is no concern in sight. Doubt neither. It is only possible to enjoy the moment, knowing that what is now lived It will be a foretaste of the full happiness that awaits at the end of the trip.
Watteau thus contributed to the emergence of a new genre, the gallant fete (“galant party”), that what was actually celebrated was the infinite capacity of the human being to enjoy beauty, seduce and be seduced . The country atmosphere, the rich costumes and the delicate choreographies they were the main elements that were counted on to activate the device.
'Pierrot'
In the second half of the eighteenth the style languished , drifting towards an affectation that has greatly contributed to the disrepute we were talking about at the beginning. Famine came and the French Revolution and, accelerated by the guillotine, a new world emerged from the ashes of the old.
It is not that the change was really so radical, because in the long run the empires returned, and the bourgeoisie adopted as far as it could the same forms that had previously envied that dying nobility. But gallant parties, at least as Watteau had conceived them, were no longer possible. However, the island of kythera continued to receive pilgrims, and the flow still goes on , and it does not seem that it will be extinct in the future.