Word: rococo
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...made its debut a decade ago. With Concertmaster Neville Marriner directing in 18th century style from the first desk, the 16-man ensemble achieves a dramatic precision that would do credit to Toscanini. The three Divertimenti for strings, written when Mozart was 16, are stunning miniatures in Italian rococo symphonic style. The Serenata Notturna, scored for two small orchestras plus timpani, also sparkles with classical elegance...
...upward like startled fawns. Then, of course, there is the whole mystique of style. Most congenial to the eyes of modern collectors is the gracefully severe Queen Anne style, which was developed by French Huguenots who fled across the Channel to England to escape religious persecution in 1685. The rococo elegance of mid-18th century English designers like Paul de Lamerie has an extravagant appeal of its own. The robust baroque styles of the 17th century are rarer, but in some ways the most memorable of all. Last November, two James II tankards, delicately chased with drawings of posturing Chinese...
...collection is the great black Chinese chest that London craftsmen lovingly set on legs of gilded wood. When the stateliness of the baroque era gave way to the studied insouciance of the court of Louis XV, chests took on a kind of portly gentility, as witness the gilt-trimmed rococo commode in Wickes' salon...
When Louis XVI succeeded Louis XV in 1774, the rococo was superseded by the neoclassical mode, an improbable amalgam of Roman severity and Bourbon frivolity exemplified by the small writing desk that stands between two tapestry-covered Louis XV armchairs. The desk's spare lines are in conflict with the riot of gilded tassels, leaves, garlands and mythological heads. In politics, the warring desires for republican simplicity and kingly extravagance proved even more difficult to resolve, and after the French Revolution the curios made for kings descended to commoners. A Jacques-Louis David crayon drawing of Napoleon...
...study and bedroom display a gaunt tension that clearly foreshadows the Jugendstil 30 years before its prime. Sketches for carved colonnades incorporate fantastic root-and-branch configurations that would have delighted Spain's art nouveau master, Antoni Gaudí. Ludwig's two other palaces both evoke the rococo splendors of Louis XIV of France. From Linderhof come tutti-frutti-colored, specially commissioned Sèvres porcelain, embroidered screens inspired by Boucher, and Ludwig's magnificent throne, a Beardsleyan Oriental divan backed by three haughty, blue-and-green-enameled peacocks...