Rococo, style in interior design, the decorative arts, painting, architecture, and sculpture that originated in Paris in the early 18th century but was soon adopted throughout France and later in other countries, principally Germany and Austria. It is characterized by lightness, elegance, and an exuberant use of curving natural forms in ornamentation. The word Rococo is derived from the French word rocaille, which denoted the shell-covered rock work that was used to decorate artificial grottoes.
Excellent examples of French Rococo are the Salon de Monsieur le Prince (completed 1722) in the Petit Château at Chantilly, decorated by Jean Aubert, and the salons (begun 1732) of the Hôtel de Soubise, Paris, by Germain Boffrand. The Rococo style was also manifested in the decorative arts. Its asymmetrical forms and rocaille ornament were quickly adapted to silver and porcelain, and French furniture of the period also displayed curving forms, naturalistic shell and floral ornament, and a more elaborate, playful use of gilt-bronze and porcelain ornamentation.
Rococo painting in France began with the graceful, gently melancholic paintings of Antoine Watteau, culminated in the playful and sensuous nudes of François Boucher, and ended with the freely painted genre scenes of Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Rococo portraiture had its finest practitioners in Jean-Marc Nattier and Jean-Baptiste Perroneau. French Rococo painting in general was characterized by easygoing, lighthearted treatments of mythological and courtship themes, rich and delicate brushwork, a relatively light tonal key, and sensuous coloring. Rococo sculpture was notable for its intimate scale, its naturalism, and its varied surface effects.
From France the Rococo style spread in the 1730s to the Catholic German-speaking lands, where it was adapted to a brilliant style of religious architecture that combined French elegance with south German fantasy as well as with a lingering Baroque interest in dramatic spatial and plastic effects. Some of the most beautiful of all Rococo buildings outside France are to be seen in Munich—for example, the refined and delicate Amalienburg (1734–39), in the park of Nymphenburg, and the Residenztheater (1750–53; rebuilt after World War II), both by François de Cuvilliés. Among the finest German Rococo pilgrimage churches are the Vierzehnheiligen (1743–72), near Lichtenfels, in Bavaria, designed by Balthasar Neumann, and the Wieskirche (begun 1745–54), near Munich, built by Dominikus Zimmermann and decorated by his elder brother Johann Baptist Zimmermann. Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff and Johann Michael Fischer also created notable buildings in the style, which utilized a profusion of stuccowork and other decoration.
Excellent examples of French Rococo are the Salon de Monsieur le Prince (completed 1722) in the Petit Château at Chantilly, decorated by Jean Aubert, and the salons (begun 1732) of the Hôtel de Soubise, Paris, by Germain Boffrand. The Rococo style was also manifested in the decorative arts. Its asymmetrical forms and rocaille ornament were quickly adapted to silver and porcelain, and French furniture of the period also displayed curving forms, naturalistic shell and floral ornament, and a more elaborate, playful use of gilt-bronze and porcelain ornamentation.
