Neo-classicism in the context of "Jugendstil"

Joseph-Benoît Suvée (3 January 1743 – 9 February 1807) was a Flemish painter strongly influenced by French neo-classicism.

François Rude (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃swa ʁyd]; 4 January 1784 – 3 November 1855) was a French sculptor, best known for the Departure of the Volunteers, also known as La Marseillaise on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. (1835–36). His work often expressed patriotic themes, as well as the transition from neo-classicism to romanticism.

The Return to Order (French: retour à l'ordre) was a European art movement following the First World War that rejected the extreme avant-garde art of the years up to 1918 and emphasized the classical ideals of order and rationality. The movement is often thought to be a reaction to the war, though strands of the Return to Order began before its outbreak, such as the Noucentista movement in Spain. Futurism, which had praised machinery, dynamism, violence and war, was rejected by most of its adherents. The return to order was associated with a revival of classicism and representational painting. Among the many artists who participated in the movement were notable figures in modernism such as Picasso and Braque, Matisse, Cezanne, Renoir, and much of the Italian Futurists.

Artists of the Return to Order placed high emphasis on the classical ideals of rationality, quality of line, illusionism and order, in opposition to the preceding decades of irrationality and emotional turbulence which characterised the artworks of the avant-garde. Although taking classicism as its foundational inspiration, artists were keen to re-interpret the essence of classical art through the lens of modernism, and a link was often made between the idealism of the classical period and the “Plastic-like” art of the modern era. Many of the works made during the period display modernist tendencies alongside classical subjects and techniques.

A hemistich (/ˈhɛmɪstɪk/; via Latin from Greek ἡμιστίχιον, from ἡμι- "half" and στίχος "verse") is a half-line of verse, followed and preceded by a caesura, that makes up a single overall prosodic or verse unit. In Latin and Greek poetry, the hemistich is generally confined to drama. In Greek tragedy, characters exchanging clipped dialogue to suggest rapidity and drama would speak in hemistichs (in hemistichomythia). The Roman poet Virgil employed hemistichs in the Aeneid to indicate great duress in his characters, where they were incapable of forming complete lines due to emotional or physical pain.

In neo-classicism, the hemistich was frowned upon (e.g. by John Dryden), but Germanic alliterative verse employed the hemistich as a basic component of verse. In Old English and Old Norse poetry, each line of alliterative verse was divided into an "a-verse" and "b-verse" hemistich with a strong caesura between. In Beowulf, there are only five basic types of hemistich, with some used only as initial hemistichs and some only as secondary hemistichs. Furthermore, Middle English poetry also employed the hemistich as a coherent unit of verse, with both the Pearl Poet and Layamon using a regularized set of principles for which metrical (as well as alliterative) forms were allowed in which hemistich position.