Louis XVI style

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From 1775 to 1790.

This style marks the return to the “purity” of the arts of Antiquity. Artists created a neo-Classical style based on fanciful ideas of Ancient Greece, because at the time, Greece was an inaccessible Turkish territory, and only a few European archaeologists traveled there. However their surveys fired the public’s imagination: people dined “à la grecque” (Greek style), dressed “à la grecque” and built gardens with ruins “à la grecque”. The dominant of the style is straight lines and the use of an Antique repertoire of forms, but here through the influence of philosophers Rousseau and Diderot, nature and sensitivity became central to the style.

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