The Rococo is rightly associated with the 18th-century in France, but even within the last years of the previous century, indications of the new style appear, as in the work of the court architect, Jules-Hardouin Mansart (1646-1708), at the Trianon at Versailles, and at Marly, another royal residence. In these two buildings Mansart broke away from the stultifying use of marble and bronze, turning rather to wooden panelling and paler colours. The very scale of the Trianon indicates a desire to escape from the grandiose palace, a feeling which occasioned a number of highly significant works in the 18th-century. [Note also the influence of the earlier Fontainebleau School (1530-1610) on the evolution of the Rococo style, in particular its playful stucco carvings and other Rococo-like motifs.]
Louis XIV appears to have much encouraged this reaction, as illustrated by his famous injunction to Mansart concerning the decoration of the room of the very young Duchesse de Bourgogne in the Chateau de la Menagerie: "You must spread everywhere the feeling of youthfulness". This was in 1699, and the King still had another sixteen years to live, years which were to determine the course of art and decoration for at least the next generation, not only in France but as far afield as Sicily and Austria.
If the Rococo was specifically a French creation, many factors from further afield influenced and fostered the style, as, for example, the graphic works of such seventeenth-century Italian artists as Stefano delia Bella, who spent a long time in Paris. In his designs delicate, feathery lines enfold forms which are often purely decorative in intent, as much rococo art was to be.
Many engraved books from the last decades of the seventeenth century reveal the rococo style in embryonic form. The tight scroll-work so characteristic of Flemish and German renaissance decoration, and even of the Fontainebleau School, was liberated, making it less severe and symmetrical, and fantastic elements were introduced, unknown in the originals. This is seen in France in the furniture of Andre-Charles Boulle and in Venice in the furniture of Andrea Brustolon, where curving, intricate baroque forms began to be modified around the turn of the century.
One of the first appearances of the new style in a highly important setting is in the bedroom of Louis XIV at Versailles. This was redecorated about 1701 mainly in white and gold, relying entirely for its effect on the crisp contrasts of finely sculptured pilasters against rich areas of gilded carving, and, set above the chimney-pieces, large mirrors with rounded tops. Large areas of Venetian mirror-glass were, of course, important decorative features as early as the creation of the Galerie des Glaces, and also of the Mirror Room in the Grand Trianon: they have often been mistakenly identified solely with the advent of the rococo style, in which, indeed, they were to play an important part. The design of Louis' bedroom, however, still bears witness to a strong preference for the Classical Orders, with pilaster decoration in the typically academic seventeenth-century tradition.
One of the problems of any examination of rococo decoration is that we are uncertain as to how much of it originated from the small army of draughtsmen, whose leading figures such as Mansart kept behind the scenes, and how much from the great architects themselves. Thus, while a building or an interior passes as the work of Mansart or De Cotte, the novel details in it may just as well have sprung from a 'ghost' designer with a certain sense of fantasy and an originality which the Royal Architect passed off as his own.
These draughtsmen were in all probability familiar with books of decorative patterns - derived from the era of Renaissance art - illustrating the famous grotesques of Raphael in the Villa Madama and the Vatican Loggia. Grotesques, descended from the stucco reliefs and paintings in Roman tombs (or grottoes, hence 'grotesques'), played an important part in French decoration as early as the 1650s and later appeared in some of Lebrun's own decorations, such as those in the Galerie d'Apollon in the Louvre. They consisted of curving plant-and-scroll forms, often originating in an urn or pot and winding upwards in a regular pattern, inhabited by playful monkeys, insects and other creatures who provide a slight asymmetrical touch. The lightness of this type of decoration was borne in mind by Pierre Lepautre when he decorated the King's suite of rooms at Marly in 1699.
Lepautre's interiors at Marly are, tragically, known to us only from drawings. They show that he dispensed with the heavy, rectangular frames around doors and mirrors, replacing them with miniature curving decorations integrated into the corners of mouldings, which themselves were finer and more elegant in effect than ever before. In place of the traditional painted and gilded ceiling, Lepautre simply articulated the great white plaster expanse with a delicate gilded rosette at the centre - this was to be imitated on both ceilings and panelling throughout the rococo period.
The rococo style developed most strongly during the Regency of the Duc d'Orleans (1715-23), whose town residence was the Palais Royale. Here, licence was the rule, and the tone of rococo society was set: a society which demanded constant novelty, wit and elegance - precisely the qualities of the rococo style. Society opened its doors to people whom Louis XIV would never have accepted: the newly rich and increasingly important intellectuals. During the Regency much of the aristocracy, which had found itself confined to Versailles during Louis XIV's reign, returned to Paris and commissioned new town houses, as in the Place Vendome, where the transitional style can still be clearly seen.
Their interiors did not call for the elaborate ceiling-paintings of the previous century, and in their place a new school of painters emerged who specialized in the gently curving trumeaux (over-doors) and small-scale painted panels which form a great part of the output of (eg) Francois Boucher (1703-70). Also in constant employment from this period until the Revolution were the scupteurs, who executed the often minutely detailed carving on the boiseries, the decorated panel-framings.
It was in about 1720 that the transitional style began to give way to a clear rococo style. The term 'rococo' probably derives from the French 'rocaille', which originally referred to a type of sculptured decoration in garden design. Certainly the leading designers of the rococo style, Gilles-Marie Oppenordt, Nicolas Pineau and Juste-Aurele Meissonnier, were very much aware of it. The grotesques of the seventeenth century were now transformed into arabesques under Claude Audran, Watteau's teacher, full of a new fantasy and delicacy.
The main steps forward were made in interior decoration and painting, while little of importance happened to the appearance of the exterior, except that a certain light sophistication replaced the heaviness of the Louis XIV style, and, instead of relying on the Classical Orders, architects such as Jean Courtonne and Germain Boffrand produced buildings whose main effect lay in the subtle treatment of stonework and the skilful disposition of delicate sculpture against sophisticated rustication. In Paris, two of the best examples are the famous Hotel de Matignon of 1722-23 and the Hotel de Torcy of 1714.
In interior decoration a steady progression towards extreme elaboration is seen during the Regency, as demonstrated by the Palais Royale and Hotel d'Assy, culminating in such triumphantly sophisticated rooms as the Salon Ovale of the Hotel de Soubise in Paris (1738-39) by Boffrand, whose influence on German rococo architecture was to be considerable.
A tendency to replace the huge series of very formal apartments favoured in the Louis XIV period with smaller, more intimate rooms is also seen, as in the Petites Appartements in Versailles, where form follows function more closely. Sadly these, together with many of the greatest rococo rooms, have disappeared without trace. Apart from Paris, much fine architecture and decoration in the full-blown rococo style was effected at Nancy, where the dethroned King of Poland lived.