Eclecticism in art

Eclecticism describes a practice of borrowing and combining a variety of styles from different historical or cultural sources within a single work, rather than adhering to one unified style. The term was first applied by the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann to the Carracci family of painters, who blended Renaissance and classical elements, and the eighteenth century painter Sir Joshua Reynolds later advocated the same approach. Eclecticism spans architecture, painting, the graphic arts and the decorative arts, and music uses the related term polystylism for a comparable mixing of idioms. In architecture the eclectic approach became especially important in the mid to late nineteenth century, when architects freely combined historical styles such as Gothic, Renaissance and Classical forms in the same building, and it reemerged as an influence in architecture again in the late twentieth century.