Short answers, pulled from the story.
Rococo is a Western style of architecture, art, and decoration that emerged in France in the 1730s as a reaction against the heavy grandeur of the Louis XIV style. It is characterized by extensive ornamentation, fluid curves, asymmetry, pastel colors, and a smaller scale designed to foster intimacy. It is often regarded as the final expression of the Baroque movement.
The word rococo was coined as a satirical derivation of the French word rocaille by the Neoclassical painter Pierre-Maurice Quays, who lived from 1777 to 1803. It first appeared in print in 1825 as a pejorative for decoration deemed out of style. By 1829, the author Stendhal used it as a more neutral historical descriptor, and art historians accepted it as a legitimate term by the mid-19th century.
The Wieskirche, designed by Dominikus Zimmermann and built between 1745 and 1754, is among the most celebrated Bavarian Rococo pilgrimage churches. The Würzburg Residence, built between 1720 and 1744 and designed by Balthasar Neumann, features a ceremonial stairway with ceiling murals by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo painted from 1750 to 1753. The Amalienburg pavilion in Munich, built between 1734 and 1739 by François de Cuvilliés, is considered one of the first Rococo buildings in Germany.
Antoine Watteau established the Fete galante genre with The Embarkation for Cythera in 1717. After his death in 1721, François Boucher, who lived from 1703 to 1770, became the dominant figure and the favourite painter of Madame de Pompadour. Jean Honoré Fragonard, born in 1732, extended the Rococo sensibility into the later decades of the 18th century.
Rococo declined in France due to several intersecting forces. The archaeological discoveries at Herculaneum in 1738 and Pompeii in 1748 redirected taste toward classical antiquity. Madame de Pompadour sent her brother Abel-François Poisson de Vandières on a two-year study tour to Italy; he returned and, as director general of the King's Buildings, turned official French architecture toward Neoclassicism. Critics including Charles-Nicolas Cochin and Jacques-François Blondel attacked the style's excess, and by 1785 Rococo had been replaced in France by the austerity of Neoclassical artists such as Jacques-Louis David.
Rococo fashion was defined by pastel colors, elaborate frills, ruffles, bows, and lace, in direct contrast to the dark, heavy fabrics of the preceding Baroque era. The robe a la Française, featuring a tight bodice, low neckline, wide panniers, and lavish lace trim, became the signature women's garment of the period. Panniers, wide hoops worn under skirts to extend the hips sideways, could reach up to 16 feet in diameter for special occasions and derived originally from the 17th-century Spanish guardainfante.