All About Romanticism
Romanticism Simplified
Romanticism’s central notion is that reason alone cannot explain everything. Romantics sought deeper, often subliminal appeals in response to the Enlightenment’s worship of logic. As a result, the Romantics had a different perspective than the Enlightenment intellectuals.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe, Romanticism (the Romantic era or Romantic period) was a movement, or style of art, literature, and music. The movement was most visible in the arts, particularly music and literature. It did, however, have a significant impact on historiography, education, and natural history.
Summary of Romanticism
Romanticism swiftly expanded throughout Europe and the United States towards the end of the 18th century and far into the 19th, challenging the Enlightenment’s logical ideal. The artists highlighted the importance of sensation and emotions in understanding and experiencing the universe, rather than only reason and order. In the never-ending pursuit for human rights and liberty, Romanticism praised individual imagination and intuition. Avant-garde movements were propelled by its notions of the artist’s creative, subjective capabilities far into the twentieth century.
Romanticists found expression in a variety of areas, including literature, music, art, and architecture. The far-reaching worldwide movement promoted originality, creativity, and creativity, therefore creating a range of styles within the movement, in contrast to the sombre Neoclassicism approved by most nations’ academies. Additionally, many Romanticists stressed the individual’s connection to nature and an idealised past in an effort to stop the tide of rising industrialisation.
- Romanticism supported the fight for freedom and equality, as well as the promotion of justice, in part because of the idealism of the French Revolution. Painters began incorporating current events and atrocities into dramatic compositions that competed with the more staid Neoclassical historical paintings recognised by national academies.
- To oppose the overemphasis on rational reasoning, Romanticism valued individuality and subjectivity. Artists began to experiment with diverse emotional, psychological, and mood states. The focus on the hero and genius resulted in new perceptions of the artist as a bright creator free of academic dictates and tastes. “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.” wrote French poet Charles Baudelaire.
- Various Romantic artists shifted their focus to nature and plein air painting, or painting outside in the open air, in many nations. Terrain painting was elevated to a new, more respectful level by works based on attentive study of the landscape, as well as the sky and atmosphere. While some painters focused on humanity as one with and a part of nature, others depicted nature’s strength and unpredictability, generating in the viewer a sense of the sublime – wonder coupled with horror.
- Following the American Revolution, the growth of freshly discovered nationalism swept many countries, and Romanticism was strongly associated with it. Romanticists offered the visual images that further fueled national identity and pride by emphasising local folklore, traditions, and landscapes. Romantic artists blended the ideal with the concrete, imbuing their works with a call to spiritual regeneration that would usher in a new era of liberty and freedoms.
Why is it called romanticism?
Pre-Romanticism refers to a group of connected developments that began in the mid-eighteenth century and lasted until the mid-nineteenth century. A fresh appreciation of mediaeval romance, from which the Romantic movement gets its name, was one of these movements.
Everything About Romanticism
The Beginnings
In the late 1700s, the critics August and Friedrich Schlegal coined the word “romantische Poesie,” which meant “romantic poetry” (“romantic poetry”). Following the publication of her account of her German travels in 1813, Madame de Stal, a prominent figure in French intellectual life, popularised the word in France. The “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” and the “romantic harp” were contrasted in 1815 by English poet William Wordsworth, who became a leading voice of the Romantic movement and believed that poetry should be “classic lyre.” The artists who identified as members of the movement shared a state of mind or attitude toward art, nature, and mankind, but they did not adhere to any particular principles or doctrines. Romanticism became a major art movement throughout Europe by the 1820s, defying established social order, religion, and morality.
Romanticism in Literature
The German movement Sturm und Drang, which means “storm and stress.” was an early forerunner of Romanticism. From the 1760s through the 1780s, it was largely a literary and musical movement, but it had a significant impact and effect on public and creative consciousness. The movement was named after Friedrich Maxmilian Klinger’s play Romanticism (1777), which emphasised emotional extremes and subjectivity.
The most prominent proponent of the movement was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a German writer and statesman whose work The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) became a cultural sensation. The novel’s popularity caused what became known as “Werther Fever,” as young men adopted the protagonist’s clothing and mannerisms. The novel depicted the emotionally anguished storey of a young artist who, in love with the woman who is engaged and then married to the artist’s friend, commits suicide. There have even been some copycat suicides, and the literature has been banned in countries such as Denmark and Italy. Goethe himself rejected the novel, subsequently abandoning all Romantic associations in favour of a conventional approach.
After the publication of his Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), the British poet Lord Gordon Byron became a celebrity in the 1800s, and the phrase “Byronic hero,” was established to describe the character of the lone and brooding genius divided between his finest and worst attributes.
Romanticism in Art
Various academics have named the English poet and artist William Blake and the Spanish painter Francisco Goya the “fathers” of Romanticism because of their focus on subjective vision, the power of the imagination, and a darkly critical political consciousness in their works. Blake, who mostly worked with engravings, published his own pictures alongside his poems to depict his vision of a new world, creating fantastical realms full of gods and powers while fiercely criticising industrial civilization and individual enslavement. In works like his Black Paintings (1820-23), Goya explored the fear of irrationality, conveying the terrifying forces that underpin human existence and events.
Antoine-Jean Gros inspired painters Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, who later led and expanded the Romantic movement in France. Gros heightened the emotional depth and misery of the event in works like Bonaparte Visits the Plague Stricken in Jaffa (1804), which chronicled Napoleon Bonaparte’s military adventures.
Romanticism as a Revolutionary Movement
Romanticism, which arose mostly during the French Revolution, was associated with a revolutionary and rebellious attitude. The Enlightenment’s rule of reason and law were seen as restricting and mechanical. As a result, artists began to depict scenes of uprising and protest. The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), based on a true storey of a shipwreck, was meant by Géricault as a critique of the French government’s practises that led to the disaster. Turner’s The Slave Ship (1840) was also meant to persuade the British government to pursue a more vigorous anti-slavery campaign. Liberty Leading the People (1830) by Delacroix was made to promote the rebellion of the people of Paris against Charles X’s restoration regime. Delacroix also depicted the Greek struggle for freedom from the Ottoman Empire in a number of paintings. His Scène des massacres de Scio (Massacre at Chios) (1824) portrays survivors of a massacre that happened when the Ottoman Empire invaded a rebellious Greek island and massacred or enslaved the majority of the population.
Key Art in Romanticism
The Nightmare
By Henry Fuseli
A ravished lady is sprawled across a couch with a little, hairy incubus sitting on top of her, looking menacingly at the spectator in Fuseli’s weird and gruesome artwork. Behind her, a fascinating black horse with white eyes and flared nostrils emerges from behind luscious crimson drapes. We appear to be examining both the impact and the substance of the woman’s dream.
The Third of May 1808
By Francisco Goya
The public execution of numerous Spaniards by Napoleonic forces is shown in this remarkable masterpiece. A guy in a white shirt holds out his arms as he kneels and confronts the firing squad on the left, lighted up against a hill. Several guys form a ring around him, their faces and body language indicating a storm of passion. A number of the dead lie near them on the ground, as do a group of individuals to their right, all with their faces buried in their hands, knowing they will be next. The firing squad, creating a single faceless mass on the right, aims their guns. Into the two groups, a big square lantern divides the scene between shadowy executioners and victims.
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog
An aristocratic man ventures out onto a rocky cliff and views the area before him, his back to the spectator in this artwork. Tall pinnacles of rocks tower out of swirling clouds of fog, and a beautiful peak on the left and a rock formation on the right fill the horizon. Many of Friedrich’s landscapes feature a lone man amid a vast landscape, resembling a Byronic hero, who dominates and overlooks the scene.
Information Citations
En.wikipedia.org, https://en.wikipedia.org/.
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