Romanticism was also inspired by the German Sturm und Drang movement Storm and Stress , which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism. This proto-romantic movement was centered on literature and music, but also influenced the visual arts. The movement emphasized individual subjectivity. Extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements.
Sturm und Drang in the visual arts can be witnessed in paintings of storms and shipwrecks showing the terror and irrational destruction wrought by nature. These pre-romantic works were fashionable in Germany from the s on through the s, illustrating a public audience for emotionally charged artwork. The Industrial Revolution also had an influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism.
While the arrival of Romanticism in French art was delayed by the hold of Neoclassicism on the academies, it became increasingly popular during the Napoleonic period. Its initial form was the history paintings that acted as propaganda for the new regime.
Since the Renaissance, history painting was considered among the highest and most difficult forms of art. History painting is defined by its subject matter rather than artistic style. History paintings usually depict a moment in a narrative story rather than a specific and static subject.
In the Romantic period, history painting was extremely popular and increasingly came to refer to the depiction of historical scenes, rather than those from religion or mythology. This generation of the French school developed personal Romantic styles while still concentrating on history painting with a political message.
Achilles Receiving the Envoys of Agamemnon by Ingres, : Ingres, though firmly committed to Neoclassical values, is seen as expressing the Romantic spirit of the times. Both of these works reflected current events and appealed to public sentiment.
Spanish painter Francisco Goya is today generally regarded as the greatest painter of the Romantic period. However, in many ways he remained wedded to the classicism and realism of his training. He also shared with many of the Romantic painters a more free handling of paint, emphasized in the new prominence of the brushstroke and impasto, which tended to be repressed in neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish. The Milkmaid of Bordeaux by Goya, ca. Compared to English Romanticism, German Romanticism developed relatively late, and, in the early years, coincided with Weimar Classicism — In contrast to the seriousness of English Romanticism, the German variety of Romanticism notably valued wit, humor, and beauty.
The early German romantics strove to create a new synthesis of art, philosophy, and science, largely by viewing the Middle Ages as a simpler period of integrated culture, however, the German romantics became aware of the tenuousness of the cultural unity they sought. Late-stage German Romanticism emphasized the tension between the daily world and the irrational and supernatural projections of creative genius. Landscape painting in Europe and America greatly increased in prominence during the 18th and particularly the 19th century.
Describe the emergence of landscape painting in France, England, Holland, and the United States during the years of the Enlightenment. Landscape painting depicts natural scenery such as mountains, valleys, trees, rivers, and forests, in which the main subject is typically a wide view and the elements are arranged into a coherent composition. During the Dutch Golden Age of painting of the 17th century, this type of painting greatly increased in popularity, and many artists specialized in the genre.
Though the second generation of Romantic poets, especially Shelley and Byron, became notorious for their subversive and salacious works, later Romantic poetry also retained many characteristics established by Blake and Wordsworth. Nature was also a source of inspiration in the visual arts of the Romantic Movement.
Breaking with the longer tradition of historical and allegorical paintings, which took scenes from history or the Bible as their principle subject matter, Romantic artists like J. Turner and John Constable — as well as print-makers and engravers like Samuel Palmer and Thomas Bewick — chose instead to depict the natural world, most notably landscapes and maritime scenes.
Romantic artists depicted nature to be not only beautiful, but powerful, unpredictable and destructive. This constituted a radical departure from Enlightenment representations of the natural world as orderly and benign.
The Romantic Movement in music originated in Beethoven, whose later works drew upon and developed the classical styles of Mozart and Haydn. These characteristics set the tone for successive generations of Romantic composers in Europe, including Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn. Romantic music was also highly innovative and technically adventurous. Romanticism may be best understood not as a movement, but as a mind-set.
The artists, poets and musicians of the Romantic period were united by their determination to use their art to convey emotion or provoke an emotional response from audiences. There was also something pioneering — almost revolutionary — about Romanticism. It involved breaking with the past, and consciously moving away from the ideas and traditions of the Enlightenment.
In so doing, Romanticism fundamentally changed the prevailing attitudes toward nature, emotion, reason and even the individual. It was in his parental home in Cockermouth, Cumbria, that William Wordsworth first fell in love with nature and literature. Wordsworth purchased this semi-open woodland in Known for its daffodils and bluebells, Wordsworth bought this land — situated behind the house he was renting at Rydall Mount — with the intention of building on it.
It was in this house that Coleridge wrote some his most famous works, including 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. The relationship between the mare, the incubus, and the woman remains suggestive and not explicit, heightening the terrifying possibilities. Fuseli's combination of horror, sexuality, and death insured the image's notoriety as a defining example of Gothic horror, which inspired such writers as Mary Shelly and Edgar Allan Poe.
The Ancient of Days served as the frontispiece to Blake's book, Europe a Prophecy , which contained 18 engravings. This image depicts Urizen, a mythological figure first created by the poet in to represent the rule of reason and law and influenced by the image of God described in the Book of Proverbs as one who "set a compass upon the face of the earth. Blake combines classical anatomy with a bold and energetic composition to evoke a vision of divine creation.
Blake eschewed traditional Christianity and felt instead that imagination was "the body of God. Europe a Prophecy reflected his disappointment in the French Revolution that he felt had not resulted in true freedom but in a world full of suffering as reflected in England and France in the s. Little known during his lifetime, Blake's works were rediscovered by the Pre-Raphaelites at the end of the 19 th century, and as more artists continued to rediscover him in the 20 th century, he has become one of the most influential of the Romantic artists.
This painting depicts Napoleon I, not yet the Emperor, visiting his ailing soldiers in in Jaffa, Syria, at the end of his Egyptian Campaign. His troops had violently sacked the city but were subsequently stricken in an outbreak of plague. Gros creates a dramatic tableau of light and shade with Napoleon in the center, as if on a stage. He stands in front of a Moorish arcade and touches the sores of one of his soldiers, while his staff officer holds his nose from the stench.
In the foreground, sick and dying men, many naked, suffer on the ground in the shadows. A Syrian man on the left, along with his servant who carries a breadbasket, gives bread to the ill, and two men behind them carry a man out on a stretcher. While Gros' teacher Jaques Louis David also portrayed Napoleon in all of his mythic glory, Gros, along with some of David's other students, injected a Baroque dynamism into their compositions to create a more dramatic effect than David's Neoclassicism offered.
Gros' depiction of suffering and death, combined with heroism and patriotism within an exotic locale became hallmarks of many Romantic paintings. The use of color and light highlights Napoleon's gesture, meant to convey his noble character in addition to likening him to Christ, who healed the sick.
Napoleon commissioned the painting, hoping to silence the rumors that he had ordered fifty plague victims poisoned. The work was exhibited at the Salon de Paris, its appearance timed to occur between Napoleon's proclaiming himself as emperor and his coronation. Content compiled and written by Rebecca Seiferle. Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Valerie Hellstein.
The Art Story. Ways to support us. Romanticism Started: c. Summary of Romanticism At the end of the 18 th century and well into the 19 th , Romanticism quickly spread throughout Europe and the United States to challenge the rational ideal held so tightly during the Enlightenment. Later Developments and Legacy. Key Artists Francisco Goya. Quick view Read more.
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