Romanticism

romanticism

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 * Overview **

Romanticism was a movement that began in the late 18th century as a reaction against the rigid neo-classical norms of the time. It favored emotion and human individuality over logical objectivity and a purely rational view of reality. It encompassed all the arts, all sharing the common themes of emotion and individual humanity.


 * Origins **

The Romantic style had roots in earlier Neoclassical works which showed emotional intensity sch as Benjamin West’s The Death General Wolfe. It also had origins in Medieval romances, from which it takes its name. Traditionally Romantic painting, however, began in England with artists such as John Henry Fuseli and William Blake. Both looked to the Renaissance, specifically Michelangelo, rather than to Classical sources. Fuseli rejected Enlightenment ideals of rationality by depicting intentionally irrational subjects such as the supernatural and the world of dreams, the latter exemplified in his work The Nightmare. William Blake also rejected reason in favor of the human imagination. He developed a unique and complex mythopoeia blending Classical and Anglo-Saxon mythology and Christianity. He used his cosmology to criticize conceptions of a deity based on reason. This is shown in his Elohim Creating Adam, clearly influenced by Michelangelo’s Creation of Man. Elohim is pictured as an old man, however, and Adam is being devoured by a giant worm, matter. These two works show the seeds of the romantic movement.


 * Architecture **

Romantics looked back o the Medieval period as a purer time unconstrained by Enlightenment conceptions of reason. Consequently, architectural Romanticism was embodied by the Gothic Revival style. Horace Walpole, an English politician and author, was an early advocate of this style, remodelling his house, Strawberry Hill, as if an old Gothic castle. He employed utilitarian Medieval innovations, such as crenellated battlements and turrets, for stylistic purposes. The house was built to the specifications of the medievalist fiction Walpole himself was writing. This fiction began the “Gothic” trend of writing, its origins exemplified in Strawberry Hill. Romanticism was seldom shown in architecture, however.


 * France **

Jacques-Louis David, the neo-classical master, was also the father of French Romanticism. His works, such as Napoleon Crossing the Saint-Bernard, abandons some of the neo-classical style that defined his paintings during the French Revolution in favor of dramatic composition and giving the image a sense of awe. The background of the painting is also similar to the romantic landscape with its expressive power. However, the painting shows nature’s power only to glorify Napoleon’s victory over it.

Succeeding Jacques-Louis David as Napoleon’s court painter was his student Antoine-Jean Gros. His painting Napoleon In The Plague House at Jaffa romantically depicts Napoleon as a semi-divine figure. Dramatic lighting and facial expressions show emotion in the romantic mode. Its focus on a dramatic moment and glorification of a unique individual also places it in Romanticism. It also demonstrates some of the orientalizing tendencies found in romantic works, as the ornate dress and horseshoe arches of the plague house demonstrate.

Post-Napoleon, Theodore Gericault was the leading exponent of the french Romanticism. He is immortalized for his infamous work The Raft of the ‘Medusa.’” The work depicts a group of men set adrift on a raft when they spot a rescue ship. The work is romantic in its depiction of anonymous men in a way normally reserved for mythological or historical subjects. It subverts the heroic narrative--there is nothing noble about the men’s suffering. Also supremely romantic was its clearly defined imagery revolving around death.

Following Gericault was Eugene Delacroix. His most famous work is Liberty Leading The People: July 28, 1830, depicting the events of the French Revolution of 1830. The revolution was a popular uprising over the increasingly autocratic Bourbon monarch Louis XVIII. The revolutionaries are shown again as if traditional heroes, rising forward over a mound of corpses, The work is not gloomy as is the Raft of the ‘Medusa’” but is instead shows the aftermath of a heroic battle. The group is led by an allegorical figure of Liberty, a traditional allegorical figure in the Renaissance vein. She is placed, however, in a modern context, alive in the contemporary age. Delacroix is known for using his imagination in this way.

Sculpture was occasionally used as a medium for Romanticism, as in Francois Rude’s Departure Of The Volunteers Of 1792, also known as The Marseillaise. The work was built upon the Arc de Triomphe, an arch in the ancient Roman vein. Like Liberty Leading the People, it shows a group of heroic normal men, in this case the army that fought Prussia. Again, an allegorical figure, this time a fully armored Liberty, is used and placed among modern people. The men look just as heroic as the allegorical figure, however, and are shown in the tradition of the heroic nude.


 * Spain **

Romanticism in Spain was defined by one figure, Fransisco Goya. He was a politically conscious painter, as in his most famous work, Third Of May, 1808, which depicts Napoleon’s army invading Spain. It shows the execution of a town in the wake of a street ball, with a French firing squad executing defenseless civilians, with one christlike figure emitting light as the soul counterpoint to the darkness of the rest of the work. It uses very loose brushwork and off-balance composition which mark it as Romantic, as does its subject matter. Goya does not attack the French but war itself, abstraction being a hallmark of Romanticism.


 * Romantic Landscape Painting **

One dramatic shift during the Romantic period was a shift from viewing nature as a predictable system to seeing it as more powerful than humanity and indifferent to its existence. In addition, the Romantic landscape depicts a mood rather than strictly natural features.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Caspar David Friedrich, a German Romantic, was one of the major innovators of the romantic landscape. He believed that God’s nature could be seen in the power and majesty of nature. He created many pieces such as his Nebel (Fog), which shows a small boat rowing through a thick fog. The location is wholly invented, and created merely for the overall mood and spiritual experience.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In England, Joseph Mallord William Turner viewed nature slightly differently, as an unstoppable destructive force. He used the loose brushstrokes typical of many Romantic painters such as Goya. His Snowstorm: Hannibal And His Army Crossing The Alps demonstrated his later tendency towards history painting. In the painting, a mighty storm threatens to destroy Hannibal’s mighty army, barely visible among the mighty Alps.


 * <span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Orientalizing **

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">In the Romantic period, part of the focus on human imagination was the urge to stimulate it through exotic places. Areas in the Middle East and North Africa held particular appeal, as they were close enough to Europe to visit, yet seemed full of mystery.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">One of the first European artists to travel to the Middle East was David Roberts, who visited Spain and Morocco. Following that successful trip, he visited Palestine and created a series of works based on what he say such as Gateway To The Great Temple At Baalbek. Like other Orientalist work, only the “native” people are depicted, without Western influence. It shows the native people as primitive and unable to comprehend the splendor around them.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Not all Orientalist pictures focused on the land itself. Some, such as Jean-Leon Gerome, painted scenes of “ordinary life” in the Middle East. They designed to interest the European viewer while reminding them of their superiority. Geroe frequently visited Asia Minor and Egypt, and his observations are shown in Cafe House, Cairo (Casting Bullets). It depicts a cafe house, in which a group of mercenaries are melting metal for bullets. Non-western people are often depicted as being violent in Orientalist pictures.

<span style="background-color: transparent; color: #000000; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14.6667px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Not all artists who painted Orientalist subjects travelled. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres never left Europe, yet was famous for his erotic depictions of odalisques, concubines in a sultan’s harem, such as his Large Odalisque. The picture is at the same time aloof and sexually charged, the odalisque averting the viewer’s gaze, this pose accenting the popular view of non-Western females and customs as strange yet interesting. Also enhancing this meaning is the anatomically incorrect depiction of the woman, treated in a deliberately non-classical way.