| |
|
 |
Romanticism, in art, European and American
movement extending from about 1800 to 1850. Romanticism cannot
be identified with a single style, technique, or attitude, but
romantic painting is generally characterized by a highly imaginative
and subjective approach, emotional intensity, and a dreamlike
or visionary quality. Whereas classical and neoclassical art
is calm and restrained in feeling and clear and complete in
expression, romantic art characteristically strives to express
by suggestion states of feeling too intense, mystical, or elusive
to be clearly defined. Thus, the German writer Hoffmann declared
"infinite longing" to be the essence of romanticism.
In their choice of subject matter, the romantics showed an affinity
for nature, especially its wild and mysterious aspects, and
for exotic, melancholic, and melodramatic subjects likely to
evoke awe or passion.
The word romantic first became current in 18th-century English
and originally meant "romancelike," that is, resembling
the strange and fanciful character of medieval romances. The
word came to be associated with the emerging taste for wild
scenery, "sublime" prospects, and ruins, a tendency
reflected in the increasing emphasis in aesthetic theory on
the sublime as opposed to the beautiful. The British writer
and statesman Edmund Burke, for instance, identified beauty
with delicacy and harmony and the sublime with vastness, obscurity,
and a capacity to inspire terror. Also during the 18th century,
feeling began to be considered more important than reason both
in literature and in ethics, an attitude epitomized by the work
of the French novelist and philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau.
English and German romantic poetry appeared in the 1790s, and
by the end of the century the shift away from reason toward
feeling and imagination began to be reflected in the visual
arts, for instance in the visionary illustrations of the English
poet and painter William Blake, in the brooding, sometimes nightmarish
pictures of his friend, the Swiss-English painter Henry Fuseli,
and in the somber etchings of monsters and demons by the Spanish
artist Francisco de Goya. |
|
 |
|
 |
