Romantic Painting Themes and Goya’s Artistic Legacy
Romantic Painting Characteristics
- Prevalence of oil on canvas and prints; strong symbolism given to light and colors.
- Using painting as a means to express the unlimited, challenging rational order.
- Discontinuation of central perspective in favor of an indefinable space conveying universal ideas.
- Landscapes featuring the sea, mountains, and forests often carry the horizon, reflecting holy significance for the observer, but also expressing humanity’s abandonment and loneliness against the universe.
- Landscape painting served Romantics to capture processes of becoming and passing away, explaining the frequent appearance of historical elements: Gothic cathedrals, monasteries, castles, megalithic monuments, ruins, etc.
- Landscapes unfold with quirky characters.
- Vast landscapes or gigantic buildings dwarf human figures.
- Depiction of nature’s power over humanity through storms, fires, earthquakes, etc.
- Tendency towards the visionary and irrational.
- Reflection of the exaltation of feeling and individualism, searching for the intimate and subjective.
- Epic, heroic, war, legendary, historical, revolutionary, and nationalist scenes, often with a predominance of medieval aesthetics.
- Tendency towards a universalizing religious feeling, vaguely referenced by crosses, churches, monks, corpses, prayers, etc.
- Use of Christian and mythological themes, often treated in novel ways or from new perspectives.
- Critical or wondrous vision of scientific progress and industrialization.
- Nudes, sometimes accompanied by skeletons; depictions of public nudity.
- Evocation of emotion towards wilderness, mysterious islands, and reckless travel.
- Emphasis on the physical or psychic pain of characters in tragic situations.
Francisco de Goya
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828) merits special attention, not only for the exceptional quality of his painting. His work, spanning the late 18th and early 19th centuries, serves as a magnificent testament to Spain’s historical transition. He moved from depicting the pleasant life of the 18th century to confronting the problems and crises of the 19th, reflecting these changes with extraordinary sensitivity and skill.
Key Characteristics of Goya’s Work
- While his artistic dimension transcends periods and schools, owing solely to his unique personality, his art is rooted in the Spanish people – their joys, pains, habits, and weaknesses across all classes. He became the foremost observer and critic of his time, his art inseparable from its roots (*raíces*).
- Largely self-taught (*Autodidacta*), his slowly developing style moved away from the objectivity and mysticism traditional in the Spanish school, instead celebrating spontaneity.
- Free from stiffness or academic constraints, and unconcerned with fees or conventions, he achieved perfect harmony (*rapport*) in drawing (*dibujística*), color, and composition.
- He created masterpieces across many genres: mural painting, canvas works, prints, drawings, both religious and secular subjects.
- Goya exemplifies the artist open to all trends, opposing dogmatic positions.
- His immense body of work shows continuous artistic and technical progress throughout his life.
- The execution (*bill*) of his paintings became increasingly casual and free (*libre*).
- He was essentially a painter focused on color. His initially earthy palette became cleaner, filled with light, and showed growing enthusiasm for reds and vivid colors.
- Entering the 19th century, black gained crucial ground on his palette (*paleta*).
- He largely avoided naturalism and idealism in favor of realism.
- His works initially reflected Rococo life (e.g., early tapestry cartoons), but realism soon became dominant.
- Possessing an extraordinary imagination, he used satirical and humorous commentary, eventually distorting reality to revel in the monstrous and the purely fantastic (*fantástico*).
- His work is a fundamental document of Spanish history; the historical and pictorial are more intertwined in his art than in perhaps any other painter’s.