Romanticism: A 19th-Century Revolution in Art and Thought
Romanticism was an artistic, political, social, and ideological revolution. Many of its principles, such as freedom, individualism, democracy, and nationalism, are still important today. Above all, it was a cry of freedom. Individualism, the conversion of privacy into a subject, the subjective representation of the landscape, and the exaltation of the people are some of the core principles of the new sensibility.
Romanticism was broadcast with the momentum of a revolution. The longing for freedom is reflected in various works of the period, such as Delacroix’s paintings or Byron’s poems. The liberation movements of peoples led to great enthusiasm. The first period of Romanticism took place in parallel with Neoclassicism, or rather in opposition to this trend. Indeed, where Neoclassicism proposes an ideal of beauty, rationalism under the line, the cult of classical antiquity, and the Mediterranean, Romanticism opposes and promotes heart, passion, the irrational, the imaginary, disorder, excitement, color, and the cult of the brushstroke, the Middle Ages, and the mythologies of northern Europe.
This explosion of freedom in the artistic world was not imposed without resistance. We found a new human type, which involved a different relationship between art and society. The artist ceased to be a servant of power and supported efforts to emancipate the academic directions.
Romantic painting rejected neoclassical conventions, jumping over them and linking to the values of Baroque painting. Its characteristic signs are:
- The consciousness of self as an autonomous entity and, against the universality of reason in the eighteenth century, equipped with individual skills and variables such as fantasy and feeling.
- The primacy of the creative genius of the Universe itself, the poet as a demiurge.
- Evaluation of difference compared to what is usually a strong nationalistic tendency.
- Liberalism against despotism.
- Originality in the classical tradition and relevance to the charges. Each man must show what makes him unique.
- Creativity in neoclassical imitation.
- The work imperfect, unfinished, and open in front of the work perfect, completed, and closed.
Romantic Themes
Egocentrism
The soul of man is his enemy within, identifiable with an incurable obsession for the impossible, which deprives the individual of the enjoyment of life, causing it to be adverse to him. The romantic soul is not given from outside the individual, but it is created when one is aware of their feelings. It makes the individual unique and universal so that the universe is conceived only from the knowledge of himself, for man is the image of the Macrocosm. This largely self-centeredness refers to Fichte: “The Self is the only existing reality, as there are no more objects than those of which you are aware. You yourself are your own purpose.” Therefore, only the self is real, is the absolute, and poetry can make sensitive and communicative experience. It is represented as the soul and representation of the inner world in its entirety. The poet’s soul and universe. Romantic egotism has its roots in Kantian philosophy and transcendental idealism. Kant placed the center of gravity of philosophy in man himself and valued feeling for the act of knowing. And Schelling, with his philosophy of nature, gave vent to Fichte’s destructive circularity because the world is just becoming a mirror that I ever presented itself to his own loneliness.
Freedom
The realm of absolute freedom is the romantic ideal, the principle of all romantic ethics. Formal freedom in art is understood as a need for individuals to explore the outside world and to ensure communication with the One-All in a progressive march towards infinity. The romantic is conceived as a free being, which manifests as a desire to be and a seeker of truth. Laws cannot accept any authority. Many Romantics inherited the crisis of European consciousness that the Enlightenment led to the question, on behalf of reason, of religious dogmas.
Love and Death
Romantic love is associated with death, as in Goethe’s Werther. Romantic love attracts as a means of knowledge, as pure feeling, faith in life, and the summit of art and beauty. But love grows his thirst for infinity. In the love object, a further dimension of this fusion of the One and All is cast, which is their main objective. But harmony is not achieved in love. Romantic love is love for love itself, and he rushes to his death and wants to make it, discovering in it a principle of life, and the possibility of turning death into life: the death of love is life, and life without love is death. In love, all the romantic rebellion is embodied: “All the passions end in tragedy, everything ends up dying is limited, all poetry is something tragic” (Novalis).
Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863)
Eugène Delacroix is undoubtedly the center of the French Romantic movement. He trained at the workshop of the neoclassical Guérin, still there with Géricault. From a very young age, he showed preferences for Rubens and the Venetians. In 1822, the Salon accepted his work Dante’s Boat, causing a sharp dispute over this official decision. Writers and journalists came to his defense. A similar phenomenon was repeated in 1824 when he presented The Massacre of Chios, inspired by the Greek War of Independence against Turkish power. The moving and dramatic color abutments are notes of this and the rest of his works, as well as aspects of English landscape painting. During thirty years, he was the undisputed master of Romanticism. His success was repeated with The Death of Sardanapalus and especially with Liberty Leading the People, a work of patriotic and emotional argument. In his biography, from 1832, a period of Muslim Oriental themes stands out after a trip to Morocco by the painter. From a technical point of view, his palette was constantly evolving. Before 1820, he abandoned earthy colors and replaced them with intense and pure ones, leading to an exaltation of the most potent (yellow, orange, red, blue, green, yellow-green). But color is for him only a form of eloquence, a way of emphasizing the gestures of the message and jubilant compositions.