Neoclassicism vs. Romanticism Goya, Goethe, Byron

Neoclassicism vs. Romanticism

Goya, Goethe, Byron

• The sleep of reason produces monsters

• The dream of reason produces monsters

Neoclassicism

• Symmetry• Proportion• Order• Clarity• Restraint

Neoclassicism

Neoclassicism

Landscape with Aeneas on Delos

Neoclassicism

• Decorum• Harmony• Restraint• Imitation of Greek and

Roman originals• Dominance of pre-

established rules

Jean-Louis David, Oath of the Horatians

Neoclassicism

• Purpose of art: to instruct by delighting

• Dominance of the moral over the aesthetic function of art.

Romanticism

J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth

Romanticism

Caspar Friedrich, Abbey in the Oak Wood

Romanticism

Romantic Garden

Romanticism

• Prevalence of the individual, subjective, personal, spontaneous

• Emphasis on the power of imagination, emotion, irrationality

• Search for the transcendental• Appreciation for the power/beauty of

untamed nature

Romanticism• Emotion over reason, senses over the intellect• Preoccupation with genius, the individual, the

exceptional• Artist as the supreme creator• Rejection of rules, importance of experimentation• Imagination as way to reach transcendental

experience/truth• Predilection for the exotic, mysterious, weird,

occult, monstrous, diseased, satanic• Search for national, autochthonous origins

(resurgence of medieval, revaluation of Shakespeare, Calderón, Lope de Vega)

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes 1746-1828

His life is described as having four stages:

• Until 1793 – slow rise to maturity

• 1793 – illness that left him deaf and released pent up creative forces within him

• 1808 – Napoleonic invasion and Goya’s responses to the war.

• 1819 – a second illness, he retires to the Quinta del Sordo, the Black Paintings

First Stage: Tapestry Cartoons

• General impression?• Calm, peace, harmony• Lack of emotion• Beauty, grace• Balance

1808 – 1814 Napoleon and the War of Independence

The 3rd of May, 1808

The disasters of the war

The Colossus – between 1808-1812

• Ambiguity of giant– Ignorant, arrogant prince?

(Ferdinand VII)• Mountains= the powerful• Donkey=nobility

– Hercules who rises up against Napoleon?

– Buried to above the knees– Back to spectator– Closed eyes

Black Paintings– 1820-1823

The witches’ Sabbath

Saturn eating his son

Prometheus

• Rebel god (Titan)• Stole fire from Zeus

and gave it to man• Chained to a rock• Eagle ate his liver

each day• 13 generations later,

Heracles killed the eagle

Prometheus, Gustave Moreau

Some Romantic works based on the Prometheus myth

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Prometheus” (1774)

• Ludwig van Beethoven, opus 43, Creatures of Prometheus (ballet), overture (1801)

• Lord Byron, “Prometheus” • Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1820)• Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

or the Modern Prometheus (1818, 1831)

Johan Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

• Perhaps the most important German writer (poet, essayist, dramatist, novelist)

• Collected works form around 144 volumes

• Most influential works: The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), Wilhem Meister (1821-1829), Faust (Part I, 1808, Part II 1832)

• A principal figure of the Sturm und Drang movement

Portrait by Eugene Delacroix

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

• Perhaps the best known of the English Romantic poets

• Main works:– Childe Harold’s

Pilgrimage (1812-1818)

– Manfred. Dramatic Poem. (1817)

– Don Juan (1819-1824)

Byronic hero

• Exiled or solitary wanderer

• Moody, passionate• Superior intellect• Heightened sensitivity• Rejects traditional

values and moral codes

Goethe and Byron’s “Prometheus”

• In groups of three discuss the following and choose an image that you feel is particularly powerful to exemplify each:

1. How the Gods (Zeus, in particular) are characterized.

2. How Prometheus is characterized.3. What stage of the Promethean myth is

presented.4. How the attitudes of the two poets differ.