Romanticism -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia

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Germaine de Stal, portrait by Jean-Baptiste Isabey, 1810; in the Louvre,Paris

Giraudon/Art Resource, New York

RomanticismRomanticism,attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture,criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can beseen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism ingeneral and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment andagainst 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, theirrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; ageneral exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightenedexamination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and theexceptional figure in general, and a focus on his passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individualcreator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasisupon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national andethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult,the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.

Romanticism proper was preceded by several related developments from the mid-18th century on that can be termed Pre-Romanticism. Among such trends was a new appreciation of the medieval romance, from which the Romantic movement derivesits name. The romance was a tale or ballad of chivalric adventure whose emphasis on individual heroism and on the exotic andthe mysterious was in clear contrast to the elegant formality and artificiality of prevailing Classical forms of literature, such as theFrench Neoclassical tragedy or the English heroic couplet in poetry. This new interest in relatively unsophisticated but overtlyemotional literary expressions of the past was to be a dominant note in Romanticism.

Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790s with the publication of the Lyrical Balladsof William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworths Preface to the secondedition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he described poetry as the spontaneous overflow ofpowerful feelings, became the manifesto of the English Romantic movement in poetry.William Blake was the third principal poet of the movements early phase in England. The firstphase of the Romantic movement in Germany was marked by innovations in both content andliterary style and by a preoccupation with the mystical, the subconscious, and thesupernatural. A wealth of talents, including Friedrich Hlderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang vonGoethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. and Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm HeinrichWackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling, belong to this first phase. In Revolutionary France, thevicomte de Chateaubriand and Mme de Stal were the chief initiators of Romanticism, byvirtue of their influential historical and theoretical writings.

The second phase of Romanticism, comprising the period from about 1805 to the 1830s, wasmarked by a quickening of cultural nationalism and a new attention to national origins, asattested by the collection and imitation of native folklore, folk ballads and poetry, folk danceand music, and even previously ignored medieval and Renaissance works. The revivedhistorical appreciation was translated into imaginative writing by Sir Walter Scott, who is oftenconsidered to have invented the historical novel. At about this same time English Romanticpoetry had reached its zenith in the works of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy ByssheShelley.

A notable by-product of the Romantic interest in the emotional were works dealing with the supernatural, the weird, and thehorrible, as in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and works by C.R. Maturin, the Marquis de Sade, and E.T.A. Hoffmann. The secondphase of Romanticism in Germany was dominated by Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, J.J. von Grres, and Joseph vonEichendorff.

By the 1820s Romanticism had broadened to embrace the literatures of almost all of Europe. In this later, second, phase, themovement was less universal in approach and concentrated more on exploring each nations historical and cultural inheritanceand on examining the passions and struggles of exceptional individuals. A brief survey of Romantic or Romantic-influencedwriters would have to include Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, and the Bront sisters in England; Victor Hugo, Alfred deVigny, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Stendhal, Prosper Mrime, Alexandre Dumas (Dumas Pre), and Thophile

Gautier in France; Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi in Italy; Aleksandr Pushkin and

Literature



Sir Walter Scott, detail of an oilpainting by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer,1824; in the National

Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery,London

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, oil on canvas by Richard Rothwell,first exhibited 1840; in the

AISAEverett/Shutterstock.com

Mikhail Lermontov in Russia; Jos de Espronceda and ngel de Saavedra in Spain; AdamMickiewicz in Poland; and almost all of the important writers in pre-Civil War America.



Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, oil on canvas by Vasily Tropinin,1827; in the National Pushkin

Hulton Archive/Getty Images

In the 1760s and 70s a number of British artists athome and in Rome, including James Barry, HenryFuseli, John Hamilton Mortimer, and John Flaxman,began to paint subjects that were at odds with thestrict decorum and classical historical andmythological subject matter of conventional figurativeart. These artists favoured themes that were bizarre,pathetic, or extravagantly heroic, and they definedtheir images with tensely linear drawing and boldcontrasts of light and shade. William Blake, the otherprincipal early Romantic painter in England, evolved

his own powerful and unique visionary images.

In the next generation the great genre of English Romantic landscape painting emerged in the works of J.M.W. Turner and JohnConstable. These artists emphasized transient and dramatic effects of light, atmosphere, and colour to portray a dynamic naturalworld capable of evoking awe and grandeur.

Visual arts



Pity, colour print finished in pen and watercolour by William Blake,

Courtesy of the trustees of the Tate Gallery, London; photographs, G. Robertson, A.C. Cooper Ltd.

Snow StormSteam-Boat off a Harbours Mouth, oil on canvas by J.M.W.Turner, 1842; in

Courtesy of G. Roberton, A.C. Cooper Ltd.

The Raft of the Medusa, oil on canvas by Thodore

In France the chief early Romantic painters were BaronAntoine Gros, who painted dramatic tableaus ofcontemporary incidents of the Napoleonic Wars, andThodore Gricault, whose depictions of individualheroism and suffering in The Raft of the Medusa and inhis portraits of the insane truly inaugurated themovement around 1820. The greatest FrenchRomantic painter was Eugne Delacroix, who isnotable for his free and expressive brushwork, his richand sensuous use of colour, his dynamiccompositions, and his exotic and adventurous subjectmatter, ranging from North African Arab life torevolutionary politics at home. Paul Delaroche,Thodore Chassriau, and, occasionally, J.-A.-D. Ingresrepresent the last, more academic phase of Romanticpainting in France. In Germany Romantic painting tookon symbolic and allegorical overtones, as in the worksof P.O. Runge. Caspar David Friedrich, the greatestGerman Romantic artist, painted eerily silent and starklandscapes that can induce in the beholder a sense ofmystery and religious awe.

Romanticism expressed itself in architecture primarilythrough imitations of older architectural styles and

through eccentric buildings known as follies. Medieval Gothicarchitecture appealed to the Romantic imagination in England andGermany, and this renewed interest led to the Gothic Revival.



Clich Muses Nationaux, Paris

Houses of Parliament, London, a complex of Gothic Revivalbuildings designed by Sir Charles Barry

A.F. Kersting

Musical Romanticism was marked by emphasis on originality and individuality, personal emotional expression, and freedom andexperimentation of form. Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert bridged the Classical and Romantic periods, for while theirformal musical techniques were basically Classical, their musics intensely personal feeling and their use of programmaticelements provided an important model for 19th-century Romantic composers.

The possibilities for dramatic expressiveness in music were augmented both by the expansion and perfection of theinstrumental repertoire and by the creation of new musical forms, such as the lied, nocturne, intermezzo, capriccio, prelude, andmazurka. The Romantic spirit often found inspiration in poetic texts, legends, and folk tales, and the linking of words and musiceither programmatically or through such forms as the concert overture and incidental music is another distinguishing feature ofRomantic music. The principal composers of the first phase of Romanticism were Hector Berlioz, Frdric Chopin, FelixMendelssohn, and Franz Liszt. These composers pushed orchestral instruments to their limits of expressiveness, expanded theharmonic vocabulary to exploit the full range of the chromatic scale, and explored the linking of instrumentation and the humanvoice. The middle phase of musical Romanticism is represented by such figures as Antonn Dvok, Edvard Grieg, and Pyotr IlyichTchaikovsky. Romantic efforts to express a particular nations distinctiveness through music was manifested in the works of theCzechs Antonn Dvok and Bedich Smetana and by various Russian, French, and Scandinavian composers.

Romantic opera in Germany began with the works of Carl Maria von Weber, while Romantic opera in Italy was developed by thecomposers Gaetano Donizetti, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gioachino Rossini. The Italian Romantic opera was brought to the height ofits development by Giuseppe Verdi. The Romantic opera in Germany culminated in the works of Richard Wagner, who combinedand integrated such diverse strands of Romanticism as fervent nationalism; the cult of the hero; exotic sets and costumes;expressive music; and the display of virtuosity in orchestral and vocal settings. The final phase of musical Romanticism isrepresented by such late 19th-century and early 20th-century composers as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Sir Edward Elgar,and Jean Sibelius.

"Romanticism".Encyclopdia Britannica. Encyclopdia Britannica Online.Encyclopdia Britannica Inc., 2015. Web. 12 jul. 2015.

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Romanticism -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia