The Age of Romanticism
An Age of Passion, Rebellion, Individuality, Imagination, Intuition,
Idealism, and Creativity
The Age of RomanticismSeveral centuries B.C., Plato
described humans as a careful balance of reason, passions, and appetites, with reason as the guide. The Age of Reason elevated reason, but perhaps suppressed passions too much. For some, the emphasis on reason had gotten out of balance with the rest of human nature.
Reason
Age of Reason v. Age of Romanticism
• Descartes: “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I exist.)
• Rousseau: “Exister, pour nous, c’est sentir” (For us, to exist is to feel.)
Qualities of Romanticism• Love of Nature• Idealization of Rural Living• Faith in Common People• Emphasis on Freedom and Individualism• Spontaneity, intuition, feeling, imagination,
wonder• Passionate individual religiosity• Life after death; Organic view of the World
QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM
Love of Nature
“Are not the mountains, waves, and skies, a part / Of me and my soul, as I of them?” Byron
“[A mountain is] the type of a majestic intellect, . . . There I beheld the emblem of a giant mind that feeds upon infinity.” Wordsworth
Naturein the raw, wildstate.
Awe-inspiring.
Sublime.
CasperFriedrich
The Wandererabove theMists
1817-8
Divine.
John Constable Seascape w/ Rain Cloud
QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM
• Idealization of rural living
“I met a little Cottage Girl: / She was eight years old, she said; / Her hair was thick with many a curl / That clustered round her head. / She had a rustic, woodland air, / An she was wildly clad: / Her eyes were fair, and very fair; / --Her beauty made me glad.” Wordsworth
Idealization of rural living
Millet: Gleaners
The exaltationof a simplehonest life
Jean-FrancoisMillet
WomanBaking Bread1853-4
Exotic. Primitive.
Marie-GuillemineBenoist
Portrait ofa Negress
Paul GauginMiraculousSource
The Exotic
Arab Being attacked by a Lion
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres Le Grande Odalisque 1814
Turkish Harem Girl
The Exotic
Algerian Women
Theodore Chasseriau
Cossack woman
The Exotic
QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM
• Faith in Common People
“For there’s not a man that lives who hath not known his god-like hours” Wordsworth
Man is as “a god, though in the germ.” Browning
HonoreDaumier1862--realism
The Common People
An Orphan
Faith in Common People
GustaveCourbet1849
QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISMEmphasis on Freedom and Individualism
–Political freedom--American and French Revolution(liberty, equality, fraternity); antislavery and women’s suffrage movements–“Men of England, wherefore plough / For the lords who lay ye low? / Wherefore weave with toil and care / The rich robes your tyrants wear? . . . . . . . . . . . Wherefore, Bees of England, forge / Many a weapon, chain, and scourge, / . . . . . . / Sow seed,--but let no tyrant reap; / Find wealth,--let no imposter heap;” Shelley–“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.” Thoreau
Commoners seeking their rights.
EugeneDelacroix
Liberty Leading the People
TheodoreGericault
The Raft of the Medussa - 1818
Francisco de Goya Execution of the Citizensof Madrid, 3 May 1808
1814
QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM
Spontaneity, intuition, feeling, imagination, wonder–“Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.” Blake–“[Poetry] is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” and is put into art “from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Wordsworth
QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM
Passionate individual religiosity–Protestant view of each man his own intermediary with Christ–Transcendentalism–“Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d Body is a portion of Soul discern’d by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” William Blake
QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM
• Life after death
• Organic view of the world
Delacroix Dante and Virgil in Hell 1822
William Waterhouse The Lady of Shallot
Romanticism: A Poetic Age• Wordsworth-- [Poetry is] the spontaneous
overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility.
• Hazlitt--[poetry is] the language of imagination and the passions.
• Shelley--[poetry redeems from decay] the visitations of the divine in man.
• Keats--[If poetry] comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.
Romanticism: A Poetic Age• Popular forms: blank verse, the ballad, the
short lyric, Rime Royal stanzas, Spenserian stanzas, the sonnet
• Meter: lines were often enjambed, loose, with a free use of caesura and other spontaneous breaks in patterns.
• “. . . spinning still/ The rapid line of motion, then at once/ Have I, reclining back upon my heels,/ Stopped short; yet still the solitary cliffs/ Wheeled by me -- . . .” (Wordsworth-- “The Prelude”)
Gothic Models Replace Greco-Roman Architecture
Flying Buttresses—back of Notre Dame
Gothic Architecture
St. Paul’s Church---Princeton
Gothic Architecture
Princeton University Chapel
Romantic Music