Romanticism: Cultural movement of the early 19th century

White horse, Constable

Enlightenment

EnlightenmentSociety is good, curbing

violent impulses!Society is good, curbing violent impulses!

Civilization corrupts!Civilization corrupts!

Romanticism

Romanticism

Early19c

Early19c

A Growing Distrust of Reason

A Growing Distrust of Reason

The essence of human experience is subjective and emotional.

Human knowledge is a puny thing compared to other great historical forces.

“Individual rights” are dangerous efforts at selfishness the community is more important.

The essence of human experience is subjective and emotional.

Human knowledge is a puny thing compared to other great historical forces.

“Individual rights” are dangerous efforts at selfishness the community is more important.

Romanticism; basics

• Revolt against classicism and the enlightenment• Classicism: too many rules, structure• Enlightenment: Too much emphasis on the

rational approach to truth• Primarily concerned with expressing new forms

of feeling and thought• Influence of Rousseau and the French Revolution

– Brought into question all traditional beliefs and institutions. The youth of the early 19th century felt it had to build something new or perish. This urge was the essence of the romantic temperament.

Romantic basics, cont.

• Characterized by a belief in emotional exuberance• Unrestrained imagination and spontaneity• Tremendous emotional intensity• Suicides, duels to the death• Bohemian lifestyle-long, unwashed hair, no visible

means of support• Driven by a sense of the unlimited universe and by a

yearning for the unattained, the unknown, the unknowable.

• Nature was portrayed as awesome and uncontrolled-not pristine as classics saw it.

Romantics, basics, cont.

• Idealized the middle ages

• Idealized untouched and exotic lands.– Untouched example-the Lake District in

England– Exotic lands example-Morocco

• Romanticism can be seen in the literature, art and music of the early 19th century

Romantic Literature- English poets

• William Wordsworth 1770-1850– Ode: Intimations of immortality from the

recollections of early childhood– Daffodils

• George Gordon, Lord Byron 1788-1824– Don Juan

• John Keats– Ode on a Grecian Urn

William Wordsworth 1770-1850

• WW sought inspiration from the Lake District of England

• Defied classical rules• Abandoned flowery poetic conventions for the

language of ordinary speech• Wrote of love of nature in very democratic form

which could be appreciated by everyone.• Poetry was the “spontaneous overflow of

powerful feeling recollected in tranquility”

Daffodils, Wordsworth

I wandered lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o’er vales and hills,When all at once I saw a crowd, A host of golden daffodils;Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze……And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils.

Ode: Intimations of immortality from recollections of early childhood-WW

–“There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The Earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparell’d in celestial light, The glory and freshness of a dream”

Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822

• Shelley expressed the desire of many English romantics for art itself to become more “natural”

Ode to a skylarkHail to thee, blythe spirit!Bird thou never wert-That from heaven or near it Pourest thy full heartIn profuse strains of premeditated art.

George Gordon, Lord Byron 1788-1824

• In Don Juan, Byron exhibited another side of the romantic temperament: the restless and aimless hero

• Through Byron the romantic’s continued the loss of faith in old ideas, the boredom with conventional civilization into a flirtation with life and death.

• The concept of the Byronic hero. • “On this day I complete my 36th year”• “Prometheus unbound”• “she walks in beauty”

Form: irregularly rhyming

Composition Date: July 1816

1. The Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus, in which Prometheus, chained to the Caucasian mountains and fed on by a vulture, suffers for his gift of fire to man and his defiance of Zeus, was one of Byron's favourite books. Titan. The Titans belonged to the faction of Saturn, whom his son Zeus replaced as chief of the gods. Defeated but unsubmissive, the Titans (and Prometheus in particular) were popular in the nineteenth century as symbols of revolution or resistance to tyranny

Thy Godlike crime was to be kind,36       To render with thy precepts less37       The sum of human wretchedness,38   And strengthen Man with his own mind;39   But baffled as thou wert from high,40   Still in thy patient energy,41   In the endurance, and repulse42       Of thine impenetrable Spirit,43   Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse,44       A mighty lesson we inherit:45   Thou art a symbol and a sign46       To Mortals of their fate and force;47   Like thee, Man is in part divine,48       A troubled stream from a pure source;49   And Man in portions can foresee50   His own funereal destiny;51   His wretchedness, and his resistance,52   And his sad unallied existence:53   To which his Spirit may oppose54   Itself--and equal to all woes,55       And a firm will, and a deep sense,56   Which even in torture can descry57       Its own concenter'd recompense,58   Triumphant where it dares defy,

59   And making Death a Victory.

1     She walks in beauty, like the night 2         Of cloudless climes and starry skies;3     And all that's best of dark and bright4         Meet in her aspect and her eyes:5     Thus mellow'd to that tender light6         Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

7     One shade the more, one ray the less,8         Had half impair'd the nameless grace9     Which waves in every raven tress,10       Or softly lightens o'er her face;11   Where thoughts serenely sweet express12       How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

13   And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,14       So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,15   The smiles that win, the tints that glow,16       But tell of days in goodness spent,17   A mind at peace with all below,18       A heart whose love is innocent!

Composition Date:

June 1814

1.

"She" is Byron's cousin, Mrs. Wilmot, whom he met at a party in a mourning dress of spangled black

John Keats 1795-1821

• Represented romantic belief that truth could best be discovered through intuition and that aesthetic truth was the highest kind of truth

• Keats believed in spirit as the source of poetic inspiration and identified it with the spontaneous creative power of language

• Ode on a Grecian UrnBeauty is truth, and truth beauty,-that is all ye

know on earth, and all ye need to know

William Blake 1757-1827

• The chimney sweeper

A critique of industrial England

When my mother died I was very young

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry “weep, weep, weep”

So your Chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep

Victor Hugo- French 1802-1885

• The Hunchback of Notre Dame

• Exemplified romantic fascination with fantastic characters, strange settings and human emotions

Romantic literature potpourri

• The love of the grotesque

• Victor Hugo-Hunchback of Notre Dame

• Mary Shelley- Frankenstein

Characteristics of Romanticism

Characteristics of Romanticism

The Engaged & Enraged Artist: The artist apart from society.

The artist as social critic/revolutionary.

The artist as genius.

The Engaged & Enraged Artist: The artist apart from society.

The artist as social critic/revolutionary.

The artist as genius.

Wandering Above the Sea of Fog

Caspar David Friedrich,

1818

Wandering Above the Sea of Fog

Caspar David Friedrich,

1818

Romantic Art- French

• Delacroix 1798-1863– Massacre at Chios– Liberty leading the people– Death of Sardanapalus

• Delacroix was fascinated with remote and exotic subjects; lion hunts, Sultans harem

• Gericault – Raft of the Medusa

Delacroix

“Liberty leading the People”

Delacroix, Death at Sardanapalas 1828 Death of Assyrian

King

Delacroix Algerian apartment

The Raft of the Medusa 1819 Gericault

• In 1816, a French naval vessal (La Meduse) sank en route to West Africa. The captain and senior officers took the life boats and left a makeshift raft for the 150 passengers and crew. During 13 days adrift in the Atlantic, all but 15 people died.

• Man vs. Nature

Gerricault

“Raft of the Medusa”

Delacroix

“Massacre at Chios”

Francisco Goya Third of May 1808

Romantic Art-English

• Joseph M.W. Turner 1775-1851– Depicted natures power and terror

• John Constable 1776-1837– Painted Wordsworthian landscapes

Turner “Snowstorm”

John Constable “White Horse”

John Constable, “Rainstorm”

Joseph M.W. Turner “Rain, Steam, Speed”

Romantic Music• Medium in which romanticism was most fully

realized• Classical music had held to structures • Mozart• Romantics used range of forms-broke rules• Berlioz-The creator of Romantic music• Frederick Chopin- 1810-1849 “Revolutionary etude”• Franz Liszt- 1811-1880 Great Pianist• Beethoven- Bridge between classical and romantic

music.

Romantic music

• Music built around themes

• Played up nature

• Interest in death

• Interest in the supernatural