Introducing Romanticism

Romanticism engraves great enemy when it comes to artistic movements, if you can have an artistic movement as an enemy. But romanticism rose from a desire for freedom of thought, feeling, action, and speech, as well as political freedom. Now, it's interesting because you would think that these are ideas that will come out of the French Revolution, and in part they do, but Napoleon gets in the way of that from a political perspective. So romanticism really develops just shortly thereafter. Now, romantic artists believe that the path to freedom was through the imagination rather than reason. It's very anti-enlightenment. Feeling is more important than logic to them. The heart taking a key role over the head. They will focus on the medieval world, and in fact they create many of the ideas of the medieval world that we have today, even though most of them are historically massively inaccurate. But they focus on the medieval world. They also focus on the sublime, and this is where many of our ideas of chivalry and honor will come from. We also get a taste for the morbid, the fantastic, the occult, magic from a simpler time. Again, the world is getting more complicated, and so they're looking to the simplicity, in this case of the Middle Ages, or the simplicity of an earlier time, a time of magic. And this should sound familiar because it sounds vaguely like the natural art that we saw Chardin doing, and Rousseau's ideas that somehow civilization, society, the Enlightenment will corrupt the human spirit. So we start to go back to stories. We start to go back to things that are fictional, and really that's romanticism. They will depict things that are fictional, things that you cannot in reality touch. They're making the intangible, dreams and nightmares for example, tangible. They're giving us a sense of human psychology that has never really been captured in the past, and they're doing all of this in the early 19th century.