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Romanticism
Romanticism,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 be
seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in
general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and
against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the
irrational, 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; a
general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened
examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the
exceptional figure in general, and a focus on his passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual
creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis
upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and
ethnic 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.

Literature
Romanticism proper was preceded by several related developments from the mid-18th century on that can be termed PreRomanticism. Among such trends was a new appreciation of the medieval romance, from which the Romantic movement derives
its name. The romance was a tale or ballad of chivalric adventure whose emphasis on individual heroism and on the exotic and
the mysterious was in clear contrast to the elegant formality and artificiality of prevailing Classical forms of literature, such as the
French Neoclassical tragedy or the English heroic couplet in poetry. This new interest in relatively unsophisticated but overtly
emotional 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 Ballads
of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworths Preface to the second
edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he described poetry as the spontaneous overflow of
powerful 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 first
phase of the Romantic movement in Germany was marked by innovations in both content and
literary style and by a preoccupation with the mystical, the subconscious, and the
supernatural. A wealth of talents, including Friedrich Hlderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. and Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich
Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling, belong to this first phase. In Revolutionary France, the
vicomte de Chateaubriand and Mme de Stal were the chief initiators of Romanticism, by
virtue of their influential historical and theoretical writings.

Germaine de Stal, portrait by JeanBaptiste Isabey, 1810; in the Louvre,

Paris
Giraudon/Art Resource, New York

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

A notable by-product of the Romantic interest in the emotional were works dealing with the supernatural, the weird, and the
horrible, as in Mary Shelleys Frankenstein and works by C.R. Maturin, the Marquis de Sade, and E.T.A. Hoffmann. The second
phase of Romanticism in Germany was dominated by Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, J.J. von Grres, and Joseph von
Eichendorff.
By the 1820s Romanticism had broadened to embrace the literatures of almost all of Europe. In this later, second, phase, the
movement was less universal in approach and concentrated more on exploring each nations historical and cultural inheritance
and on examining the passions and struggles of exceptional individuals. A brief survey of Romantic or Romantic-influenced
writers would have to include Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, and the Bront sisters in England; Victor Hugo, Alfred de
Vigny, 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
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Mikhail Lermontov in Russia; Jos de Espronceda and ngel de Saavedra in Spain; Adam
Mickiewicz in Poland; and almost all of the important writers in pre-Civil War America.

Sir Walter Scott, detail of an oil

painting 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

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Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, oil on canvas by Vasily Tropinin,

1827; in the National Pushkin
Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Visual arts

his own powerful and unique visionary images.

In the 1760s and 70s a number of British artists at

home and in Rome, including James Barry, Henry
Fuseli, John Hamilton Mortimer, and John Flaxman,
began to paint subjects that were at odds with the
strict decorum and classical historical and
mythological subject matter of conventional figurative
art. These artists favoured themes that were bizarre,
pathetic, or extravagantly heroic, and they defined
their images with tensely linear drawing and bold
contrasts of light and shade. William Blake, the other
principal early Romantic painter in England, evolved

In the next generation the great genre of English Romantic landscape painting emerged in the works of J.M.W. Turner and John
Constable. These artists emphasized transient and dramatic effects of light, atmosphere, and colour to portray a dynamic natural
world capable of evoking awe and grandeur.
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In France the chief early Romantic painters were Baron

Antoine Gros, who painted dramatic tableaus of
contemporary incidents of the Napoleonic Wars, and
Thodore Gricault, whose depictions of individual
heroism and suffering in The Raft of the Medusa and in
his portraits of the insane truly inaugurated the
movement around 1820. The greatest French
Romantic painter was Eugne Delacroix, who is
notable for his free and expressive brushwork, his rich
and sensuous use of colour, his dynamic
compositions, and his exotic and adventurous subject
matter, ranging from North African Arab life to
revolutionary politics at home. Paul Delaroche,
Thodore Chassriau, and, occasionally, J.-A.-D. Ingres
represent the last, more academic phase of Romantic
painting in France. In Germany Romantic painting took
on symbolic and allegorical overtones, as in the works
of P.O. Runge. Caspar David Friedrich, the greatest
German Romantic artist, painted eerily silent and stark
landscapes that can induce in the beholder a sense of
mystery and religious awe.

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

Romanticism expressed itself in architecture primarily

through imitations of older architectural styles and
through eccentric buildings known as follies. Medieval Gothic
architecture appealed to the Romantic imagination in England and
Germany, and this renewed interest led to the Gothic Revival.

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

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Clich Muses Nationaux, Paris

Houses of Parliament, London, a complex of Gothic Revival

buildings designed by Sir Charles Barry
A.F. Kersting

Music
Musical Romanticism was marked by emphasis on originality and individuality, personal emotional expression, and freedom and
experimentation of form. Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert bridged the Classical and Romantic periods, for while their
formal musical techniques were basically Classical, their musics intensely personal feeling and their use of programmatic
elements 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 the
instrumental repertoire and by the creation of new musical forms, such as the lied, nocturne, intermezzo, capriccio, prelude, and
mazurka. The Romantic spirit often found inspiration in poetic texts, legends, and folk tales, and the linking of words and music
either programmatically or through such forms as the concert overture and incidental music is another distinguishing feature of
Romantic music. The principal composers of the first phase of Romanticism were Hector Berlioz, Frdric Chopin, Felix
Mendelssohn, and Franz Liszt. These composers pushed orchestral instruments to their limits of expressiveness, expanded the
harmonic vocabulary to exploit the full range of the chromatic scale, and explored the linking of instrumentation and the human
voice. The middle phase of musical Romanticism is represented by such figures as Antonn Dvok, Edvard Grieg, and Pyotr Ilyich
Tchaikovsky. Romantic efforts to express a particular nations distinctiveness through music was manifested in the works of the
Czechs 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 the
composers Gaetano Donizetti, Vincenzo Bellini, and Gioachino Rossini. The Italian Romantic opera was brought to the height of
its development by Giuseppe Verdi. The Romantic opera in Germany culminated in the works of Richard Wagner, who combined
and 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 is
represented by such late 19th-century and early 20th-century composers as Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, Sir Edward Elgar,
and Jean Sibelius.

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