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