Romanticism

SOURCE:
• The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica

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 Enlightenmentand 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.

Romanticism proper was preceded by several related developments from the mid-18th
century on that can be termed Pre-Romanticism. 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. Wordsworth’s “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
movement’s 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 Hölderlin, 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 Staël were the chief initiators of
Romanticism, by virtue of their influential historical and theoretical writings.
 Germaine de Staël, portrait by Jean-Baptiste Isabey, 1810; in the Louvre, ParisGiraudon/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.

Sir Walter Scott, detail of an oil painting by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, 1824; in the National Portrait Gallery, LondonCourtesy of
The National Portrait Gallery, London

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 Shelley’s 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 Görres, and Joseph von Eichendorff.
 Shelley, Mary WollstonecraftMary Wollstonecraft Shelley, oil on canvas by Richard Rothwell, first exhibited 1840; in the
National Portrait Gallery, London.© AISA—Everett/Shutterstock.com

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 nation’s 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 Brontë sisters in England; Victor Hugo, Alfred de
Vigny, Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de Musset, Stendhal, Prosper
Mérimée, Alexandre Dumas (Dumas Père), and Théophile Gautier in
France; Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi in Italy; Aleksandr Pushkin
and Mikhail Lermontov in Russia; José de Espronceda and Ángel de Saavedra in
Spain; Adam Mickiewicz in Poland; and almost all of the important writers in pre-Civil
War America.

Pushkin, Aleksandr SergeyevichAleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, oil on canvas by Vasily Tropinin, 1827; in the National Pushkin
Museum, St. PetersburgHulton Archive/Getty Images
Visual Arts

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 his own powerful
and unique visionary images.

Blake, WilliamPity, colour print finished in pen and watercolour by William Blake, 1795; in the Tate Collection, London.Courtesy
of the trustees of the Tate, London; photographs, G. Robertson, A.C. Cooper Ltd.

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.
In France the chief early Romantic painters were Baron Antoine Gros, who painted
dramatic tableaus of contemporary incidents of the Napoleonic Wars, and Théodore
Géricault, 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 Eugène 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, Théodore
Chassériau, 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.
 The Raft of the Medusa, oil on canvas by Théodore Géricault, c. 1819; in the Louvre, Paris. 491 × 716 cm.Fine Art Images—
Heritage Images/age fotostock

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.

Houses of Parliament, London, a complex of Gothic Revival buildings designed by Sir Charles Barry and Augustus Welby
Northmore Pugin, 1837–60.A.F. Kersting

Music
Excerpt from Violin Concerto in D Major, Opus 61, by Ludwig van Beethoven, with a
pianist playing the orchestra's part.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Musical Romanticism was marked by emphasis on originality and individuality,
personal emotional expression, and freedom and experimentation of form. Ludwig van
Beethoven and Franz Schubertbridged the Classical and Romantic periods, for while
their formal musical techniques were basically Classical, their music’s intensely
personal feeling and their use of programmatic elements provided an important model
for 19th-century Romantic composers.
Excerpt from Harold en Italie, by Hector Berlioz, 1834. Written for viola and orchestra,
the piece is played here by viola and piano.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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, Frédéric 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 Antonín Dvořák, Edvard Grieg, and Pyotr Ilyich
Tchaikovsky. Romantic efforts to express a particular nation’s distinctiveness through
music was manifested in the works of the Czechs Antonín Dvořák and Bedřich
Smetana and by various Russian, French, and Scandinavian composers.
“Einst träumte meiner sel'gen Base,” Ännchen's aria (No. 13, Romance) from Act III
of Der Freischütz (1821) by Carl Maria von Weber.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
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.