Romanticism Era

Romanticism Era

In the European and American movement, Romanticism art, extended from about 1800 to 1850. The Romantic Movement first took root in Germany and then England in the 1780s. With the decline of Neoclassicism and the Enlightenment, and the American and French Revolutions, the movement shook the rest of Europe and lighted across the seas in the second wave to America. The ideals and tenets were the exact opposite of Neoclassicism, which emphasized order, logic, emotional restraint, balance, science, and reason. However, as the industrial revolution gained its footing in England, and cities began to grow, the ideals were reevaluated and emotions, individuality, and nature overshadowed Neoclassicism.

Romanticism art can be described as highly imaginative, emotional, and visionary. Romantic artists constantly desired to show the mysterious and wild aspects of nature, and were motivated by passion, drama, and melancholy. One cannot identify Romanticism with a single style, technique, or attitude, but romantic paintings are characterized as being highly imaginative, with subjective approach, emotional intensity, and a dreamlike or visionary quality. Where classical and neoclassical art is calm and restrained in feeling, and clear and complete in expression, romantic art characteristically strives to express by suggestion states of feeling - too intense, mystical, or elusive to be clearly defined. This essay will portray a critical analysis of three great works of arts from the Romanticism Era.

"The Raft of Medusa" by Theodore Ge'ricault

Theodore Ge'ricault, a French painter, first exhibited his dramatic masterpiece, "The Raft of Medusa" to Paris society in 1819. The painting is enormous, measuring at sixteen feet high, twenty three feet, six inches wide, it depicts a group of desperate men floating on a few planks of wood, trying to get the attention of a tiny little ship on the horizon by waving their shirts around. GÐ"©ricault took for his subject the ordeal of the survivors of the French ship Medusa, which had floundered off the west coast of Africa in 1816. Fifteen survivors and several corpses are piled onto one another in every attitude of suffering, despair, and death.

GÐ"©ricault used a large canvas, with just oil paint to express his frustrations. The painting was done with dark gloomy colors. Heavy clouds set the background and the desperation of each subject feels real. This incident was the result of tragic mismanagement and provoked

scandal in France, which infuriated GÐ"©ricault. Onlookers were fascinated and horrified by the image, but there was a sordid, true tale behind this raft, and everyone at the French museum in 1819, knew what it was. It had taken place three years prior involving desperate men, howling stupidity, and cannibalism.

Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco Goya

"Goya is always a great artist, often a frightening one...light and shade play upon atrocious horrors." (Charles Baudelaire, Essay on Goya, CURIOSITES ESTRANGERS, 1842). The painting is known as "Saturn Devouring One of His Sons" by Francisco Goya. Goya used oil on plaster to paint one of his darkest work of art. With just dark and somber colors, the artist was able make the hair on one's neck stand when viewing the painting. The image is ineffaceable: the painting depicts Saturn, grotesquely biting the arm off the headless torso of one of his sons. A Greek mythology, Saturn, who had seized power from his own father, Uranus, was obsessed by the prophecy that he would in turn be overthrown by his own offspring. He sought to avoid this fate by consuming each of his children at birth.

From 1775 to 1792 Goya painted cartoons for the royal tapestry factory in Madrid. The experience helped him become a keen observer of human behavior. Serious illness in 1792 left Goya permanently deaf. Isolated from others by his deafness, he became increasingly occupied with the fantasies and inventions of his imagination and with critical and satirical observations of mankind. Across much of Latin America from the 1960s to the 1980s the generals' exaggerated fears led them to devour thousands of their nations' children. In Argentina under the military regime, an estimated 30,000 people were "disappeared". For the bold technique of his paintings, the haunting satire of his etchings and his belief that the artist's vision is more important than tradition, Goya is often called "the first of the moderns. Whether it is a reflection of Goya's own mental state, or an allegory on the situation in a country that was consuming its own children in bloody wars and revolutions, or a statement on the human condition generally, may remain open. Maybe the most terrible of Goya's paintings, "Saturn Devouring One of His Sons" was done during his last and dark years. The expressed violence illustrates the tortured mind of the painter, typical of his whole work.

Monk by the Sea by Caspar David Friedrich

Romantic image such as the "Monk by the Sea" continued speaking to successive generations, a sense of high drama conveyed by a single figure open to the echoing sound of the seas, the water's motion mirrored by the sky's. "The Monk by the Sea" is undoubtedly a masterpiece in Caspar David Friedrich's oeuvre and the boldest picture within German Romanticism. The painting depicts the tiny figure of a man set against a natural landscape divided into three horizontal zones of colors. Its composition breaks with all traditions. There is no longer any perspective depth whatsoever. At the bottom of the picture, the whitish sand dunes made up the narrow strip of shoreline, rise at an obtuse angle towards the left. The tiny figure of a man robed in black is visible from behind - the only vertical in the picture. Most of the canvas is given over to the diffuse structure of the cloudy sky. All lines lead out of the picture, making infinity the true subject of the painting. Like so many of his paintings, it is full of a sense of mystery.

Casper David Friedrich can be regarded as the foremost German romantic painter. He captured the sense of mysticism and melancholy typical of Northern Romanticism. Friedrich aimed to produce a Christian art based in nature, divested of standard biblical imagery. The human beings depicted in his work seem to seek redemption, often seen by their back, surrounded by contemplating landscapes and poses as a "medium" between the viewer of the painting and the background landscape. Friedrich was