Romantic Movement Fine Arts

Origins of the Romantic Movement Fine Arts. A. 1960 Today we shall concern ourselves with the origin of the romantic movement. Now the romantic movement is like a tree with many roots, it is not only difficult but indeed impossible to trace its history back to a single source. But one of the most important sources of romanticism was, undoubtedly, the new emphasis placed upon the role of feeling, upon emotion, and upon imagination in the process of artistic creation, a new emphasis which increases steadily throughout the eighteenth century. The Eighteenth century is often called the Age of Reason. Classicism and Neo-Classicism as we have seen emphasised the importance of symmetry, fitness, proportion, clarity and control, in art. Concern with a rational and intellectual order is a hallmark of classical perfection. ‘Reason’ wrote Sir Joshua Reynolds in 1776is in his 7th Discourse, ‘must ultimately determine our choice upon every occasion’. But long before 1776 other writers had been directing attention to the role of the emotions both in taste and in artistic creation. One of the first to do so was Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftsbury, who in 1711 published his Characteristics of Men, Manners and Opinions. Shaftsbury sought to create a natural system of moral values in which the affections and passions were controlled by reason rather than by divine grace. Shaftsbury’s natural morality placed a new emphasis upon the affections. His doctrines were translated and were read widely upon the Continent, both in France and Germany. He influenced such German men of letters as Goethe and Herder, and in France, Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau. Indeed in 1745, Diderot translated Shaftsbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit and presented a copy to Rousseau. And Rousseau in such works as his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1754) and, his Social Contract (1762) and Emile (1762) placed the greatest importance on the role of sentiment and the affections in the good life. His doctrine that evil was due not to sin but to the excesses of civilisation became a view greatly cherished by the romantics and Rousseau is one of the great sources of romanticism To return to the simplicity of childhood, to the naturalness of rural life (as it seemed to him), the simplicity of primitive societies, became a new ideal in thought, literature, and art. Rousseau championed sentiment above reason. Natural compassion is to him the primary moral force, he calls it the pure emotion of nature, and believed it ‘prior to all kinds of reflection’. From the force of his writings a new vouge of sentimentalism emerged in the late eighteenth century both in literature and art. [Jean Baptiste Graize: Village Betrothal (humble life and sentiment); Punished son. Sir Brock Bosth?? By Joseph Wright of Delfsey] The new emphasis upon feeling was felt in the field of aesthetic theory. The enjoyment of a new kind of beauty, sublime beauty, became increasingly fashionable. Sublime beauty was associated with great height, vastness, strangeness, the awe- inspiring, the horrible, the terrifying. In England, the discussion on the sublime was given currency by the translation of a text on classical rhetoric called De Sublimita. It is now ascribed to an unknown first century writer. But in the 17th and 18th century it was commonly ascribed to a writer called Longinus. The treatise was concerned with defining the nature of the appeal of he lofty and elevated style often adopted by classical orators. ‘We are led by nature’ the pseudo-Longinus wrote ‘to admire, not our little rivers, for all their purity and homely uses, as much as he Nile, Rhine and Danube, and, beyond all, the sea. Nor do we revere that little fire of our own kindling, because it is kept ever brightly burning, as we do the heavenly fires that are often veiled in darkness; nor is it so marvellous in our eyes as the gulfs of Etna, whose outbursts bring up from their depths rock and whole mountains and our fourth rivers of subterranean elemental fire. What is useful or needful is homely, but what is strange is a marvel.’ Fabris (8). Now as taste turned more to the strange and marvellous the sublime acquired increasing significance as an aesthetic category. In 1757 Edmund Burke distinguished precisely between the idea of beauty and the idea of sublimity in his Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. For Burke, beauty was created by smallness, smoothness, absence of angularity, brightness of colour; the sublime was excited by the vastness, darkness, solitude, terror. ‘The sublime,’ wrote Sir Joshua Reynolds, impresses the mind at once with one great idea; it is a single blow. The sublime in painting, he added, so overpowers and takes such possession of the whole mind that no room is left for minute criticism.’ Reynolds cited the work of Michelangelo, such as “the Mosses”* and the “Sybils”* in the Sistine chapel,* as masterpieces of the sublime. And Michelangelo became a great inspiration to such romantic artists as Fuseli and Blake. For eighteenth century taste, the world and rocky landscapes of Salvator Rosa were often cited as examples of the sublime, and Rosa became another source of Romantic inspiration. From the beginning, however, the romantic taste drew its inspiration from literature. The word romantic derives from the French roman, tales of chivalry, knights of valour, the medieval French epics, chanson de geste, such as the Song of Roland in which the deeds of an ancient national hero are sung and glorified, or late medieval romances, such as Tristan and Isolde. Meanwhile the epics of the Northern mythology of Scandinavia and Iceland were being translated into the modern European languages. While many travellers like the Frenchman Le Roy and the Englishmen Stuart and Revett went to Greece to make accurate drawings of Greek temples, others visited Lapland and Iceland. However, the medieval epic which captivated the whole of cultivated Europe was a fake. This was James Macpherson’s Ossian published in 1762-3. Everyone read it. Here is a typical example of its highly elevated romantic rhetoric. Father of heroes! O Trnmoor! High dweller of eddying winds! Where the dark-red thunder marks the troubled clouds! Open thou thy story halls. Let the bards of old be near. Let them draw near, with songs and their half-viewless harps. No dweller of misty valley comes! No hunter unknown at his streams! It is the car borne Oscar, from the fields of war. The vast folds thee in its skirt and rustles through the sky.’ Such writing was generally accepted by contemporary taste as being in the sublime. Much of Fuseli’s drawings and paintings, with its exaggerations, ad highly dramatic emphasis will give us a clear idea of what the sublime in the visual arts amounted to. Take his bard,* for example, which is an illustration to Grays Ode “The Bard”. [John Moreir 1817 “The Bard” (14); John Reincemir “King Leer” (16)] Grey wrote: On a rock, whose haughty brow Frowns o’er old Conway’s foaming flood, Robed in the sable garb of woe, With haggard eyes the poet stood; Loose his beard and hoary hair Screamed like a meteor, to the troubled air. [Girodet: Ossian Receiving Napoleon’s Generals. Romantic classicist follower of David] The men of the Renaissance, we know, found new inspiration in the art of classical antiquity. The great romantic writers and artists referred with equal zest and keen enjoyment to the art of the middle age. We must not think o this return to medieval literature, art and architecture simply as an escape into the past. Prior to the emergence of the romantics there was, in the end, only one court of appeal in matters of taste and artistic perfection. Classical antiquity had established certain rules which artists ignored at their peril. That was the opinion of the Renaissance critics, of the seventeenth century classicists and the eighteenth century neo-classicists. But the new relish for the sublime, closely associated with the rediscovery of medieval art, created an alternative standard. One could, it came to be admitted, create great masterpieces without adhering to the standards of classical antiquity. That was an enormous advance and out of the alternatives there emerged a new conception of the personal freedom of the artist to choose his own standards and create his own style. We may study the effect of the alternative, which the enthusiasm for the middle ages provided, in the history of English architecture in the 18th century. The revival of an interest in Gothic architecture, one of the hallmarks of romantic taste, may be traced back to Sir John Vanbrugh. Take his Blenheim Palace*, built between 1705 and 1724. Although its architectural motifs derived from classical architecture, through the very high attic storey, the irregular skyline, and the tower- like pavilions, Vanbrugh gave the Palace a castle-like air that reveals his enjoyment of the medieval castle. This is more obvious in his Seaton Devlaval, in Northumberland (1720-29)* which possesses a fortress like character. Or consider his own house, Blackheath Castle,* at Greenwich built between 1717 and 1726 with its high chimneys, and rounded and castellated turrets. But the early taste for the Gothic which we find in Vanbrugh’s houses is certainly not a return to medieval methods of building. It is still essentially baroque classicism with a faintly medieval air about it. Vanbrugh’s medievalism was probably patriotic in origin, he wanted his buildings to have an English look. And here I might stress the very close relation between romantic sentiment and national sentiment.

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