QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

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Prompt 3
Listen to Vivaldis Spring Concerto. Based on
the music, what do you imagine, see, and feel.
Why? Explain and analyze the piece.
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Vivaldis Spring Concerto in E Major
Springtime is upon us. The birds celebrate her
return with festive song, and murmuring streams
are softly caressed by the breezes. Thunderstorms,
those heralds of Spring, roar, casting their
dark mantle over heaven, Then they die away to
silence, and the birds take up their charming
songs once more.
On the flower-strewn meadow, with leafy branches
rustling overhead, the goat-herd sleeps, his
faithful dog beside him. Led by the festive
sound of rustic bagpipes, nymphs and shepherds
lightly dance beneath the brilliant canopy of
spring.
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The Age of Romanticism

• An Age of Passion, Rebellion, Individuality,
  Imagination, Intuition, Idealism, and Creativity

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The Age of Romanticism

• Several 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.

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Age of Reason v. Age of Romanticism

• Descartes Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore
  I exist.)
• Rousseau Exister, pour nous, cest sentir
  (For us, to exist is to feel.)

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Neo-Classicism vs Romanticism

• Medieval/Eastern
• influence
• Emphasis on Individual
• Age of Passion
• Emotion
• Imagination
• Spirituality
• Interest in the Exotic
• Nature pastoral and wild
• Revolution
• Social Justice

• Greek/Roman influence
• Emphasis on Society
• Age of Reason
• Rationality
• Philosophy
• Deism
• Euro-centric
• Cities
• Enlightenment
• Science

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NATURENeo-Classical
Romantic

• Subject to human control
• Gardens
• Source of peace and tranquillity
• Untamed nature dangerous/evil

• Beyond human control
• Mountains, oceans, forests
• Source of inspiration and spirituality
• Untamed nature exhilarating/sublime

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Gainsborough, St James Park
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Friedrich, Solitary Tree
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LOVENeo-Classical
Romantic

• Subject to human control
• Marriage
• Social Contract
• Economic Contract
• Attraction between social and intellectual equals
• Source of peace and tranquillity

• Beyond human control
• Passion
• Individual choice
• Search for soul-mate
• Forbidden attractions social, exotic
• Source of inspiration, exhilaration and despair

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Gaspar Netscher A Musical Evening
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Rationalism vs. Romanticism in the Visual Arts
Neo-classicism or Rationalism
Romanticism
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Neo-Classical Artist

• Social
• Arbiter of Taste
• Elitist
• Moral
• Intellectual
• Critic

Louis Michel van Loo Portrait of Diderot
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Romantic Artist

• Loner
• Unconventional
• Interested in the noble savage
• Amoral
• Genius
• Prophet

George Gordon Lord Byron
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Rationalism vs. Romanticism

• Neoclassical art was rigid, severe, and
  unemotional it hearkened back to ancient Greece
  and Rome

• Romantic art was emotional, deeply-felt,
  individualistic, and exotic. It has been
  described as a reaction to Neoclassicism, or
  anti-Classicism.

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Romantic beliefs

• Romantics preferred
• Intellectual intuition to reason
• Unspoiled nature to the artificiality of
  civilization
• Youthful innocence to educated sophistication
• Individual freedom and the worth of the
  individual to societal concerns
• Poetry (the spontaneous overflow of powerful
  feelings) to prose
• The past to the future

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Romantic beliefs

• To summarize, Romantics believed in the 5 Is
• Imagination
• Intuition
• Idealism
• Inspiration
• Individuality
• Romanticism occurred across all of the
  arts--literature, music, art--and across the
  Western world, beginning in Germany and England.

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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

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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

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Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David
Friedrich
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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, / And she was
  wildly clad / Her eyes were fair, and very fair
  / --Her beauty made me glad. Wordsworth

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Idealization of rural living
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The Exotic
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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Faith in Common People
• For theres not a man that lives who hath not
  known his god-like hours
• --Wordsworth

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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Emphasis on Freedom and Individualism
• Political freedom--American and French Revolution
  (liberty, equality, fraternity) antislavery and
  womens 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

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Commoners seeking their rights.
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Liberty Leading the People
Eugene Delacroix
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Goya was in Madrid during the tragic events of 2
and 3 May 1808 when the population rose against
the French and the uprising was savagely
repressed.
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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Spontaneity, intuition, feeling, imagination and
  wonder
• Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful
  feeling and is put into art from emotion
  recollected in tranquility.
• --Wordsworth

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QUALITIES OF ROMANTICISM

• Passionate individual religiosity
• Protestant view of each man is his own
  intermediary with Christ
• Man has no Body distinct from his Soul for that
  calld Body is a portion of Soul discernd by the
  five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this
  age. William Blake

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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.

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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 (a break or pause in a line
  of poetry, for rhetorical effect) and other
  spontaneous breaks in patterns.

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Wordsworth, from The Tables Turned (1798) One
impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of
man, Of moral evil and good Than all the sages
can. Sweet is the lore which Nature brings Our
meddling intellect Misshapes the beauteous forms
of things We murder to dissect. Enough of
Science and of Art Close up those barren
leaves Come forth, and bring with you a
heart That watches and receives.
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Gothicism
Excerpt from Baudelaires Carrion The sun shone
onto the rotting heap,As if to bring it to the
boil,And tender a hundredfold to vast NatureAll
that together she had joinedAnd the sky
watched that superb carcassLike a flower blossom
out.The stench was so strong that on the
grassYou thought you would pass out.Flies
hummed upon the putrid belly,Whence larvae in
black battalions spreadAnd like a heavy liquid
flowedAlong the tatters deliquescing.
http//www.uvm.edu/sgutman/Baudelaire.htm
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Pope Innocent III, On the Misery of the Human
Condition, c. 1200

• Man is conceived of blood made rotten by the
  heat of lust and in the end worms, like
  mourners, stand about his corpse.
• In life he produced lice and tapeworms in
  death he will produce worms and flies.
• In life he produced dung and vomit in death he
  produces rottenness and stench.
• In life he fattened one man in death he
  fattens a multitude of worms.

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Notre Dame Cathedral
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Chartres Cathedral
V E R T I C A L I T Y
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Literary Gothicism

• In the context of British Romanticism, "Literary
  Gothicism" is a type of imitation medievalism.
• When it was launched in the later eighteenth
  century, Gothicism featured accounts of
  terrifying experiences in ancient castles
  experiences connected with subterranean dungeons,
  secret passageways, flickering lamps, screams,
  moans, bloody hands, ghosts, graveyards, and the
  rest.
• By extension, it came to designate the gruesome,
  mysterious, fantastic, supernatural, and, again,
  the terrifying, especially the pleasurably
  terrifying, in literature more generally

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Gothic Novels

• Novels characterized by magic, mystery and
  horror
• Exotic settings medieval, Oriental, etc.
• Originated with Horace Walpoles Castle of
  Otranto (1764)
• William Beckford Vathek, An Arabian Tale (1786)
• Anne Radcliffe 5 novels (1789-97) including The
  Mysteries of Udolpho
• Widely popular genre throughout Europe and
  America Charles Brockden Browns Wieland (1798)
  
• Contemporary Gothic novelists include Anne Rice
  and Stephen King

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Frankenstein by Mary Shelley1797-1851

• Inspired by a dream in reaction to a challenge
  to write a ghost story
• Published in 1817 (rev. ed. 1831)
• A Gothic novel influenced by Promethean myth
• The first science fiction novel