Title: Common Themes in Romanticism, The Enlightenment, and the Renaissance
Headings: Common Themes in Romanticism, The Enlightenment, and the Renaissance
Today's Date:
May 04, 2021
Common Themes in Romanticism, The Enlightenment, and the Renaissance

Content: While the reasons for rebelling against the old social and artistic order vary for each of these movements, the fact remains that all three were successful at changing many aspects of society and all each movement has had an enormous impact on history and artistic expression. Romanticism was a movement that took place in Europe throughout the latter part of the 18 th century. This period in history was a direct rebellion against many of the artistic and societal values of the previous era, which was the Enlightenment. While the Enlightenment movement focused on ideas of reason, rationality, and empiricism, romanticism went the complete opposite direction and explored new ideas about emotions and beauty. The main part of this rebellion was centered around the notion that not everything could be coldly rationalized and that beauty and aesthetics were important parts of existence. Although it was in direct opposition to the Enlightenment, romanticism as a movement did also build off of some of the new ideas that were part of that period such as a renewed interest in the individual. Romanticism was a movement in history that went one step further and began to focus on individual experience as well as the human brain—mostly as it related to feelings and personal thoughts. In general, however, it could be easily argued that without the Enlightenment movement there would not have been romanticism, mostly because the former had to exist for the rebellion in ideas to take place. The Enlightenment, a movement in Western history that came just before romanticism, was itself a rebellious movement that developed out of a prior period that emphasized ideas such as religion. In addition, before this period, there was more weight given to speculations about god and the natural order of things whereas with the Enlightenment empiricism became one of the core ideas.