Title: What is Romanticism? Exploring the 19th-Century Movement
Headings: Romanticism: An Art Movement That Emphasized Emotion and Turned to the Sublime
Romanticism: An Art Movement That Emphasized Emotion and Turned to the Sublime
What was the Romantic Period?
Romantic Paintings
Other Disciplines
The Legacy of Romanticism
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Content: Pre-Raphaelite painting, for example, was born out of a dislike of the Renaissance, while Rococo artists built upon the opulence of Baroque art. Though this phenomenon has manifested time and time again, it reached a peak with the onset of Romanticism, a movement that rejected the formality of Neoclassicism and, instead, embraced emotion. Today, the Romantic genre is mostly associated with large-scale paintings. However, the movement influenced several disciplines and branches of study, culminating in a legacy evident in the visual arts and beyond. What was the Romantic Period? Eugène Delacroix, “Liberty Leading the People,” 1830 (Photo: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain)
Romanticism was a cultural movement that emerged around 1780. Until its onset, Neoclassicism dominated 18th-century European art, typified by a focus on classical subject matter, an interest in aesthetic austerity, and ideas in line with the Enlightenment, an intellectual, philosophical, and literary movement that placed emphasis on the individual. While Romantic figures agreed with the Enlightenment's interest in individualism, their approach diverged from the Neoclassicists. Instead of looking back to classical models, artists like Joseph Mallord William Turner, Eugène Delacroix, Theodore Gericault, Francisco Goya, and Caspar David Friedrich found inspiration in their own imaginations.