Romanticism
Whereas Neoclassicism’s rationality reinforced Enlightenment thought
(see Chapter 29), particularly Voltaire’s views, Rousseau’s ideas con-
tributed to the rise ofRomanticism.Rousseau’s exclamation “Man is
born free, but is everywhere in chains!”—the opening line of his So-
cial Contract (1762)—summarizes a fundamental Romantic premise.
Romanticism emerged from a desire for freedom—not only political
freedom but also freedom of thought, of feeling, of action, of wor-
ship, of speech, and of taste. Romantics asserted that freedom was
the right and property of all. They believed the path to freedom was
through imagination rather than reason and functioned through
feeling rather than through thinking.
The allure of the Romantic spirit grew dramatically during
the late 18th century. The term originated toward the end of that
century among German literary critics, who aimed to distinguish
peculiarly “modern” traits from the Neoclassical traits that already
had displaced Baroque and Rococo design elements. Consequently,
many scholars refer to Romanticism as a phenomenon that began
around 1750 and ended about 1850, but most use the term more
narrowly to denote a movement that flourished from about 1800 to
1840, between Neoclassicism and Realism.
Roots of Romanticism
The transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism represented a
shift in emphasis from reason to feeling, from calculation to intu-
ition, and from objective nature to subjective emotion. Among Ro-
manticism’s manifestations were the interests in the medieval period
and in the sublime. For people living in the 18th century, the Middle
Ages were the “dark ages,” a time of barbarism, superstition, dark
mystery, and miracle. The Romantic imagination stretched its per-
ception of the Middle Ages into all the worlds of fantasy open to it,
including the ghoulish, the infernal, the terrible, the nightmarish,
the grotesque, the sadistic, and all the imagery that emerges from the
chamber of horrors when reason sleeps. Related to the imaginative
sensibility was the period’s notion of the sublime. Among the indi-
viduals most involved in studying the sublime was the British politi-
cian and philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797). In his 1757 pub-
lication A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and Beautiful,Burke articulated his definition of the sub-
lime—feelings of awe mixed with terror. Burke observed that pain or
fear evoked the most intense human emotions and that these emo-
tions could also be thrilling. Thus, raging rivers and great storms at
sea could be sublime to their viewers. Accompanying this taste for30-9Henry Fuseli,The Nightmare,1781. Oil on canvas, 3 33 – 4 4 1 –^12 . Detroit Institute of the Arts (Founders Society
Purchase with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Bert L. Smokler and Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence A. Fleishman).
The transition from Neoclassicism to Romanticism marked a shift in emphasis from reason to feeling. Fuseli was among the first
painters to depict the dark terrain of the human subconscious.784 Chapter 30 EUROPE AND AMERICA, 1800 TO 1870
1 ft.