Gardners Art through the Ages A Global History

790 Chapter 30 EUROPE AND AMERICA, 1800 TO 1870

T

he appeal of Romanticism, with its emphasis on freedom and
feeling, extended well beyond the realm of the visual arts. The
imagination and vision that characterized Romantic paintings and
sculptures were equally moving and riveting in musical or written
form. In European music, literature, and poetry, the Romantic spirit
was a dominant presence during the late 18th and early 19th cen-
turies. These artistic endeavors rejected classicism’s structured order
in favor of the emotive and expressive. In music, the compositions of
Franz Schubert (1797–1828), Franz Liszt (1811–1886), Frédéric
Chopin (1810–1849), and Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) all em-
phasized the melodic or lyrical. For these composers, music had the
power to express the unspeakable and to communicate the subtlest
and most powerful human emotions.
In literature, Romantic poets such as John Keats (1795–1821),
William Wordsworth (1770–1850), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(1772–1834) published volumes of poetry that serve as manifestations

of the Romantic interest in lyrical drama.Ozymandias,by Percy Bysshe

Shelley (1792–1822), speaks of faraway, exotic locales. The setting of

Lord Byron’s Sardanapalus is the ancient Assyrian Empire (see Chap-

ter 2). Byron’s poem conjures images of eroticism and fury unleashed—

images that appear in Delacroix’s painting Death of Sardanapalus

(FIG. 30-17). One of the best examples of the Romantic spirit is the en-

grossing novelFrankenstein,written in 1818 by Shelley’s wife, Mary

Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851). This tale of a monstrous creature

run amok remains popular to the present day. As was true of many Ro-

mantic artworks, the novel not only embraced the emotional but also

rejected the rationalism that underlay Enlightenment thought. Dr.

Frankenstein’s monster was a product of science, and the novel is an in-

dictment of the tenacious belief in science that Enlightenment thinkers

such as Voltaire promoted.Frankenstein served as a cautionary tale of

the havoc that could result from unrestrained scientific experimenta-

tion and from the arrogance of scientists like Dr. Frankenstein.

The Romantic Spirit in Art,

Music, and Literature

ART AND SOCIETY

30-17Eugène
Delacroix,Death of
Sardanapalus,1827. Oil on
canvas, 12 1 –^12  16  2 –^78 .
Louvre, Paris.

Inspired by Byron’s 1821
poem, Delacroix painted the
Romantic spectacle of an
Assyrian king on his funeral
pyre. The richly colored and
emotionally charged canvas
is filled with exotic figures.

1 ft.

EUGÈNE DELACROIXArt historians often present the his-
tory of painting during the first half of the 19th century as a contest
between two major artists—Ingres, the Neoclassical draftsman, and
Eugène Delacroix(1798–1863), the Romantic colorist. Their dia-
logue recalls the quarrel between the Poussinistes and the Rubénistes

at the end of the 17th century and into the 18th (see Chapter 29).

The Poussinistes were conservative defenders of academism who re-

garded drawing as superior to color, whereas the Rubénistes pro-

claimed the importance of color over line (line quality being more

intellectual and thus more restrictive than color). Delacroix’s works