ROMANTICISM
A Movement
An Aesthetic Style
An Attitude or Spirit
As a Movement
• Revolt against convention
• Revolt against authority
• Search for freedom in personal, political,
and artistic life
• Reacted against Enlightenment order
• Reacted against industrialism
The Witches’ Sabbath
by Francisco Goya
The Witches' Sabbath was one of the series of the fourteen
Black Paintings, made by Goya on the walls of the so-called
"The Deaf Man's Villa", between 1820 and 1824. It was
located on the longest wall of the dining room of the ground
floor together with Leocadia, Two Old Men, Saturn, Judith
and Holofernes and St. Isidore's Day.
rd
3
of May by Francisco Goya
Characteristics of Style
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Love of nature (sublime)
Rejection of organized religion (God is in nature)
Free expression of imagination
Liberation of the emotions
Spontaneous outpouring of feeling
Taste for the exotic, ecstatic, and fantastic
Glorification of the individual (intuition and
senses)
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Sentimentality: excess of feeling
Nostalgia for the past
Melancholy—lots of suicides
Longing (shown in their art)
Nationalistic—die for what you believe
Alienated from society
Despair
• The world is too much
Turner’s Rain,
Steam and Speed
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with us; late and soon
Getting and spending, we lay
waste our powers:
Little we see in nature that is
ours;
We have given our hearts away,
a sordid boon!
This sea that bares her bosom to
the moon,
The winds that will be howling
at all hours,And are up-gathered
now like sleeping flowers, For
this, for everything, we are out
of tune;
It moves us not.—Great God! I’d
rather be a pagan suckled in a
creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this
pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make
me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from
the sea; or hear old Triton blow
his wreathed horn.
Heroes
• Pursued fiercely
individualistic paths to
creativity
• Alienated from society
• Self indulgence (also
called subjectivity)
• Frustration and despair
• Adventures into danger
• Infatuation with the
sublime
Taste for the exotic, the ecstatic, and the fantastic
Glorified the individual self by intuition
Reliance upon the senses
Emotions were as important as reason
Valued sentimentality, nostalgia, melancholy, and
longing