Neoclassicism vs. Romanticism

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Neoclassicism vs. Romanticism

• Goya, Goethe, Byron

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• The sleep of reason produces monsters
• The dream of reason produces monsters

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Neoclassicism

• Symmetry
• Proportion
• Order
• Clarity
• Restraint

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Neoclassicism
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Neoclassicism
Landscape with Aeneas on Delos
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Neoclassicism

• Decorum
• Harmony
• Restraint
• Imitation of Greek and Roman originals
• Dominance of pre-established rules

Jean-Louis David, Oath of the Horatians
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Neoclassicism

• Purpose of art to instruct by delighting
• Dominance of the moral over the aesthetic
  function of art.

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Romanticism
J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a
Harbour's Mouth
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Romanticism
Caspar Friedrich, Abbey in the Oak Wood
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Romanticism
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Romantic Garden
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Romanticism

• Prevalence of the individual, subjective,
  personal, spontaneous
• Emphasis on the power of imagination, emotion,
  irrationality
• Search for the transcendental
• Appreciation for the power/beauty of untamed
  nature

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Romanticism

• Emotion over reason, senses over the intellect
• Preoccupation with genius, the individual, the
  exceptional
• Artist as the supreme creator
• Rejection of rules, importance of experimentation
• Imagination as way to reach transcendental
  experience/truth
• Predilection for the exotic, mysterious, weird,
  occult, monstrous, diseased, satanic
• Search for national, autochthonous origins
  (resurgence of medieval, revaluation of
  Shakespeare, Calderón, Lope de Vega)

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Francisco de Goya y Lucientes 1746-1828

• His life is described as having four stages
• Until 1793 slow rise to maturity
• 1793 illness that left him deaf and released
  pent up creative forces within him
• 1808 Napoleonic invasion and Goyas responses
  to the war.
• 1819 a second illness, he retires to the Quinta
  del Sordo, the Black Paintings

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First Stage Tapestry Cartoons

• General impression?
• Calm, peace, harmony
• Lack of emotion
• Beauty, grace
• Balance

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1808 1814 Napoleon and the War of Independence
The 3rd of May, 1808
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The disasters of the war
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The Colossus between 1808-1812

• Ambiguity of giant
• Ignorant, arrogant prince? (Ferdinand VII)
• Mountains the powerful
• Donkeynobility
• Hercules who rises up against Napoleon?
• Buried to above the knees
• Back to spectator
• Closed eyes

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Black Paintings 1820-1823
The witches Sabbath
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Saturn eating his son
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Johan Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

• Perhaps the most important German writer (poet,
  essayist, dramatist, novelist)
• Collected works form around 144 volumes
• Most influential works The Sorrows of Young
  Werther (1774), Wilhem Meister (1821-1829), Faust
  (Part I, 1808, Part II 1832)
• A principal figure of the Sturm und Drang movement

Portrait by Eugene Delacroix
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George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

• Perhaps the best known of the English Romantic
  poets
• Main works
• Childe Harolds Pilgrimage (1812-1818)
• Manfred. Dramatic Poem. (1817)
• Don Juan (1819-1824)

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Byronic hero

• Exiled or solitary wanderer
• Moody, passionate
• Superior intellect
• Heightened sensitivity
• Rejects traditional values and moral codes

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Prometheus

• Rebel god (Titan)
• Stole fire from Zeus and gave it to man
• Chained to a rock
• Eagle ate his liver each day
• 13 generations later, Heracles killed the eagle

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Prometheus, Gustave Moreau
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Some Romantic works based on the Prometheus myth

• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Prometheus (1774)
• Ludwig van Beethoven, opus 43, Creatures of
  Prometheus (ballet), overture (1801)
• Lord Byron, Prometheus
• Percy Shelley, Prometheus Unbound (1820)
• Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein or the
  Modern Prometheus (1818, 1831)

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Goethe and Byrons Prometheus

• In groups of three discuss the following and
  choose an image that you feel is particularly
  powerful to exemplify each
• How the Gods (Zeus, in particular) are
  characterized.
• How Prometheus is characterized.
• What stage of the Promethean myth is presented.
• How the attitudes of the two poets differ.