- Romanticism
- The Romantic Movement
- Swept across Europe during the first half of the nineteenth century
- Influenced religion, art, music, and philosophy
- Inspired a desire for freedom of thought, feeling, and action
- Key Characteristics
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The primacy of emotion
- The Enlightenment stressed reason as a way to understand nature.
- Romantics rejected reason, and instead stressed emotion, intuition, and subjective feelings.
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A different past
- Neoclassical artists looked to Greece and Rome for models of order and clarity.
- Romantics looked to the medieval period for models of chivalrous heroes, miraculous events, and unsolved mysteries.
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A new view of nature
- Enlightened thinkers relied on the scientific method to study and understand nature. They viewed nature as a well-ordered machine.
- Romantics preferred to contemplate the beauty of nature. They were inspired by raging rivers, great storms, and majestic mountains veiled in mist.
- Key Romantic Writers, Artists, and Composers
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Writers
- William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lyrical ballads
- Friedrich von Schiller, Ode to Joy
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
- Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe
- Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Jacob and William Grimm, Grimm’s Fairy Tales
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Artists
- Casper David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Mist
- Eugene Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People
- John Constable, The Hay Wain
- J.M.W. Turner, Hannibal Crossing the Alps
- Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808
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Composers
- Ludwig von Beethoven, Ninth Symphony
- Richard Wagner, The Ring of the Nibelung