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Neoclassicism vs. Romanticism
Goya, Goethe, Byron
• The sleep of reason produces monsters
• The dream of reason produces monsters
Neoclassicism
• Symmetry• Proportion• Order• Clarity• Restraint
Neoclassicism
Neoclassicism
Landscape with Aeneas on Delos
Neoclassicism
• Decorum• Harmony• Restraint• Imitation of Greek and
Roman originals• Dominance of pre-
established rules
Jean-Louis David, Oath of the Horatians
Neoclassicism
• Purpose of art: to instruct by delighting
• Dominance of the moral over the aesthetic function of art.
Romanticism
J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth
Romanticism
Caspar Friedrich, Abbey in the Oak Wood
Romanticism
Romantic Garden
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
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)
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 Goya’s responses to the war.
• 1819 – a second illness, he retires to the Quinta del Sordo, the Black Paintings
First Stage: Tapestry Cartoons
• General impression?• Calm, peace, harmony• Lack of emotion• Beauty, grace• Balance
1808 – 1814 Napoleon and the War of Independence
The 3rd of May, 1808
The disasters of the war
The Colossus – between 1808-1812
• Ambiguity of giant– Ignorant, arrogant prince?
(Ferdinand VII)• Mountains= the powerful• Donkey=nobility
– Hercules who rises up against Napoleon?
– Buried to above the knees– Back to spectator– Closed eyes
Black Paintings– 1820-1823
The witches’ Sabbath
Saturn eating his son
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
Prometheus, Gustave Moreau
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)
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
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
• Perhaps the best known of the English Romantic poets
• Main works:– Childe Harold’s
Pilgrimage (1812-1818)
– Manfred. Dramatic Poem. (1817)
– Don Juan (1819-1824)
Byronic hero
• Exiled or solitary wanderer
• Moody, passionate• Superior intellect• Heightened sensitivity• Rejects traditional
values and moral codes
Goethe and Byron’s “Prometheus”
• In groups of three discuss the following and choose an image that you feel is particularly powerful to exemplify each:
1. How the Gods (Zeus, in particular) are characterized.
2. How Prometheus is characterized.3. What stage of the Promethean myth is
presented.4. How the attitudes of the two poets differ.