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Literature

The Romantic school, which characterised modern literature from the end of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, had already manifested itself (beginning with the political and social crisis of the Renaissance, the Religious Reformation and the contrasting theories of Greco-Latin classicism) as early as the seventeenth century and the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Particularly from the middle of the eighteenth century, in the field of theater, narrative, country, sepulchral and idyllic poetry, some elements of sensibility and taste have anticipated a real new trend: they have been grouped, since some decades, under the name of preromanticism, even if they have been instead considered as the beginnings of Romanticism since those first statements (for example, with Italo Siciliano starting from Abbot Prévost in his history of French Romanticism).

A particular tendency, which stands out even before a declaredly and polemically Romantic school, was that of the Sturm und Drang (from the title of a drama by F. M. Klinger); from the needs expressed by such a movement L. Vincenti has clearly distinguished the innovative and quivering libertarianism of Alfieri, a man and author already defined protoromantic by B. Croce. Croce. Also the Belgian R. O. J. Van Nuffel exalted in Alfieri the character of revolutionary dramatist even in the classical form connected with the choice of some ancient heroes as characters.

The new yearnings of Romanticism, connecting with the needs of modern peoples, especially the Nordic ones, generally alien or on the margins of the Greek-Latin cultural and mythological world, were masterfully embodied also by those who, for their education largely connected with the classical world and with antiquity in its eastern and Mediterranean development, opposed the romantic theories or at least discussed and limited them: Goethe, Foscolo, Leopardi, Shelley, Keats and others. The works of these authors are fundamental testimonies of a literary and artistic world inspired by new needs, from the advent of the French Revolution onwards: despite the limitations of a nationalistic conception (connected with the Italian Risorgimento and with German history, from the struggle against Napoleon to the affirmations of the Reich) Romanticism has elements of universal classicism, widely felt throughout the world as an expression of a new age.

The complexity and variety of the manifestations of Romanticism throughout Europe and then in the American world (both in the south and in the north, including the literatures of Canada) prevent a unitary definition of the movements, or at least of the tendencies manifested in different peoples and cultures: even southern Europe (to use a term from the Coppet group) had in Romanticism a revolution or at least a literary reform. And so did Latin America in the same ferments of political freedom, at least from 1810 onwards. If the various national traditions are different and even opposed to each other because of new demands for patriotism (which after the French Revolution took the place of cosmopolitanism), the manifestations of Romantic tendencies should be considered in their unity, felt on the one hand as an element of rupture with the past, on the other as a restoration of values.

The imperial and Christian Middle Ages was for the Germans a myth that even helped to strengthen Catholicism in the historiography of the Protestants, but for the Italians the civilization of the Communes, in anti-imperial function, if not always Guelph, was a fundamental reason in the Risorgimento. Sentiment, reverie, individualism, life as a struggle, the historical conquest of rights, revolutions, the contrasts of civilization are exalted in a dialectical need that opposes becoming to being, feeling to reasoning, passion to the mind.

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Historical notes: 1770-1800

The painters of the pre-Romantic phase were victims of their neoclassical education, which was mainly devoted to studio study, to the study of ancient casts and to the very thorough study of Greek and Roman history. Füssli and Blake in Great Britain, Girodet in France began to deal with “wild” themes with melodramatic implications, but they were not able to deal with them in an appropriate and free style. Sculpture still exerted its tyrannical influence, as evidenced by Romney’s Shakespearean-inspired drawings (Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum) or Girodet’s refined paintings (Endymion: Paris, Louvre).

Some rebellious temperaments, such as Blake or Girodet, found it easier to transcend tradition; but even genuinely Romantic spirits such as Friedrich continued to exploit marked drawing and a discreet palette. This phase partakes of a certain romanticism mainly because of the characteristic choices of subjects, which more often touch on irrational themes. All the themes were now discovered: but not the way of treating them, even though already before 1800 the value of color began to be appreciated. In reality, the invention of numerous themes that will be more widely used between 1820 and 1840 is due to pre-romanticism. The main change in the choice of subject concerns both the historical and the literary aspect. Shakespeare or Froissart were now preferred to Livy, Ossian to Ovid. In France, Shakespeare was to be at the center of the debate between Classics and Romantics from 1820 onwards.

The rediscovery of Shakespeare in the 18th century manifested itself, of course, in Britain. Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery, composed of works commissioned to about thirty artists from 1786, encouraged many painters to show more imagination in costumes and attitudes, although few of them could stand comparison with John Runciman in his masterpiece King Lear in the Storm (Edinburgh, National Gallery), executed in 1767. In France, a parallel current developed with the initiative of the Count of Angiviller, who attempted to awaken national pride by commissioning both painters and sculptors to paint works dedicated to the heroes of French history, particularly St. Louis, Henry IV and Baiard.

Runciman’s King Lear can be compared to Vincent’s Arrest of President Molé (1779: Paris, Palais Bourbon) or Ménageot’s Death of Leonardo da Vinci (1781: Amboise town hall), a theme that was to be passed on to Ingres without change. The American Benjamin West, perhaps the most representative artist of this phase, drew his sources from ancient, modern and contemporary history, but his composition, very bold in form, is gloomy in color and lacking in merit in execution. Imagination fed the fantastic. The eighteenth century had been the period of black dramas, in the novel (think of the English Gothic novel), as in the theater; and the sincere representation of horror or terror invaded the works of numerous pre-Romanticists.

The result is striking, even when the effect is superficial and picturesque as in Joseph Vernet’s Nocturne on the Seashore (Louvre), or Sadat in Search of the Waters of Oblivion by John Martin (Southampton, Art Gallery). Sometimes, this aspect completely imposes itself on the imagination and gives the unconscious a predominant role, influencing at the same time the layout and the execution of the work: Füssli’s Nightmare (1782: Frankfurt, Goethe Museum), or Girodet’s Seven Against Thebes (Montpellier Museum). Such fantastical, black vision became completely detached from literary illustration in Goya and Géricault.

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Historical notes: 1800-1824

The period between 1800 and 1824 saw the advent of modern history painting, the establishment of a modern school of landscape and the end of the hegemony of sculpture in favor of that of painting. All of these changes are stark, but perhaps most striking are the great series of modern history paintings executed by David, Gros, and Géricault. By 1823, Stendhal considered David’s epic paintings, whose realism solicits the imagination, to be essentially romantic; they embodied the very spirit of the revolution, and were immediately intelligible to the “children of the revolution.” David, considered the greatest exponent of neoclassicism, took on the role of painter of modern history in 1793 with the Death of Marat (Brussels, Musée Royal des Beaux-Arts), in which the reference to ancient art (Caravaggio or the traditional Pietà) is put entirely at the service of a contemporary message. David’s Marat, a work whose mournful character bears the weight of the artist’s meditative idealism, dominated French art of the time. The legacy of this black vision of the epic was picked up by Gros (Battle of Eylau, 1808: Paris, Louvre), Géricault (The Raft of the Medusa: ibid.), Delacroix (Dante and Virgil, 1822: ibid.) and even Daumier and Courbet. During these years, French Romanticism is essentially a chronicle of revolution and empire.

It is also dominated by the character of Napoleon, who appears as a hero or anti-hero in not a few canvases. In David’s eyes, Bonaparte “crossing the Great St. Bernard” is the hero of a new era, with the aura of genius and prophet. For Gros, more impressionable, Napoleon had a messianic character, so to speak (The Plague Victims of Jaffa, 1804: ibid.). Géricault, still young, presented with Gros, without ever making it explicit, that the spirit of war is obscured by the reality of death, whatever its cause: he painted his Wounded cuirassier (1814: ibid.) as a nocturnal effect, with the same dark and eloquent color as David’s Marat, while his Raft of the Medusa, a gigantic representation of a contemporary shipwreck in the Indian Ocean, shows a multitude of naked bodies struggling in the same infernal darkness.

The format of such modern epics had already been worked out in England by John Singleton Copley, who between 1770 and 1780 had painted an extraordinary series of works on themes taken from modern history: Brook Watson and the Shark (1778: London, Christ’s Hospital), The Death of Chatham (1779-80: London, Tate Gallery.), and The Death of Major Peirson (1783: there). From these original modern compositions describing a contemporary event, we moved on to an art form capable of commentary to the point of denunciation and taking a stand. The formula was exalted by Goya, whose sensibility was so wounded by the humiliations inflicted on his country that he rejected all traditional rules of expression in favor of a brutal, almost caricatural and even expressionist description, which characterizes Dos de Mayo (1814: Madrid, Prado). It is not certain that this work was known to French artists, but there are striking similarities between Goya and some French Romantics.

Goya must have aroused the profound admiration of Delacroix and Baudelaire; the ghosts of his gloomy temperament (The Disasters of War, Proverbs) reveal the extent to which a painter, a witness to his own time, can transcend the limits of the conscious: this was accomplished with equal courage by Géricault in his portraits of madmen (probably executed around 1819). The search for a formal purity inspired above all by moral intentions follows closely these realizations, even though they are contemporary.

Flaxman’s engravings, based on the model of Greek vases, played an important role in Ingres’ training, as did the 15th-century paintings on display at the Musée Napoléon. The portrait of Mademoiselle Rivière (1805: Paris, Louvre) is imbued with an archaic gentleness, described as “Gothic” by his contemporaries, although Ingres did not attempt to become a painter of the Middle Ages or the High Renaissance. This was also the case with the Lucasbruders, a group of German artists who, under the guidance of Pforr and Overbeck, settled in 1810 in the monastery of Sant’Isidoro in Rome, on the Pincio Hill, and identified themselves with the early Florentine painters, whose works they strove to imitate almost painfully (frescoes of Casa Bartholdy, 1805-16).

Another innovation of the period was the rediscovery of a significant landscape style, freed from classicizing traditions as well as from eighteenth-century eclecticism. Here England triumphed above all, although in France Georges Michel should be mentioned, inspired by Rembrandt and Ruisdael, for his interpretation of nature. Moreover, in England, a vigorous provincial school, located in East Anglia and animated by Crome and Cotman, devoted itself to freely reviving the tradition of the Dutch landscape, outside any workshop formula; it gave life, in the 19th century, to one of the two main currents of English painting. Constable and Turner, the two great names in the history of the English landscape in general and of English romanticism in particular, represent two different visions of the world, which are not mutually exclusive. Constable remained an instinctive and self-taught artist, deeply tied to his environment and most inspired by those very regions of England where he had been happy: Suffolk, Salisbury, Brighton and Hampstead.

The absolute simplicity of his vision was totally opposed to the “sublime” tastes of the time, which he disapproved of. Constable drew closer to northern naturalism than to southern idealism, not without references to the pictorial explosions of Rubens (The Flatford Mill, 1817: London, National Gallery). His hand is sometimes rough, with brilliant surface effects, and he thrilled Delacroix when he exhibited Hay Cart (ibid.) at the Paris Salon in 1824. Constable’s passion for the natural world was most directly expressed in the studies or sketches, made outdoors, that he executed for his large canvases. From them, already completed in themselves, it releases a vitality that will not always keep his finished compositions. Turner represents in some ways the most complex personality of the “romantic” artist; trained as a watercolourist in the tradition of Cozens and Girtin, he exhibited his first oil paintings at the Royal Academy in 1797. His large-format works acquired a monumental character when he was influenced by Claude Lorrain; but Turner’s pictorial imagination transformed the original scheme into an unprecedented apotheosis, for the first time translated into terms of light and atmosphere.

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Historical notes: 1824-1840

The third phase of Romanticism-which could rightly be called the Romantic movement-is dominated by the conception of the artist as “genius” impersonated by Turner and Delacroixin their maturity. Turner and Delacroix were very different in tendencies and character, but they had some traits in common. Both maintained close ties with the masters of the seventeenth century and found powerful defenders, respectively, in Ruskin and Baudelaire. Both remained faithful to official institutions such as the Academy or the Salon. Both were at the origin of a fracture in the evolution of painting and contributed to its radical change.

Both, finally, pushed themselves to the limits of the possibilities of their pictorial language, and left neither pupils nor disciples. That said, the two characters embody the opposing conceptions of the romantic genius. Delacroix, susceptible, sophisticated, cultured, primarily Parisian; he remained attached to the academic ideal of history painting; his work is anthropocentric: he paints man in different historical, geographical, mythological or allegorical contexts. Turner, rugged, reserved, solitary and independent, uses human action only to punctuate his vision of nature: series of variations on themes by Claude Lorrain, or celebrations of the spontaneous forces of nature, storm, sunrise, speed, fire. Turner and Delacroix both had traditional training.

Delacroix was a pupil of Guérin and was influenced in his youth by Gros, Géricault and Bonington. The first work he presented to the public, Dante and Virgil (1822: Paris, Louvre), is close to Géricault and corresponds to the tradition of the tragic epic as David had defined it. His second main work on display, the Massacres of Chios (1824: ibid.), of classical construction and faithful to the conception of the modern historical subject set by Gros, nevertheless breaks completely with the past in its workmanship and treatment of color; it draws on a lightness, fluidity and beauty no longer known in France since the end of the 18th century. This change has been attributed to the influence of English painters such as Constable and Lawrence, whom Delacroix had been able to study at the Salon of 1824; it is more likely that he combined the transparency of Bonington with the generous vitality of Rubens, from whom he took many copies. His most Rubensian and romantic work, however, is Sardanapalo (1827: ibid.), a dazzling and curious mixture of pathos and sadism, which remain the artist’s two fundamental qualities. After this date, he abandoned the romantic model for classical inspiration and returned to the great traditions of painting of the seventeenth century.

Until the end of his life, however, he retained an interest in Romantic literature, exhibiting The Rape of Rebecca (ibid.) at the Salon of 1859, in other words well after the end of the Romantic movement. Rather than making the traditional trip to Italy, Delacroix traveled to England (1825), Morocco (1832), and later, for short periods, to Flanders and Holland. The Moroccan trip brought about a significant change in his style, freeing him from the tyrannical residues of the Mediterranean ideal and giving his color greater splendor and depth. The memories of this experience, which directly inspired masterpieces such as the Women of Algiers (1834: ibid.), are likewise deeply felt as they color even his most conventional endeavors, so much so that the gods and heroes of antiquity that adorn the libraries of the Bourbon Palace and the Luxembourg have a certain Moroccan air.

Marked by these memories, Delacroix was able to interpret traditional subjects such as Trajan’s Justice (1840: Rouen, Musée des Beaux-Arts) with power and freedom. His final career was engaged in large-scale complexes, commissioned by the government, for the decoration of the Parisian halls of the Bourbon Palace, the Luxembourg, the Louvre of the Hôtel de Ville: decorations whose culmination was the chapel of Saints-Anges in Saint-Sulpice, for which he was inspired by Raphael and Titian. He also wrote articles concerning other painters – in particular the one dedicated to Gros – which announce, in the sense of projection of personality, Baudelaire’s way; while his diary and his correspondence constitute an irreplaceable testimony of his evolution.

Turner’s training was just as traditional; but while Delacroix’s focused on history painting, Turner remained faithful to a more pictorial conception, with its references to nature in its fundamental aspects. The natural world was for him the scene of multiple impressions far more interesting than any human endeavor. Like Claude Lorrain, from whom he took his example, Turner employed characters and events as a simple pretext for landscapes that are sufficient unto themselves, visions of a man unintimidated by the power of his own receptive faculties.

Much of his work remains conventional, especially the collections of engravings, the result of his many wanderings around Britain, and the same is true of works such as Lake Buttermere (1797: London, Tate Gallery.) and the Calais Dam (1803: there), both inspired by eighteenth-century models and studies of Lorrain, as the Feast of the Harvest of Maçon (1803: Sheffield, Art Gallery).

An initial trip to Italy in 1819 had no immediate effect on the finished canvases Turner made during this period other than to expand the register of subjects; however, during this trip the practice of watercolor, according to Turner conducive to what he called his “impressions,” founded the essence of his future development. A work such as Levar del sole a Venezia visto dalla Giudecca (London, Bitish Museum) marks a total break with the topographical tradition of both the English watercolorists and Canaletto: it is entirely devoted to the harmony of sky and sea corresponding to a precise moment of the day, and contains few solid elements.

This elimination of forms as a point of reference for the landscape represents Turner’s most beautiful and daring aspect; it is the result of his receptiveness to natural changes and his ability to translate them with the sole help of painting. Turner stayed again in Venice in 1832, 1835 and 1840; these stays developed his interest in the interdependent properties of water and light. Later his oils, characterized by light, bright colors on a white background, obeying only the rhythm of the artist’s brush, gave the impression of gigantic watercolors, such as the Yacht approaching the shore (c. 1840: London, Tate Gallery). His genius in the treatment of light and color, together with his uninterrupted exaltation before nature, constitutes a unique phenomenon in the history of European art and represents the best apotheosis of Romantic consciousness in painting.