Varieties of Romanticism in Art - Assignment Example

Looking closely at a particular finished artwork can help the viewer to understand important concepts within the given society, such as the relationship between women and men or the political forces at work. By comparing several works of the Romanticist period, one can begin to understand the underlying forces of the period and thus appreciate the individual approaches to a greater degree. Romanticism focused on more direct emotional expression than the highly constructed neoclassicist approach that preceded it.

“An interesting schematic explanation calls romanticism the predominance of imagination over reason and formal rules (classicism) and over the sense of fact or the actual (realism)” (Holman & Harmon, 2001). Characteristics of the style identified by Welleck (2003) include a “revolt against the principles of neo-classicism criticism, the rediscovery of older English literature, the turn toward subjectivity and the worship of external nature slowly prepared during the eighteenth century” (196).

The period idolized the imagination as the highest of human capacities due largely in part to its creative abilities and as a means of reacting to sweeping change in every aspect of life. It also esteemed nature not only because of the creative element inherent in it, but also because of the manifestation of the imagination that could be found within it in the sense that we create what we see. The world was full of symbols and signs that would portend future events and actions which were knowable through their relationship to the myths and legends of antiquity.

Thus, it was not necessary or even fully expressive to remain doggedly true to physical vision. This approach to art can be seen as early as 1781 in the work of Henry Fuseli. In his numerous paintings and drawings, this artist chose to focus on elements of the imagination and its effects on the living experience of the human animal. The Romantic approach can be