At a time when the ideal of enlightment dominated in European cultural life, Rousseau was the only philosopher to enhance the significance of individual experiment and the need for nature in the education of young boys. Nature is elevated to a moral guide, a source of innocence and timeless truth. Those ideas are no less than the roots of Romanticism.
It was in France that the controversy over romanticism and classicism was the more intense. The starting of Victor Hugo's Hernani in 1830,(in which the author broke a classical convention of verse making in the opening lines) provoked riots in the audience. French romanticism appeared as a violent and commited avant garde , insofar as it challenged a long lived and deeply rooted order. While the Renaissance had incorporated a collective ideal, and imposed ancient virtues as absolute models, the eighteenth century had built a cult of reason based upon the idea that advances in knowledge, gained through objective rational observation and experiment , would bring about sustained improvement in the human condition. Those believe found their perfect visual expression in Neoclassicism and its values of symmetry, balance and harmony.
[...] Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing the turbulent inner character that lies behind external appearances, with the sole intention of reaching the truth. Portraiture is no longer the prerogative of the rulers, but that of the paupers (another challenge to hierarchy). Gericault for instance depicted the extremes of mental illness in his portrait of psychiatric patients like his Man with disillusion of military command.(Figure To finish, the assertion of subjectivity is obvious through the exploration of personal experience like the unconscious and subconscious, fields that the universality of reason is unable to explain. [...]
[...] In what way does Romanticism challenge the aesthetic values of Neoclassicism? Besnard,Hernani's Battle For us, existence is feeling, and our capacity to feel inarguably precedes our reason At a time when the ideal of enlightment dominated in European cultural life, Rousseau was the only philosopher to enhance the significance of individual experiment and the need for nature in the education of young boys. Nature is elevated to a moral guide, a source of innocence and timeless truth. Those ideas are no less than the roots of Romanticism. [...]
[...] It also recognizes the value of the ugly in engaging the senses rather than beauty which only wins admiration. The Raft of the Medusa marks the first appearance in painting of 'the ugly' and thereby proclaims its scrupulous respect for the truth, however repulsive the truth might be. This concern for truth is integral to the Romantic temperament. It also shows how the view of the same reality can differ: one is optimistic and brings the ancient virtue as the key to a better future, whereas the other gives no hope to the viewer, trough the representation of death, darkness and by representing the raft in such a way that the viewer is actually on the corner of it, suggesting that it is our entire society that is embarked on the Medusa'sraft Finally to suggest how absurd is the healthy view of society that neoclassics want to convey, futility and irony infuse the composition. [...]
[...] Jean Jacques Rousseau had introduced the myth of the Noble Savage and the romantics were looking for more honest way of life that might be learnt from peoples who preserved a natural vigour[13] Artists even went further by asserting themselves as Noble savages by defining the artist as a naive genius that hasn't learnt what he knows, whose creativity is a gift from nature, and whose paintings is the result of impulse and not rules. The attraction of the primitive was also seen as a challenge to western values, as well as a space for dreaming and a place of otherness. Distant places joined the distant past as destinations of romantic escapism. [...]
[...] Proportion purity and elegance[11] contrast with the vacuum of Friedrich's landscape which appeal to imagination and emotion. At the same time, romantics developed a new approach of history. Romantics were fascinated by the Middle ages. The old romances became a powerful symbol for those who were seeking to replace rules and tastes with inventiveness. The choice of what was considered as a Dark age »was an overt challenge to the Neoclassic who had focused on the enlightened civilization of Greece and Italy. [...]
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