Romanticism

An early-19th-century European movement — in painting, poetry, music and philosophy simultaneously — that set feeling, imagination and the sublime against the ordered rationalism of the Enlightenment. Where the Enlightenment trusted reason, system and progress, the Romantics trusted passion, intuition and the overwhelming power of nature. The movement was partly a response to the social disruptions of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which had demonstrated that history was violent, contingent and ungovernable by reason alone. Art, the Romantics argued, needed to match the scale and intensity of the age. In painting, this meant enormous canvases of storms at sea, volcanic eruptions, Gothic ruins and mountain precipices — subjects chosen because they produced what Edmund Burke had described as the 'sublime': a mixture of terror and awe that overwhelmed the rational faculties. Caspar David Friedrich's lone figures gazing from cliff edges into mist, J.M.W. Turner's apocalyptic seascapes dissolving into pure light and weather, Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa turning a recent shipwreck and political scandal into a vision of collective suffering — these are the defining images. Eugène Delacroix brought the same emotional intensity to historical and exotic subjects, his canvases thick with writhing figures and charged colour. The Romantic fascination with individual consciousness, with the irrational and with the non-Western world opened paths that would be taken up throughout the rest of the century. Symbolism grew directly from Romanticism's interest in myth and the inner life; Expressionism from its belief that art's primary job was to transmit emotional states. The solitary figure dwarfed by wilderness remains one of the most recognisable images of the Western tradition, endlessly recycled in photography, cinema and design.