We know that Romanticism emerged as a response to disillusionment with the Enlightenment values, and turned to nature and melancholy. The visual arts could not have offered a more explicit representation of that shift.
In Romantic visual art, nature—with its absolute power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic situations—offered subjects of extreme beauty, but also of violent and terrifying images conjuring apocalyptic vision of devastation, wreckage, and man’s struggles against the awesome force of nature.
Scenes of shipwrecks often culminated, and Théodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, 1818-9 (Louvre), based on a contemporary event, became an icon of the Romantic style. Its horrifying depiction, emotional intensity, and lack of a hero
represented the sublime feeling of terror many Romantic painters were aspiring to.
Romanticism first presented itself in landscape painting, around the 1760’s with British artists turning to wilder landscapes, storms, and even Gothic architecture. Caspar David Friedrich, born in 1774, and J. M. W. Turner (1775) were two artists who took German and English landscape painting to more extreme forms of their Romantic expression, while John Constable, born in 1776, stayed closer to the English landscape tradition but in a much larger format. Turner painted very large landscapes, and above all, seascapes, sometimes with small figures that turned the work into history painting, too. On the other hand, Friedrich often used single figures, or other features set amidst a huge landscape.
Then, other artists verged on the mystical,
Europe Over
Claude Joseph Vernet (1714–1789), Shipwreck (1759). Oil on canvas. Groeningemuseum. PD
10 | Ceres Magazine | Spring 2016