Romanticism
Nolan Anselmi
Nolan Anselmi
Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, and criticism in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the principles of order, calm, harmony, balance, and idealization that typified classicism in general and late 18th-century neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the 18th-century rationalism and materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.
Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation of the natural beauties of nature; a general extreme happiness of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentials; the hero, the "exceptional" figure, and a focus on his passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict attachment to formal rules and "traditional" procedures. |