44 Facts About Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850.

Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism, clandestine literature, idealization of nature, suspicion of science and industrialization, and glorification of the past with a strong preference for the medieval rather than the classical.

In contrast to the rationalism and classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early urban sprawl, and industrialism.

Romanticism assigned a high value to the achievements of "heroic" individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the quality of society.

Not essential to Romanticism, but so widespread as to be normative, was a strong belief and interest in the importance of nature.

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In philosophy and the history of ideas, Romanticism was seen by Isaiah Berlin as disrupting for over a century the classic Western traditions of rationality and the idea of moral absolutes and agreed values, leading "to something like the melting away of the very notion of objective truth", and hence not only to nationalism, but fascism and totalitarianism, with a gradual recovery coming only after World War II.

An earlier definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.

In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of "sensibility" with its emphasis on women and children, the isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for nature.

Romanticism tended to regard satire as something unworthy of serious attention, a prejudice still influential today.

Important motifs in German Romanticism are travelling, nature, for example the German Forest, and Germanic myths.

Romanticism was relatively late in developing in French literature, more so than in the visual arts.

Stendhal is today probably the most highly regarded French novelist of the period, but he stands in a complex relation with Romanticism, and is notable for his penetrating psychological insight into his characters and his realism, qualities rarely prominent in Romantic fiction.

Polish Romanticism revived the old "Sarmatism" traditions of the szlachta or Polish nobility.

Early Russian Romanticism is associated with the writers Konstantin Batyushkov, Vasily Zhukovsky (The Bard, 1811; Svetlana, 1813) and Nikolay Karamzin (Poor Liza, 1792; Julia, 1796; Martha the Mayoress, 1802; The Sensitive and the Cold, 1803).

Romanticism began in Portugal with the publication of the poem Camoes, by Almeida Garrett, who was raised by his uncle D Alexandre, bishop of Angra, in the precepts of Neoclassicism, which can be observed in his early work.

Romanticism was deeply interested in Portuguese folkloric verse, which resulted in the publication of Romanceiro (1843), that recollect a great number of ancient popular ballads, known as "romances" or "rimances", in redondilha maior verse form, that contained stories of chivalry, life of saints, crusades, courtly love, etc.

Romanticism too was forced to exile to Great Britain and France because of his liberal ideals.

Romanticism sought inspiration in medieval Portuguese poems and chronicles as in the Bible.

Romanticism's output is vast and covers many different genres, such as historical essays, poetry, novels, opuscules and theatre, where he brings back a whole world of Portuguese legends, tradition and history, especially in Eurico, o Presbitero and Lendas e Narrativas ("Legends and Narratives").

Romanticism's work was influenced by Chateaubriand, Schiller, Klopstock, Walter Scott and the Old Testament Psalms.

Antonio Feliciano de Castilho made the case for Ultra-Romanticism, publishing the poems A Noite no Castelo and Os Ciumes do Bardo ("The Jealousy of the Bard"), both in 1836, and the drama Camoes.

Romanticism became an unquestionable master for successive Ultra-Romantic generations, whose influence would not be challenged until the famous Coimbra Question.

Romanticism created polemics by translating Goethe's Faust without knowing German, but using French versions of the play.

An early Portuguese expression of Romanticism is found already in poets such as Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage and Leonor de Almeida Portugal, Marquise of Alorna.

Romanticism in Italian literature was a minor movement although some important works were produced; it began officially in 1816 when Germaine de Stael wrote an article in the journal Biblioteca italiana called "Sulla maniera e l'utilita delle traduzioni", inviting Italian people to reject Neoclassicism and to study new authors from other countries.

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Spanish-speaking South American Romanticism was influenced heavily by Esteban Echeverria, who wrote in the 1830s and 1840s.

Romanticism's writings were influenced by his hatred for the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, and filled with themes of blood and terror, using the metaphor of a slaughterhouse to portray the violence of Rosas' dictatorship.

Brazilian Romanticism is characterized and divided in three different periods.

The second period, sometimes called Ultra-Romanticism, is marked by a profound influence of European themes and traditions, involving the melancholy, sadness and despair related to unobtainable love.

American Romanticism was just as multifaceted and individualistic as it was in Europe.

Transcendentalism and Romanticism appealed to Americans in a similar fashion, for both privileged feeling over reason, individual freedom of expression over the restraints of tradition and custom.

American Romanticism embraced the individual and rebelled against the confinement of neoclassicism and religious tradition.

Romanticism's projects were carried out by the architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc.

Romanticism's Liberty Leading the People remains, with the Medusa, one of the best-known works of French Romantic painting.

Romanticism shared with many of the Romantic painters a more free handling of paint, emphasized in the new prominence of the brushstroke and impasto, which tended to be repressed in neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish.

Literary Romanticism had its counterpart in the American visual arts, most especially in the exaltation of an untamed American landscape found in the paintings of the Hudson River School.

Musical Romanticism is predominantly a German phenomenon—so much so that one respected French reference work defines it entirely in terms of "The role of music in the aesthetics of German romanticism".

Romanticism justified his view on the basis of these composers' depth of evocative expression and their marked individuality.

The key figure in this trend was Guido Adler, who viewed Beethoven and Franz Schubert as transitional but essentially Classical composers, with Romanticism achieving full maturity only in the post-Beethoven generation of Frederic Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt.

For example, the prominent German musicologist Friedrich Blume, the chief editor of the first edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, accepted the earlier position that Classicism and Romanticism together constitute a single period beginning in the middle of the 18th century, but at the same time held that it continued into the 20th century, including such pre-World War II developments as expressionism and neoclassicism.

Romanticism believed that knowledge was only attainable by those who truly appreciated and respected nature.

Romanticism'story writing was very strongly, and many would say harmfully, influenced by Romanticism.

Romanticism regarded the oral literature of the peasants as an integral part of Serbian culture, compiling it to use in his collections of folk songs, tales and proverbs, as well as the first dictionary of vernacular Serbian.

Romanticism wrote "Verily I say unto you, it is not for you to learn civilization from foreigners, but it is you who are to teach them civilization.