In what way does Romanticism challenge the aesthetic values of Neoclassicism?

Résumé du document

"For us, existence is feeling, and our capacity to feel inarguably precedes our reason." At a time when the ideal of enlightenment 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.

Extraits

[...] To conclude, Romanticism challenged the aesthetic value of Neoclassicism by promoting subjectivity, passion and nature against universalism, reason and culture. The visual expression of that change was a shift from harmony, symmetry, clarity, self restraint, to motion, energy, originality, intensity, and excess. The Romantics also challenged neoclassics by creating new subject matters: fantasy, dreams, exoticism seen as an antidote to disillusion and melancholy, and by transforming established categories of art (elevation of landscape to equal and even surpass history painting).They gave birth to a new approach of the role of the artist: the artist as a prophet liberating the common people and no longer as a teacher educating us, improving us, inducing us to virtue Diderot. [...]

[...] The first one is an idealized view of man and Neoclassicism aimed to depict men as they should be rather than as they actually were, whereas Romantics, depicted their own vision of what they saw, an approach that could be said to be true because freed from any rules, but at the same time biased by the actual emotion and feelings of the artist. Thus, Romanticism tried to impose its own conception of the Truth and by doing so challenged the authority , stability and conformity of the long established tradition. A painting was from then on, seen as an actual self portrait (understood as the free manifestation of my personal impression Delacroix[4]) and not as the result of a combination of absolute doctrines and academic formulas. [...]

[...] 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. [...]

[...] It was Friedrich that produced the most meaningful landscapes. For instance, the Oak tree in the snow (Figure is a complex allegory, since the oak tree, symbol of strength is denuded, like Germany itself. Yet at its roots spring new leaves and the blue sky, brings hopes of renewal.[10]Also, Turner gave nature a powerful meaning, because he saw in natural phenomena, vital means of expressing sentiment. Finally, they did that by showing the insignificance of man before god and the eternity and power of nature. [...]

[...] 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. [...]