Romanticism

Art History II: Baroque to Contemporary

Course 2 · Chapter 4 · Romanticism

Where Chapter 3's Neoclassicism prized restraint, reason, and idealized order, Romanticism inverts nearly every one of those priorities: raw emotion, nature's overwhelming power, and — most pointedly — a willingness to depict contemporary political horror rather than a distant, morally tidy Roman past.

The Sublime: A New Aesthetic Category

In 1757, the philosopher Edmund Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, formally distinguishing the merely beautiful — pleasing, harmonious, Chapter 3's own Neoclassical order — from the sublime: an experience of awe mixed with real terror, provoked by something whose scale or power genuinely threatens to overwhelm the viewer. Burke argued that terror was, in fact, the ruling principle behind any experience of the sublime. This single idea gives Romanticism its own coherent aesthetic goal, genuinely distinct from anything covered so far in this course.

Goya: A Direct Moral Reversal

Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808 (1814)

Commemorating Spanish civilians executed by Napoleon's occupying French troops during the Peninsular War. Formally, a single stark lantern isolates the central victim, arms flung wide in a pose widely read as echoing a crucifixion, his face lit with raw terror rather than composed nobility. The firing squad, opposite him, is rendered as a faceless, mechanical line of identical soldiers — the state's own violence stripped of any individual humanity at all.

🔮 Answering David Directly This is a deliberate, pointed reversal of Chapter 3's Oath of the Horatii. Both paintings show state-sanctioned violence and self-sacrifice; David frames it as noble, controlled, and worth admiring. Goya frames the same underlying subject — a state killing people in the name of duty — as horrifying, chaotic, and worth condemning. The formal tools (careful composition, deliberate lighting, real historical subject matter) are similar; the moral verdict could not be more opposite.

Turner: The Sublime as Pure Sensation

J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842)

Formally, recognizable form nearly dissolves entirely into a swirling vortex of white, grey, and pale color — a steamboat is only barely distinguishable, dwarfed and nearly consumed by the storm itself. Turner is widely considered among the first painters to embody Burke's own theory directly: this isn't a calm, composed depiction of a storm from a safe distance, but an attempt to make the viewer feel something closer to the storm's own genuinely overwhelming, disorienting power.

Nature dwarfing human technology, on purpose — a steamboat, the era's own cutting-edge industrial achievement, is rendered as barely visible against the storm's own scale. The formal choice to nearly erase the ship is the whole point: nature's power here isn't just bigger than a human vessel, it's genuinely, meaningfully indifferent to it.

Delacroix: The Sublime, Turned Political

Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People (1830)

Painted in the autumn of 1830, immediately following the actual July Revolution that had just toppled King Charles X. Formally, an allegorical female figure representing Liberty — bare-breasted, holding the French tricolor flag aloft — strides over a barricade and fallen bodies, leading a genuinely mixed crowd of revolutionaries (a bourgeois figure in a top hat, a working-class youth with pistols) forward in one dynamic diagonal surge of movement and vivid color.

A genuinely contemporary subject, not history painting — Chapter 3's David painted an ancient Roman legend to comment indirectly on his own era's own values. Delacroix instead paints an actual event that had happened mere months earlier, with real, still-current political stakes — a meaningful shift from using the distant past as a moral mirror to depicting the immediate present directly.

Neoclassicism vs. Romanticism

Aspect	Neoclassicism (Ch.3)	Romanticism
Governing value	Reason, restraint, civic duty	Emotion, individual experience, the sublime
Composition	Geometric, controlled	Dynamic, dissolving, chaotic
Subject matter	Idealized ancient history	Contemporary events, raw nature
Attitude to state violence	Often ennobling (Horatii)	Often condemning (Goya)

Questions to Sit With

Reflection 1

Burke argued terror is central to a genuine experience of the sublime. Can you think of something today — a landscape, a piece of media, a real experience — that produces that same mix of awe and real fear?

Reflection 2

Goya and David both depict state violence using careful, deliberate artistic technique, yet reach opposite moral conclusions. Does technical skill alone tell you anything about whether a painting is endorsing or condemning what it depicts?

Reflection 3

Delacroix painted an event from just months earlier, rather than using ancient history as a moral stand-in the way David did. What's gained, and what's risked, when an artist depicts a still-unresolved contemporary political moment directly?

Quick Reference — Chapter 4

Edmund Burke's sublime (1757) — awe mixed with real terror, distinct from mere beauty
Goya's The Third of May 1808 (1814) — a direct moral reversal of David's Oath of the Horatii
Turner's Snow Storm (1842) — form dissolving into atmosphere, nature dwarfing human technology
Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830) — a genuinely contemporary event, not history painting
Neoclassicism's order gives way to Romanticism's emotion, chaos, and the sublime

What's Next

Next chapter: Realism & the Disruptive Arrival of Photography — Courbet's own deliberate rejection of idealization, and photography's genuine, lasting impact on what painting was even for afterward.