Opinion of Romanticism

[Filuwaúrdjan]

An extremely important artistic movement. While it's excesses are easily (and deservedly) mockable, it was responsible for a revolution in aesthetic perspective^* and was essential to the creation of Modernity and, eventually, Modernism and beyond.

Looking at it as an 'intellectual movement' is very Atlas, and not in a good way. Look at some pictures, read some poetry, or listen to some music.** And then maybe consider it in intellectual terms, but not before.

<sub>*For an example of what I mean, compare landscape paintings of the 18th and 19th century. Except that writing 'landscape paintings of the 18th century' is (I would argue) absurd. Because artists of the 18th century did not - unless they were either a bit weird or were doing so for basically functional reasons. And even in the case of the latter they often struggled - paint landscapes as we understand the term today. They painted pastoral idylls. We regard (for example) mountains as beautiful, but before Romanticism they were generally regarded as wasteland.

**Though as music is a fundamentally abstract art form, Romanticism-as-a-dominant-tendency lasted way longer: up until the breaching of tonality in the early 20th century.</sub>

[Filuwaúrdjan]

With that constraint gone, landscape painting developed. The Dutch were expertly skilled at it and influenced most of the rest of Europe.

But (with a couple of very interesting exceptions) we are talking about pastoral paintings here. Often very good ones (or at least better than the dire stuff churned out in the 18th century. It is difficult to emphasise enough quite how bad most 18th century art is) but an idealised representation of well-settled countryside all the same. And certainly not immune from what would later be called nationalism (particularly in the case of Dutch artists).

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Ah, but I never said that all Romanticism was good

My point is that there was a major change in aesthetic perspective beginning at around about the beginning of the 19th century, and that the catalyst for this change was pretty clearly the Romantic movement. It's the movement's main legacy. An interesting feature of that change, incidentally, is that many of the consequences of it weren't properly felt until after Romanticism basically petered out in most fields after 1848.

Including, of course, landscape painting.