This is the Chapter 12 lecture for HUM 2020.

1. • Identify major figures in Romantic and Realist humanities
and their works. (CO1)
Romanticism and Realism
All non-cited images were gathered from the free domain and are not under any copyright law restrictions. All images gathered from wikipedia.org.

2. The Rise of Romanticism
• By 1800, Neoclassicism was the dominant style in European art and architecture, but
Romanticism was beginning to emerge.
French painting would oscillate for four
decades between the classical and
intellectual paintings of artists such as
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and the
romantic and emotional paintings of
Delacroix.

3. While classicism was based on logic, rigor, clarity, and
exactitude, romanticism stressed inexactitude and
indeterminacy.
The Rise of Romanticism
One notable
Romantic painter was
Francisco Goya, who
was the most
important chronicler
of France’s war with
Spain.

4. In the Romantic era, sculpture fell out of favor.
The Rise of Romanticism
Romantics embraced Gothic architecture.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiographical
Confessions was a celebration of the self and a
powerful example of reflective self-analysis.
Bodoklecksel. Reims Kathedrale. 2006. JPG.

5. • The unity of humanity with nature was a special
theme of Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The Rise of Romanticism

6. • Living close to nature was, for Henry David
Thoreau, the very source of humankind’s strength.
The Rise of Romanticism

7.  Much nineteenth century literature focused on
human ignorance and the search for truth.
◦ Examples include:
 Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, in which Captain Ahab is seeking a
final truth in the form of a great white whale.
 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, who is always trying to
figure out “who done it.”
 William Blake’s poetry showed him to be a man with
a profound interest in human emotions.
Romanticism and Literature

8.  Probably the most important literary
event in the Romantic era was the
publication in 1798 of the Lyrical
Ballads, co-authored by William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, which rejected the
sophisticated syntax and vocabulary of
Neoclassical writing.
 One of the great English Romantic
poets was Lord Byron, a free spirit who
was known for his unconventional
behavior.
 Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is a
fully Romantic work that breaks new
ground in the violence of its scenes and
the extravagance of its style.
Romanticism and Literature

9.  Perhaps the most influential writer of the Romantic
era was Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, who
witnessed the shift from the Enlightenment emphasis
on reason, objectivity, and scientific fact to the
Romantic concern for emotion, subjectivity, and
imaginative truth.
 His play Faust has been described as a defining
work of European Romanticism.
Romanticism and Literature

10.  The two outstanding American poets of the nineteenth century were
Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.
 Whitman experimented with language and form, while Dickinson’s
poems are partly rooted in the metaphysical poetry of John Donne.
Romanticism and Literature

11.  While innovative Romantic composer
Hector Berlioz wrote mostly in large forms,
Frederic Chopin wrote in small ones.
 Where Berlioz wrote for orchestra,
Chopin wrote mostly for the piano.
 Italy’s greatest Romantic composer was
Giuseppe Verdi, composer of Rigoletto.
 As Beethoven dominated the musical
world for the first half of the nineteenth
century, Richard Wagner dominated the
second half.
Romanticism and Music

12.  In Realist art and literature, the aim was to tell the truth about the realities of modern life,
especially the lives of the working class.
 According to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the working class had no effective political
voice other than revolution and were alienated from their labor by an increasingly
mechanized industrial system.
 In 1848, as they were writing The Communist Manifesto, Europe was undergoing an
unprecedented economic decline.
 Revolution quickly followed in France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland and Italy.
 One of the first truly successful painters of the working class was Rosa Bonheur, who
celebrated the French peasant.
 The other great Realist of the day was Gustave Courbet, who refused to idealize working life.
Romanticism and Reality

13.  Photography was invented in 1839 and
literally changed the way we see the
world.
 The American Civil War was the first war to
be documented by photography.
 Mathew Brady was the best-known war
photographer.
 While France and the rest of Europe were
locked in class struggle, Americans were
immersed in the Civil War.
 It was the Civil War that gave the impetus
to American realism.
Romanticism, Photography and Realism

14.  By 1850, new technological
achievements offered
architects and sculptors new
possibilities.
 The Crystal Palace in
London, which extended the
idea of a glass-framed
greenhouse, was built for the
Great Exhibition of 1851.
Romanticism and Technology

15. Romanticism and Technology
The Statue of Liberty was designed in
1875 by Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi and
given to the United States by France.
Schwen, Daniel. Statue of Liberty frontal. 2008. JPG.

16.  Realist writers such as Honoré de Balzac aimed to represent
contemporary life with precision and objectivity.
 The Realist novel that represented the most thorough attack on the
Romantic sensibility was Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
 Important Realist novelists of the time included Charles Dickens,
Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot.
 The interest in precision was shared by the Realist scientists such as
Louis Pasteur and Charles Darwin, the latter famous for his theory of
evolution.
Romanticism and Realism

17. Resources
Bodoklecksel. Reims Kathedrale. 2006. JPG.
Schwen, Daniel. Statue of Liberty frontal. 2008. JPG.
All non-cited images were gathered from the free domain and are not under any copyright
law restrictions. All images gathered from wikipedia.org.