Romanticism

Romanticism in the visual arts was a movement spanning roughly the late eighteenth century through the mid nineteenth that prized emotional intensity, dramatic subject matter and the imaginative and individual vision of the artist over the calm rationality and classical restraint of the preceding Neoclassical school. Its leading painter, Eugene Delacroix, favored dynamic composition, saturated color and turbulent movement, taking subjects from contemporary politics, literature and North African travel rather than antiquity; his 1830 Liberty Leading the People, commemorating that year's July Revolution, remains one of French Romanticism's most widely reproduced images. Delacroix's rivalry with the Neoclassical painter Ingres, color and feeling against line and restraint, became one of the defining critical debates of nineteenth-century French painting. The same Romantic sensibility appeared in music of the same century, expanding the orchestra and harmonic language beyond Classical convention and drawing on literature, folklore and nationalist feeling for subject matter; Ludwig van Beethoven's later works, including his Ninth Symphony, are widely read by historians as a bridge between the Classical and Romantic periods. The term is shared with the wider Romantic movement in literature and philosophy of the same era, with which the visual-art and musical strands overlapped in spirit though the pace and boundaries of the shift differed by art form and by nation; this atlas's own coverage is of the visual-art and musical Romanticism, kept distinct from Literature Atlas's own treatment of Romantic poetry and prose.