Grade 12 Visual Art
Wexford Collegiate School for The Arts
Romanticism: a quick summary for your notes
Instructor: Peter Marsh, 2008
Artists are rarely stupid people. They have to know a little bit about everything to live their penurious lives and they can generally stretch a dollar a lot further than most successful business men. The great ones definitely have the innate ability to look through the muck of life and raise the significant pieces to their canvas for us all to think about. Such is the case of Theodore Gericault, who brings us the romanticism of the “Raft of the Medusa”.
To get started one has to question the nature of laws and how far their jurisdiction extends into the vagaries of being shipwrecked in the middle of the ocean without enough life boats. It was the same fictitious question that was asked of the American Supreme Court in the case of the landslide entombed spelunkian explorers who wanted to draw straws to eat each other in order to stay alive (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/cse.htm). In the case of the Medusa, a French Frigate, the morals of normal society were blown away with the wind that shipwrecked them and the rule of law was rapidly reduced to ‘every man for himself’. We can read about this in the history of this real event and we can also see it clearly in the desperate humanity of the crew piled high and wide on a less than adequate raft. The boats officers have already left the scene in the only life boats available and the starving remainder is eking out their plight while hoping for rescue. And there was some cannibalism!
This true episode caused a huge stir in French society from 1816 to the 1820’s. Gericault’s painting hangs in the Louvre as the greatest of all the renderings about this incident and also as the most famous marked beginning of the period entitled “Romanticism”. Unlike its Davidian precursors the “Raft of the Medusa” is not an idyllic metaphor of the classical past, rather it contains real people, involved in a contemporary real event. Out of approximately 150 cut loose at sea about 15 survived!
Notice the characteristics of many romantic paintings that are embodied in this piece. It has some exoticism, for that period in time, in the Negro figure that hails the distant ship on the horizon (it disappeared). It has strong diagonal lines in the placement of the figures and the raft which gives the painting a dynamic quality denied to most neoclassical works. Although mute in comparison to modern terms the painting has a ‘painterly’ quality produced by the flow of brushstroke. The contrasts are dramatic. The movement is dramatic. The sky is dramatic. The poses are dramatic. The painting has a combination that fills it with emotion. And to top it off the painting has a dynamic asymmetrical balance even though it follows ‘the rule of thirds’.
You will find these characteristics in many ‘romantic’ pieces of art. When artists leave the staid and sedate they wander off into romantic expression. When Baroque and Rococo architects took the placid and classic lines of the Greek pediment and bent it, and cut it, and concaved it, they were certainly visiting personal and emotional expression, and although it appears somewhat excessive, it certainly has mystic and emotional quality not expressed in the traditional mode. The same can be said of more expressive sculptors. People like Rodin and Brancusi are certainly visiting a more personal space in their work than can be found in the lines of our classical past.
Romanticism embodied the work of many other romantic artists which we do not have time in this course to cover, but you are certainly advised to at least take a look at their work. Outside of the history of painting Romanticism is also a cultural movement trying to free itself from the miseries of industrialization, looking for a more meaningful and beautiful life. William Blake, Delacroix, and Walt Whitman are just a few of the many artistic names that are attached to Romanticism.
Even though we must move on quickly to social realism it is important to note that many of these artistic forces are running concurrently throughout history, and just because we mark the history of “Romanticism” in painting with the spectacular “Raft of the Medusa”, it doesn’t mean that romanticism as a movement was confined to this time. Actually it stretched from before the revolution at least up into the middle of the 18th Century. As I have said previously, Romanticism as a concept can be found in the work of all times and it is a fairly constant foil to its classical counterpart.
Wexford Collegiate School for The Arts
Romanticism: a quick summary for your notes
Instructor: Peter Marsh, 2008
Artists are rarely stupid people. They have to know a little bit about everything to live their penurious lives and they can generally stretch a dollar a lot further than most successful business men. The great ones definitely have the innate ability to look through the muck of life and raise the significant pieces to their canvas for us all to think about. Such is the case of Theodore Gericault, who brings us the romanticism of the “Raft of the Medusa”.
To get started one has to question the nature of laws and how far their jurisdiction extends into the vagaries of being shipwrecked in the middle of the ocean without enough life boats. It was the same fictitious question that was asked of the American Supreme Court in the case of the landslide entombed spelunkian explorers who wanted to draw straws to eat each other in order to stay alive (http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/writing/cse.htm). In the case of the Medusa, a French Frigate, the morals of normal society were blown away with the wind that shipwrecked them and the rule of law was rapidly reduced to ‘every man for himself’. We can read about this in the history of this real event and we can also see it clearly in the desperate humanity of the crew piled high and wide on a less than adequate raft. The boats officers have already left the scene in the only life boats available and the starving remainder is eking out their plight while hoping for rescue. And there was some cannibalism!
This true episode caused a huge stir in French society from 1816 to the 1820’s. Gericault’s painting hangs in the Louvre as the greatest of all the renderings about this incident and also as the most famous marked beginning of the period entitled “Romanticism”. Unlike its Davidian precursors the “Raft of the Medusa” is not an idyllic metaphor of the classical past, rather it contains real people, involved in a contemporary real event. Out of approximately 150 cut loose at sea about 15 survived!
Notice the characteristics of many romantic paintings that are embodied in this piece. It has some exoticism, for that period in time, in the Negro figure that hails the distant ship on the horizon (it disappeared). It has strong diagonal lines in the placement of the figures and the raft which gives the painting a dynamic quality denied to most neoclassical works. Although mute in comparison to modern terms the painting has a ‘painterly’ quality produced by the flow of brushstroke. The contrasts are dramatic. The movement is dramatic. The sky is dramatic. The poses are dramatic. The painting has a combination that fills it with emotion. And to top it off the painting has a dynamic asymmetrical balance even though it follows ‘the rule of thirds’.
You will find these characteristics in many ‘romantic’ pieces of art. When artists leave the staid and sedate they wander off into romantic expression. When Baroque and Rococo architects took the placid and classic lines of the Greek pediment and bent it, and cut it, and concaved it, they were certainly visiting personal and emotional expression, and although it appears somewhat excessive, it certainly has mystic and emotional quality not expressed in the traditional mode. The same can be said of more expressive sculptors. People like Rodin and Brancusi are certainly visiting a more personal space in their work than can be found in the lines of our classical past.
Romanticism embodied the work of many other romantic artists which we do not have time in this course to cover, but you are certainly advised to at least take a look at their work. Outside of the history of painting Romanticism is also a cultural movement trying to free itself from the miseries of industrialization, looking for a more meaningful and beautiful life. William Blake, Delacroix, and Walt Whitman are just a few of the many artistic names that are attached to Romanticism.
Even though we must move on quickly to social realism it is important to note that many of these artistic forces are running concurrently throughout history, and just because we mark the history of “Romanticism” in painting with the spectacular “Raft of the Medusa”, it doesn’t mean that romanticism as a movement was confined to this time. Actually it stretched from before the revolution at least up into the middle of the 18th Century. As I have said previously, Romanticism as a concept can be found in the work of all times and it is a fairly constant foil to its classical counterpart.
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