Romanticism

Romanticism, 19th-century European artistic movement. Its values of emotion, intuition, imagination, and individualism were in opposition to the ideals of restraint, reason, and harmony promoted by classicism. The word “romantic” was first applied to art by Friedrich von Schlegel in 1798. It was later used as a label for works emphasizing the subjective, spiritual, or fantastic; those concerned with wild, uncultivated nature; and those that seemed fundamentally modern rather than classical. The evocative qualities of nature inspired poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Alphonse Lamartine, and painters such as Joseph Turner and Caspar Friedrich. William Blake and J.W. von Goethe sought to develop new spiritual values; individualism concerned artists as disparate as Walt Whitman and Francisco Goya. The lives of Lord Byron and Frederic Chopin seemed to exemplify the romantic myth. Among the greatest romantic composers were CM. von Weber, Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt, and Richard Wagner.