Asher2012.p2.t3 Romantic Era Synthesis

The Romantic Era, an era that is characterized by artistic expression, is an era that existed as a counterpoint to the philosophies of the Enlightenment, much as the Renaissance existed as a counterpoint to the ideas of the Medieval Era. The Enlightenment attempted to classify the human condition using the scientific method; it was a flourishing of philosophies that were aimed at bettering how the everyday man lived, at eliminating the injustices present in society. With the Enlightenment, though, came rapid growth in scientific fields, leading to industrialization on a scale never before seen in human history. This caused many of the intellectual giants of the post Enlightenment Era to believe that, although the Enlightenment aimed at bettering the human condition, all it really produced was a society that was even more rigid in its class structure (due to the shifting of wealth caused by the advent of the Industrial Revolution) and one that put little value in the common man (after all, people were just becoming “hands” in a factory overrun with machines). The intellectuals of the Romantic Era rose against this seemingly horrific turn of events much as the Renaissance Era academics expressed their displeasure in the strict ruling of the Catholic Church; through art, art as a form of protest. In the Romantic Era, though, art celebrated the triumphs of the common man and nature opposing industrialization and social injustice, whereas in the Renaissance, art was used to praise god while at the same time incorporating revolutionary and innovative techniques.
Examples of these views can be seen in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and Eugene Delacroix. Friedrich often addressed the immenseness of nature and mans (with all his machines and scientific philosophies) relatively minute importance in comparison to the grandeur that is the more classical natural world. In his painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, (1818) Friedrich portrays a man looking over a massive landscape consisting of trees and mountains all veiled in fog. It not only portrays how humans are unimportant in comparison to nature but how humans cannot fully grasp the hidden truths of nature, no matter how well we think we can. Delacroix on the other hand tended to focus on the injustices of a rigid social system in his artwork. In his painting Liberty Leading the People, (1830) Delacroix depicts a woman leading a group of common people past the bodies of dead soldiers, symbolizing the power of liberty, which can only result in the triumph of the common man over a socially unjust system of governance. These works represent what the Romantic Era embodied, a protest against the ills of a changing society and an exaltation of the common man. This protest is in contrast, though to the earlier protest that was the Renaissance because the focus of the artistic work in the Romantic Era is the common man while the Renaissance focused on the glory of the church.

August Mawn, Tom Allen, Daniel Pon, Zachary Gershman