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THE ROMANTIC CLASSICIST vs THE CLASSICAL ROMANTICIST

ROMANTICISMO dónde lo verdadero y lo falso no quedan delimitados. Los sentidos están engañados por una excesiva teatralidad y ornamentación….….los poetas y filósofos románticos reformularon la vieja querella de los antiguos y de los modernos, que pasa a ser la querella de los clásicos y de los románticos. la oposicion, así replanteada, estaba condicionada enteramente por la visión romántica de lo clásico……..

CLASICISMO……Los neoclásicos buscaron los efectos de la solidez y de la permanencia, de la solemnidad y la rigidez, de la evocación serena y silenciosa de ese mundo arcaico de verdades atemporales del que extraían sus principios…………

———-Turner dematerialisations shows us the world is real – the world outside our own selves, in all its light and shadow. His eye for the complex truth of space doesn’t just look forward to Monet, but Cézanne——-Throughout the first half of the 19th century, Turner was unstoppable. He dominated British landscape painting in a thoroughly Romantic style which was driven by the immediacy of personal experience, emotion, and the boundless power of imagination——————The open ended possibilities that the Romanticists were accustomed to left artists like Joseph Mallord William Turner a world of new found subject matter. The Romanticism period was the beginning of a complete rebirth of the art world moving forward from the social order of neoclassicism and dominating religious features throughout history to the extremely emotional period of art———-

———-Turner was never a painter of line but always one of mass, tone and light. For him the four elements were interchangeable; he treated land as if it were air and air as if it were water. “Indistinctness is my forte”, Turner acknowledged, but he used that indistinctness to express his pantheistic stirrings. The mists and vapours, deliquescing views and washes of colour that took his paintings to the edge of abstraction and so appalled his contemporaries are not just emotions but expressions of the numinous --a “category of value” and a “state of mind”—as a way to express what he viewed as the “non-rational” aspects of the holy or sacred that are foundational to religious experience———-

———-Confined by the strict rules set by The French Academy of Painting and Sculpture, Jacques-Louis David was told what to paint rather than paint freely. To be successful in the Neoclassical art period artists had to be firstly accepted into the Academy and secondly abide by the guidelines for art making———With the death of marat we have entered the Romantic era: note the focus on a single, tragic individual.  Rather than pledging himself to an Enlightened new Republic, Marat is a victim of political violence.  Ironically, both  Marat and David were still ardent supporters of the bloodier elements of the Revolution, and David has presented his close friend -- he was in Marat's home the day before Marat was murdered -- as a Christ figure.  But this comparison to Christ's passion is still much more Romantic than the "oath to the Republic" we started with————

The Entombment of Christ, Caravaggio, 1603–4

The Sorrow of Andromache, Jacques-Louis David, 1783