Romanticism and Idealism
After Kant and the French Revolution, art was given a new and higher task. For the German idealists and the Romantic poets it was no longer merely a source of pleasure but a path to freedom, to the absolute and to truths that reason cannot reach. The question was no longer what is beautiful, but what art is and what it can reveal.
Around 1800 the position of art changed fundamentally. The French Revolution had shaken Europe, and the Napoleonic Wars were redrawing the map. Kant, meanwhile, had shown that beauty cannot be proved yet still claims to hold for everyone, and that genius makes its own rules. His successors drew far bolder conclusions than he had. In the university town of Jena, around 1798–1800, a circle of young writers and philosophers gathered – the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck and the young Schelling – and set out a new programme in the journal Athenaeum. Romanticism became the name of an attitude rather than a style: a longing for the infinite, a faith in the imagination and a feeling for the unfinished and fragmentary. In 1798 Friedrich Schlegel described Romantic poetry as a progressive universal poetry, an art that is never complete but always in the process of becoming, and that mixes genres, prose and poetry, philosophy and criticism.
Friedrich Schiller took the first step. He was a playwright and poet but had studied Kant closely, and in Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795) he gave aesthetics a political meaning. The Terror had shown that people do not become free simply by being granted freedom. They must first become harmonious human beings, in whom sensuousness and reason are not at war. Schiller called the uniting force the play drive, and its object is beauty. The road to political freedom therefore passes through beauty. With Schiller, art became a means of human cultivation, an idea that shaped German culture and the notion of art’s educational mission well into the 20th century. At the same time, in Weimar during the 1790s, Schiller and Goethe developed a classicism grounded in Greek art, so the boundary between Romanticism and classicism was fluid. What they shared was the belief that art can heal a divided modern humanity.
Friedrich Schelling went further still. In System des transzendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800) he argued that art is the highest organ of philosophy. The philosopher can reach the unity of the conscious and the unconscious, of spirit and nature, only in thought; the work of art shows it concretely. The artist creates consciously, but in a great work an unconscious force is also at work that goes beyond his intention. In his lectures on the philosophy of art in Jena in 1802–1803 he surveyed all the arts and described architecture as frozen music, a phrase that Goethe also later took up. Art was no longer an imitation of nature but an expression of the same creative force that is at work in nature. In a speech in Munich in 1807 he urged artists not to copy the finished forms of nature but to seek the living force that creates them.
Landscape painting became the great visual art of Romanticism, and Caspar David Friedrich its foremost interpreter in Germany. His pictures are not depictions of places but carefully composed meditations. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, painted around 1817–1818, shows a man seen from behind before a landscape dissolving into mist. The sublime, which for Burke was a delightful terror and for Kant a discovery of the greatness of reason, here becomes an inner, almost religious experience. When Friedrich exhibited an altarpiece in 1808 showing a cross on a mountaintop instead of a biblical narrative, he was sharply criticised by the connoisseur Basilius von Ramdohr for letting landscape intrude into the church. The debate shows how far Romanticism broke with the academy’s hierarchy of genres. Friedrich wrote that the painter should paint not only what he sees before him but also what he sees within him. His contemporary Philipp Otto Runge similarly dreamed of a new landscape art that would become a religious art for the modern age.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel gave idealist aesthetics its greatest system. In his lectures on aesthetics, delivered in Heidelberg and Berlin in 1818–1829 and published after his death, he defined the beautiful as the sensuous appearance of the Idea. For him art is one of the three ways in which spirit becomes conscious of itself, alongside religion and philosophy. This is why Hegel takes almost no interest in natural beauty: art, being created by spirit, ranks higher. And this is why art also has a history, in which form and content grow towards each other in constant change. Hegel was no enemy of the art of his time. He could write warmly about Dutch genre painting, in which he saw the dignity of bourgeois life itself, a kind of Sunday of life, and he followed theatre, opera and art exhibitions in Berlin.
Hegel distinguished three great forms of art. In symbolic art, which he found in Egypt and India, spirit seeks an expression without finding it; form becomes colossal and enigmatic, and architecture, with the pyramid as its example, is its characteristic art. In classical art, that of Greece, spirit and form are in perfect balance, and the human figure of sculpture is its high point. In romantic art, the Christian art, spirit has become so inward that no body can contain it, and painting, music and poetry take over. From this follows his famous thesis of the end of art: art, considered in its highest vocation, is for us a thing of the past. He did not mean that art would cease to be made, but that it is no longer the highest expression of an age’s truth – a thesis that Arthur Danto revived 150 years later. Architecture thus held a double position for Hegel: it was the first art in history, but also the one least able to express the freedom of spirit. The Greek temple framed the image of the god, and the Gothic cathedral, with its upward striving, he regarded as a romantic architecture.
Arthur Schopenhauer, who despised Hegel, built on Kant and Plato but gave aesthetics a pessimistic foundation. In Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation, 1818) he describes reality as a blind, ceaselessly striving will, and life as a suffering made of unending desires. In aesthetic contemplation we can be free for a moment: we forget ourselves, become a pure, will-less subject and see the eternal forms of things, their Platonic Ideas. Architecture shows the lowest grades of the will, the struggle between gravity and rigidity in supporting and supported parts. Music ranks highest because, according to Schopenhauer, it does not copy the Ideas but the will itself. His ideas made their great impact only after 1850, on Wagner, Nietzsche and the Symbolists. He praised the Dutch still-life painters for their ability to contemplate the most insignificant objects with calm and objectivity, as a sign of the same will-less attitude.
In Britain, the aesthetics of Romanticism was formulated above all by the poets. In the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), the collection he had published with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798, William Wordsworth wrote that all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. Coleridge, who had studied in Göttingen and read Kant and Schelling, made the imagination the central faculty of art and distinguished it from mechanical fancy. A poem should grow like an organism, from within, not be shaped by external rules. In painting, Turner and John Constable each in their own way pursued the drama of light and weather, and Turner’s late works dissolved forms into light and colour. In a lecture in 1836 Constable said that painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. His meticulous cloud studies show that the Romantic feeling for nature could also take the form of almost scientific observation.
Romanticism was not only inward-looking. Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808, painted in 1814, shows a mass killing of civilians without heroes and without explanation, and in his print series on the disasters of war he went even further in depicting the ugly and the horrific. In Liberty Leading the People (1830) Eugène Delacroix turned the July Revolution into a contemporary history painting in which allegory and reality meet. Delacroix’s painting of colour was set against Ingres’s line in a new version of the old quarrel between Rubenists and Poussinists. Defending Delacroix in his review of the Salon of 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote that Romanticism lies neither in the choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in the way of feeling. Already in the print series Los Caprichos (1799) Goya had given one plate the caption that the sleep of reason produces monsters – an image of the limits of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism’s interest in dreams, madness and the darkness within humanity.
In architecture, Romanticism above all meant a new relationship with the Middle Ages. As early as 1772 the young Goethe, in Von deutscher Baukunst (On German Architecture), had praised Strasbourg Cathedral as an expression of genius, against the rules of classical taste. Hegel counted Gothic among the romantic arts. Construction of Cologne Cathedral resumed in 1842 after lying dormant for centuries, and in London the new Houses of Parliament were built in the Gothic style after the fire of 1834, designed by Charles Barry with Augustus Pugin responsible for the detailing. In Contrasts (1836) Pugin had set the Christian cities of the Middle Ages against those of his own day as a moral argument. The way was thus prepared for John Ruskin and for the great 19th-century debates about style, morality and craftsmanship. Victor Hugo’s novel Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, 1831) aroused new interest in the medieval cathedral, and from 1844 it was restored under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.