The difference between Neoclassicism and Romanticism

The difference between Neoclassicism and Romanticism is the difference between reason and feeling. Neoclassicism (c. 1770–1800) seeks the clarity of antiquity, with sharp outlines, calm compositions and a moral to learn. Romanticism (c. 1800–1850) seeks the infinite and the personal, with colour, movement, nature and the sublime. The two overlap in time and partly reacted to one another.

Facts

Line against colour

The quickest way to tell the styles apart is to look at the outlines. The painters of Neoclassicism draw first and add colour afterwards. Every figure is clearly delimited, like a relief in marble. The surface is smooth, the brushstrokes barely visible and the light clear. The Romantics work the other way round: colour builds the form, the brushstrokes show and the outlines dissolve in light, smoke and shadow.

The opposition became personal in Paris. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, a pupil of David, defended line as the foundation of art. Eugène Delacroix stood for colour and movement. Critics set them against each other for decades, and the debate continued an older quarrel from the 17th century between the followers of Poussin and those of Rubens.

Two paintings, two worlds

Jacques-Louis David's The Oath of the Horatii of 1784 is the key work of Neoclassicism. Three brothers swear with outstretched arms to fight for Rome, while the women collapse in grief on the right. The room is a simple set with three arches, the figures stand on a shallow plane as on an ancient relief, and everything is arranged in groups of three. The message is clear: duty to the state comes before private feelings.

Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People of 1830 is built the opposite way. The figures move towards us out of the smoke, the composition is a pyramid of bodies and flags, and the colour glows in red, white and blue. There is no classical model here but an event from the same summer, the July Revolution in Paris. Both paintings hang in the Louvre, and in the app you can place them side by side in Compare.

Sculpture shows the same difference. Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen sought a cool, pure marble, and Johan Tobias Sergel's Faun of 1774 is a classical figure at rest, modelled after studies in Rome.

The ideas behind them: the beautiful and the sublime

Neoclassicism received its programme from Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who in 1755 described the hallmarks of Greek art as noble simplicity and quiet grandeur. The excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii gave artists models, and the Enlightenment's faith in reason gave them a task: art was to educate citizens. Read more in the aesthetics chapter on the Enlightenment.

Romanticism took another concept from the same century. In 1757 Edmund Burke distinguished between the beautiful, which is small, smooth and pleasing, and the sublime, which is vast, dark and terrifying. Immanuel Kant took up the question in his Critique of Judgement in 1790; see the chapter on Kant. The Romantics sought the sublime in storms, mountains, ruins and the human interior. The chapter on Romanticism shows how philosophers and poets gave the artist the role of a genius who creates out of himself.

Intermediate forms: Géricault and Goya

Two artists show how close the styles could lie. Théodore Géricault was trained in the classical tradition and drew bodies as if from ancient sculpture. Yet for his great painting The Raft of the Medusa of 1819 he chose a contemporary scandal, a French shipwreck in which the survivors drifted for days on a raft. The figures are constructed like Neoclassical nudes, but the subject, the horror and the rising diagonal towards a ship on the horizon are Romanticism.

Francisco de Goya was a court painter in Madrid and began in an enlightened, classical spirit. With the etchings Los Caprichos of 1799 and the war pictures, among them The Third of May 1808, he moved on to something entirely different: darkness, violence and nightmare, without heroes and without comfort. He is usually counted as one of the forerunners of Romanticism, although he belonged to no school.

The overlap

The styles do not succeed one another at a clear date. As early as 1781 Johann Heinrich Füssli painted his The Nightmare, a sleeping woman with a demon on her chest, in the very heyday of Neoclassicism. William Blake created his visionary images at the same time as Canova carved his goddesses. Conversely, Ingres kept the line of Neoclassicism well into the 19th century.

Neoclassicism, too, could be emotional. David's Death of Marat of 1793 is both severe and deeply moving. And the Romantics could choose classical subjects; the difference lay in how they were painted. It is therefore wiser to speak of two attitudes than of two periods.

In Sweden and in architecture

In Sweden the Gustavian period corresponds to Neoclassicism, with Sergel as the great sculptor and a court that looked to Paris and Rome. After 1809 came Romanticism, with its interest in Old Norse history, folk poetry and Swedish nature, for instance in the landscapes of Carl Johan Fahlcrantz.

Architecture follows the same pattern. Neoclassicism built temple fronts, straight lines and pure volumes, while Romanticism rediscovered the Middle Ages and the Gothic. See the guide to Neoclassicism in architecture, and read about each style separately in the guides to Neoclassicism in art and Romanticism.

How to tell them apart

Exercise

A painting has sharp outlines, almost invisible brushwork and a subject from the history of Rome. Which style is it probably?