Romantic Painting, Part II

Mike G. on 12 30, 2009

The romantic painters were, however, by no means merely emotional. They
were mainly imaginative. And in painting, as in literature, the great
change wrought by romanticism consisted in stimulating the imagination
instead of merely satisfying the sense and the intellect. The main idea
ceased to be as obviously accentuated, and its natural surroundings were
given their natural place; there was less direct statement and more
suggestion; the artist’s effort was expended rather upon perfecting the
_ensemble_, noting relations, taking in a larger circle; a suggested
complexity of moral elements took the place of the old simplicity, whose
multifariousness was almost wholly pictorial. Instead of a landscape as
a tapestry background to a Holy Family, and having no pertinence but an
artistic one, we have Corot’s “Orpheus.”

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