Friday, December 5 introduction to Romanticism / vocab quiz

Learning Targets: I can explain the difference between the Enlightenment and the transition to Romanticism.

In class: vocabulary quiz on "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
               Quick write: interpretation of Descartes and Rousseau's quotes
                Analysis of Goya print as representative of Romanticism
              

Quick Write:  In your notebook, in a well-written paragraph explain in you own words the philosophers Descartes' and Rousseau's  interpretation of what it is to be human. 

Age of Reason

Descartes: “Cogito, ergo sum” (I think, therefore I exist)
Age of Romanticism
Rousseau: “Exister, pour nous, c’est sentir” (For us, to exist is to feel.)

Plato described humans as a careful balance of reason, passions and appetites, with reason as the guide.

The Age of Reason or the Enlightenment elevated reason, but perhaps suppressed passions too much. For some, the emphasis on reason had gotten out of balance with the rest of human nature. 

Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850.

Qualities of Romanticism

Love of Nature
Idealization of Rural Living
Faith in Common People
Emphasis on Freedom and Individualism
Spontaneity, intuition, feeling, imagination, wonder
Passionate individual religiosity
Life after death
Organic view of the World
 

“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,”

With this print, Goya is revealed as a transitional figure between the end of the Enlightenment and the emergence of Romanticism.n the image, an artist, asleep at his drawing table, is besieged by creatures associated in Spanish folk tradition with mystery and evil. The title of the print, emblazoned on the front of the desk, is often read as a proclamation of Goya’s adherence to the values of the Enlightenment—without Reason, evil and corruption prevail.

However, Goya wrote a caption for the print that complicates its message, “Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and source of their wonders.”

rational. For Goya, art is the child of reason in combination with imagination.

 The Romantics were a group of writers, artists, and thinkers who rebelled against the rational thinking of the Enlightenment by championing intense emotion and feeling as the truest form of aesthetic experience. 

Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare

Working during the height of the Enlightenment, the so-called “Age of Reason,” the Swiss-English painter Henry Fuseli (born Johann Heinrich Füssli)  chose to depict darker, irrational forces in his famous painting The Nightmare. In Fuseli’s startling composition, a woman bathed in white light stretches across a bed, her arms, neck, and head hanging off the end of the mattress. An apelike figure crouches on her chest while a horse with glowing eyes and flared nostrils emerges from the shadowy background. The painting shocked, titillated, and frightened exhibition visitors and critics when it was first displayed. The scene is an invented one, a product of Fuseli’s imagination.

 The painting has yielded many interpretations and is seen as prefiguring late nineteenth-century psychoanalytic theories regarding dreams and the unconscious (Sigmund Freud allegedly kept a reproduction of the painting on the wall of his apartment in Vienna). Although it is tempting to understand the painting’s title as a punning reference to the horse, the word “nightmare” does not refer to horses. Rather, in the now obsolete definition of the term, a mare is an evil spirit that tortures humans while they sleep.