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Unit 2: Major Literary Terms-II

and sculpture to be modeled on prototypes in these media that had actually survived from classical Notes
antiquity, those few classical paintings that had survived were minor or merely ornamental works—
until, that is, the discoveries made at Herculaneum and Pompeii. The earliest neoclassical painters
were Joseph-Marie Vien, Anton Raphael Mengs, Pompeo Batoni, Angelica Kauffmann, and Gavin
Hamilton; these artists were active during the 1750s, ’60s, and ’70s. Each of these painters, though
they may have used poses and figural arrangements from ancient sculptures and vase paintings,
was strongly influenced by preceding stylistic trends. An important early Neoclassical work such
as Mengs’s “Parnassus” owes much of its inspiration to 17th-century classicism and to Raphael for
both the poses of its figures and its general composition. Many of the early paintings of the
Neoclassical artist Benjamin West derive their compositions from works by Nicolas Poussin, and
Kauffmann’s sentimental subjects dressed in antique garb are basically Rococo in their softened,
decorative prettiness. Mengs’s close association with Winckelmann led to his being influenced by
the ideal beauty that the latter so ardently expounded, but the church and palace ceilings decorated
by Mengs owe more to existing Italian Baroque traditions than to anything Greek or Roman.
For the sake of convenience the Neoclassic period can be divided into three relatively coherent
parts: the Restoration Age (1660-1700), in which Milton, Bunyan, and Dryden were the dominant
influences; the Augustan Age (1700-1750), in which Pope was the central poetic figure, while Defoe,
Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett were presiding over the sophistication of the novel; and the Age
of Johnson(1750-1798), which, while it was dominated and characterized by the mind and personality
of the inimitable Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose sympathies were with the fading Augustan past, saw
the beginnings of a new understanding and appreciation of the work of Shakespeare, the
development, by Sterne and others, of the novel of sensibility, and the emergence of the Gothic
school—attitudes which, in the context of the development of a cult of Nature, the influence of
German romantic thought, religious tendencies like the rise of Methodism, and political events like
the American and French revolutions—established the intellectual and emotional foundations of
English Romanticism.

2.2 Romanticism

Romanticism was more widespread both in its origins and influence. No other intellectual/artistic
movement has had comparable variety, reach, and staying power since the end of the Middle Ages.
Romanticism (or the Romantic Era/Period) was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that
originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the
Industrial Revolution. In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the
Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature.

Romanticism was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature,
but had a major impact on historiography, education and natural history.
The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing
new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is
experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new
aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made spontaneity a
desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a “natural” epistemology of
human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage.
Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived
medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt
to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted
to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than Rococo chinoiserie,
harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.

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