The Romantics gave us individuality and a value of our emotions as the real source of an aesthetic experience .
The movement was born in the end of the 18th century rooted in the Sturm und Drang ( Storm and Drive ) movement in Germany but rapidly spread to other European countries particularly in England, France and Italy .
This post does not pretend to tell the History of Romanticism which is vast and rich , but its important to know some of its characteristics and why i believe that i look at the world through the eyes of a Romantic .
As i have stated previously, the romantics placed a great value to the individual emotion , especially in the aesthetic experience and more specific in the free expression of the emotion by the artist .
as the great German painter Casper David Friedrich pointed " The artist`s feeling is the law ".
For the English poet William Wordsworth poetry should begin " as the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings which the poet then recollects in Tranquility " evoking a new but corresponding emotion that the poet can mold into Art .
Art had to sprung from the imagination of the artist and not submitted to artificial rules . Hence the supreme value of the Genius for the Romantics .
Not essencial in the Romantics but so widespread as to be normative was the profound belief and interest in the importance of Nature . It was seen as quite beneficial to the artist in his creative process to be left alone in communion with Nature.
Opposite to the social art of the Enlightenment , Romantics were distrustful of the Human World and tended to believe that a closer connection with Nature would be morally and mentally healthier . A derivative concert of the " good savage " idealism of Rousseau .
Having said this , if a skepticism towards human societies and its innumerable laws that constrict us and individuality driven mostly by emotions and not reason are the landmarks of a Romantic , then i must proudly say that i am a romantic and see the world through the emotional and somehow gullible eyes of an 18th century individual and not the analytical and practical eyes of a man of my Time.
Gullible as might be i despise this age of usefulness and effectiveness that hunted down without mercy all the useless things that constitute the embodiment of artistic and creative expression .
We live in an Age that values objective , useful things , things with a purpose , a society of Tools. Not realizing that what truly define us as humans are those things that have no other purpose but to awaken in us feelings being of beauty , horror , of pure awe in its various forms .
I raise my chalice of happiness to the ornate of life ! To the Empire of the Useless because beauty flourishes within its borders.
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| Casper David Freidrich - Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog 1818 |
