Expressing classical and romantic values in the visual arts:
| Classical Values | Romantic Values | |
| Vertical & Horizontal lines | Diagonal or Curved lines | |
| Stillness | Motion | |
| Plenty of light / bright skies | Dusk, fog, clouds, storms | |
| Ancient Greek & Roman building and people |
Forests, mountains, seas and Medieval Ruins |
|
| Square and rectangular rooms | Round rooms (Baroque Era) |
Classical Antiquity (ancient Greece and Rome) (600 B.C.E - 400 A.D)
Western Medieval Europe (c. 400 - 1400)
Renaissance (1400-1600) Renaissance composers
Renaissance Humanism:
The Renaissance revived the ancient Greek idea of Paideia (pi-de-a), the educating of the ideal citizen of the polis (Greek city/state such as Athens). Humanism therefore seeks the fullest cultivation of all human powers – intellectual, ethical, and even physical. A key element of humanism was enthusiasm for the classical cultures of ancient Greece and Rome in which this ideal first took root.
A revived interest in Neoplatonism (later elaborations on Plato's philosophies), brought about a philosophy that man can become closer to God (and actually become more God-like) by using his intellect. Common men can rise spiritually, intellectually, economically, and politically.
This challenged the fixed, hierarchical medieval social class structure of kings, princes, nobles, with peasants at the bottom. A new middle class rose on an increase of local and international trade and the banking needed to finance it. The rise of the Medici family in Florence is an example of this.
Roman contributions included stoicism in ethics and republican civic virtue (the citizen takes care of his society; is the government watchdog) as found in the "humane letters" of Cicero and others (our word "humanities" is derived from this).
Renaissance art is largely characterized by seriousness, calmness, poise, stability, dignity, rationality, self-assuredness, optimism and the eternal. These are classical values.
Click here for Renaissance Art
Renaissance Music:
High Renaissance: Josquin de Prez (Franco-Flemish) Misereri (1504) (play music)
Late Renaissance: Palestrina (Italian) "Gloria" (1591) (play music)
Renaissance music begins transitioning to Baroque c. 1570. The Florentine Camerata,
a group of Florence intellectuals, becomes interested in ancient Greek drama.
Baroque (1600 - 1750) J.S. Bach, Handel, Vivaldi (more composers)
A new focus on secular drama opened the Baroque era in Italy with a renewed interest in the ancient Greek tragedians (e.g. Sophocles, Euripides).
The first lasting opera, Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, based on the Greek legend of Orpheus, was staged in 1607. In it, Orpheus pleads emotionally with Charon, the boatman of the River Styx, to take him across the river into Hades so he can take the body of his dead wife back to the upper world.
William Shakespeare's tragedies (1590 - 1610) highlight the baser human emotions of greed, lust, jealousy, personal ambition, and revenge.
The European middle class expanded during the Baroque era as did international trading. The Dutch Republic reaches its zenith in the 1600s. By the 1640s the first public opera houses were opened in Italy to accommodate middle class desires for dramatic entertainment.
Visual art in the Baroque era depicts more movement and drama than did painting and sculpture in the Renaissance.
The 17th century fascination with physics (laws of movement and gravitation "attraction" in Galileo and Isaac Newton) promotes increasingly complex chord progressions and counterpoint melodies in music, reaching its zenith in the works of Johann Sebastian Bach in the first half of the 18th century.
Rococo architecture depicts the concepts of busyness, complexity, and ornamentation that late Baroque music did.
Baroque art is characterized by movement, action, drama, flux, and a sense of the ominous and sometimes the chaotic. These are romantic values
Click here for Baroque Art
Baroque begins transitioning to Neoclassical c. 1725.
Domenico Scarlatti and Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach are important transitional figures.
Classical Era (1750 - 1820) Gluck, Haydn, Mozart (more)
The classical era simplified the complexity found in Baroque visual arts, architecture, and music. Values of the Renaissance like stability, order, reason, rationality, tempering of emotion all reappeared, as did depictions of ancient buildings and people in paintings. Simplified elegance was highly valued. Single melody lines over simplified chord structures replaced the counterpunctual lines of the Baroque era making the music more "song-like" to the ear. Mozart was the most gifted melody writer of his, and maybe any other, age.
The late 18th century was the culmination of the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that began in the late 17th century and advocated more political freedoms and participation, especially for the expanding middle class. By 1780, continental Europe was in the midst of revolutionary fervor, especially in France which had a repressive absolute monarchy in the Bourbons.
By 1760, this new "classical" style surpassed Baroque music as the preferred musical style. Christoph Willibald Gluck, Josef Haydn, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart are the dominant composers of this era which is the prevelent musical style into the early 1800s.
Click here for Neoclassical Art
The Classical era begins transitioning to the Romantic Era c. 1800.
Beethoven and Franz Schubert (starting c. 1820) are major transitional figures.
Romantic (c. 1820 - c. 1900) Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann,
Bruckner, Mahler, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff) (more)
Romanticism returns with Shakespeare's writings as an initial force c. 1770. Further developments in the arts focus on subjective emotions rather than objective reason.
By the early 1800s, many artists and other intellectuals were reacting against this focus on reason, partially because the restraint of emotions in order to be "rational" seemed to them to be restrictive of experiencing the full scope of life.
In aesthetics, previous focus on objective beauty gives way to a fascination with the subjective sublime.
"We call that sublime which is absolutely great... [Beauty] "is connected with the form of the object", having "boundaries", while the sublime "is to be found in a formless object", represented by a "boundlessness." (Immanuel Kant, 1786).
This new Romanticism, while not fully rejecting reason and even embracing the new political philosophy, turned its attention to human emotions.
Passion, drama, and even mental instability again are central themes of romanticism. The Romantics focused as much on personal human freedom as political freedom. Mary Shelly's Gothic horror story, Frankenstein (1817), is actually a critique of Enlightenment rationality and what she saw as a misplaced lust to conquer nature through science. Likewise, William Blake's poetry decried the dehumanizing effects of factory work in the British industrial revolution. In the visual arts themes of classical Roman architecture were replaced with mountains, seas, and storms.
Where the Enlightenment had been highly optimistic, the Romantics alternated between optimism and pessimism to give a fuller expression of the human experience.
In the transition from the Classical era to the Romantic era, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827) is the leading figure in music. Musical romanticism will eclipse the classical style in the 1820s and will last until the late 19th century, and even into the 20th century.
Click Here for Art of the Romantic Era
Impressionism (1875-1925) (Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel)
20th Century Music (20th century & 21st century composers)
No comments:
Post a Comment