Beethoven: The Man, His Times, and His Music: Romanticism in the Visual Arts through the Baroque Era

Romantic artists draw on a different influence from antiquity than did classicists; the Greek tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles from mythology. Their focus is often on human character flaws like greed, jealousy, and lust, and the negative consequences that follow from these flaws.

Romantics also drew on Medieval literature (e.g. Nibelungelied - Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung) and Gothic architecture (Neogothic). There was also Neogothic literature (e.g. Mary Shelly's Frankenstein (1818) and Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831).

Ideas of the "Orient" also inspired them (e.g. Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan, 1797).

Romantic values / ideals:

Instead of objective reason, rationality and logic -
  Romanticism is about subjective passion and desire

Instead of stillness and calm,
romantic art has motion, energy, drama

Instead of stability, confidence and optimism -
romantics stress apprehension, volatility, turmoil, immediacy

Instead of being sensible, balanced, and non-fantastical -
  romantic art exudes the magical, mystical, mythological, sometimes the hallucinatory

Instead of knowledge through learned science -
  romantics stress intuition and the spontaneous creative imagination

"Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death." - William Blake

Instead of being civic minded -
romantics stress the individual & nature:
society corrupts the individual (Jean-Jacques Rousseau),
the human spirit thrives in nature (transcendentalism)

Gothic art, c. 1150 - 1350

Characteristics: Emotional, Magical, Mysterious, Fantastical