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Art & Art History vocabulary · Movements & Periods

Romanticism

Meaning in art & art history, with examples

/roʊˈmæntɪsɪzəm/nounCommon term

In art & art history, Romanticism means: A movement in art, music and literature from the late eighteenth to the mid nineteenth century that valued emotion, imagination, wild nature and the individual over reason and rules.

In Turkish: Romantizm, Romantik akım

How it is used

Key painters include Delacroix, Turner, Friedrich and Géricault. Writers describe Romantic works as dramatic, emotional and sublime. Here, Romantic has nothing to do with love stories; it is linked to powerful feeling, the sublime and national history.

Example sentences

  1. Romanticism rejected the calm order of Neoclassicism and celebrated strong feeling.

  2. Friedrich's lonely figures in vast landscapes are typical of German Romanticism.

Common collocations

  • German Romanticism
  • Romantic painter
  • Romantic landscape
  • the Romantic sublime
  • NeoclassicismA movement from about 1750 to 1830 that revived the calm order, clear lines and moral themes of ancient Greek and Roman art, partly inspired by the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum.
  • RealismA mid-nineteenth-century movement, led in France by Gustave Courbet, that showed ordinary people and everyday life truthfully instead of idealised or historical scenes.
  • landscapeA painting or drawing whose main subject is natural scenery such as mountains, fields, rivers or the sky; also the genre of such pictures.
  • art movementA group of artists who share similar ideas, aims or styles during a particular period, and the art they produce, such as Impressionism or Cubism.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Movements & Periods

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