Exam 29: The Romantic Style in Art and Music

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Romantic artists sought to praise the hero,they captured certain principal themes that glorified creative individualism,patriotism,and nationalism.Antoine-Jean Gros,the student of "first painter," Jacques-Louis David,painted works of Napoleon's military campaigns that became powerful vehicles of political propaganda.For example,in his Napoleon Visiting the Plague Victims at Jaffa,Gros converted a minor historical event-Napoleon's tour of his plague-ridden troops in Jaffa (in Palestine)-into an exotic allegorical drama that cast Napoleon in the guise of Christ as healer.Indeed throughout most of Western history,the heroic image in art was bound up with Classical lore and Christian legend,but now artists were using this context to portray contemporary events.The artist Francisco Goya helped to advance this phenomenon.The Third of May,1808:The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid was Goya's nationalistic response to the events ensuing from an uprising of Spanish citizens against the French army of occupation.In true Romantic style,he used emphatic contrasts of light and dark and the theatrical attention to graphic details to heighten the intensity of the contemporary political event.
Théodore Géricault worked to portray the heroic ideal as well,but chose to elevate ordinary men to the position of heroic combatants,as they struggle against insurmountable odds.His work The Raft of the "Medusa" brought together the reality of a man-made disaster and the more abstract theme of the Romantic sublime:the terror experienced by ordinary human beings in the face of nature's overpowering might.
While Goya and Géricault democratized the image of the hero,Géricault's pupil and follower Eugène Delacroix raised that image to grand proportions.His paintings are filled with fierce vitality and vivid detail,he declared,"I have no love for reasonable painting." In his work,Liberty Leading the People,the women,a personification of liberty,assumes heroic status as she helps to lead the people against tyranny.Inspired by Delacroix's Liberty,France sent as a gift of friendship to the young American nation a monumental copper and cast-iron statue of a similarly idealized female symbol of liberty;The Statue of Liberty (Liberty Enlightening the World)is the "sister" of Delacroix's painted heroine;it has become a classic image of freedom for oppressed people everywhere.
In his sculpture,François Rude embodied the dynamic heroism of the Napoleonic Era.In his richly textured work,The Departure of the Volunteers of 1792,Rude captured the revolutionary spirit and emotional fervor of this battalion's marching song,La Marseillaise,which the French later adopted as their national anthem.