The revolt of feeling

Romanticism is the one chapter of art history with no headquarters. It had no leader, no club, no manifesto, no founding dinner where everyone agreed on the rules. It was a temperament, a shared mood that surfaced at roughly the same moment in four countries among painters who, for the most part, never met: Goya alone in Madrid, Géricault and Delacroix making scandals in Paris, Turner and Constable arguing two sides of an English sky, Friedrich praying in front of the fog in Dresden. They had no program to sign. What they had in common was a conviction that how you feel about the world is as real a subject for a painting as the world itself.

To see what that revolt was against, look at what it was answering. The reigning style was Neoclassicism (the cool, sober art of Greek and Roman models, line over color, finish over feeling), and its master was Jacques-Louis David, official painter first to the French Revolution and then to Napoleon. A David picture is built like a Roman frieze (the carved horizontal band of figures that runs across a classical temple, flat and marching in a row): clear hard contour, figures lit evenly and modeled like carved marble, every edge finished, the brushwork sanded invisible, the mood austere and morally controlled. His Oath of the Horatii (1784) lines three brothers up like statues swearing on cue. Reason and order rule, and the thing carrying the picture is the line, the drawn contour you could trace with a pencil.

The Romantics were not painting a different period. They were painting the same one (the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Napoleon, the failed hopes of the years after) from the opposite emotional angle. Where Neoclassicism saw the Revolution’s heroic clarity and painted civic virtue, the Romantics lived through its hangover and painted what the hangover felt like: disillusion, the horror of war, the loneliness of the individual, and the pull of the nation. David painted the dream. The next generation painted the morning after.

They also found a subject the academy (the official art institutions that controlled training and the Salon exhibitions) had no slot for. Its name, borrowed from a philosopher, is the sublime. In 1757 the Irish thinker Edmund Burke had drawn a line between two ways a thing can move us. The beautiful is smooth, delicate, symmetrical, easy to take in. The sublime is the opposite: terror, vastness, obscurity, overwhelming power, the feeling you get standing under a cliff or in a storm, dwarfed and a little afraid. Burke argued the sublime was the stronger of the two, and the Romantics took him at his word. Nature too big and too terrifying to master became their great theme, the human figure shrunk to a speck inside it. A Neoclassical hero commands the scene. A Romantic figure is about to be swallowed by it.

So the rules invert, one by one. Color carries the emotion instead of line containing the form. The brushwork shows instead of hiding. The composition heaves on a diagonal instead of standing in a calm row. And the subject stops being virtue calmly depicted and becomes feeling itself, the sublime, the individual, the nation, and the nightmare, all painted with visible heat. What follows is that one idea, told four national ways: the darkness in Spain, the scandal in France, the dissolving light in Britain, the silence in Germany.