Classicism and romanticism

Summary

Dominique Pagani does not treat classicism and romanticism as mere labels: he gives them a predicate. Classicism is defined by the unity and stability of the age of Louis XIV. It takes as its reference Greek measure, a perilous balance won over excess. Romanticism, which opens with Rousseau and La Nouvelle Héloïse, is the explosion of the subject, of feeling and of nature. In the nineteenth century, he follows the alternation of romanticism, realism and the Parnassians, then symbolism. He describes it as a spiral rather than a circle: the subject returns deepened each time, up to the unconscious in Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Nietzsche, the prosecutor of romanticism, is himself drawn back to it by Parsifal. He also contrasts the separation of genres proper to classicism with their romantic fusion. He links that separation to the separation of orders and classes, and that fusion to the madness of Nerval or Hölderlin1. In painting, he sets Poussin's ordered, daylit nature against Friedrich's night, and places between them the break of the French Revolution2.

1. 1#5.1 bis Questions (Facebook Live)2 Nov 2018
2. 2#5.4 Introduction: nature or landscape?25 Jan 2019

Introduction produced automatically from the 3 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.