Classicism and romanticism

What Dominique Pagani says

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 nature1. 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 Parsifal1. 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 Hölderlin2. In painting, he sets Poussin's ordered, daylit nature against Friedrich's night, and places between them the break of the French Revolution3.

1. 1Leibniz1 Aug 2017
2. 2#5.1 bis FaceBook Live / Questions2 Nov 2018
3. 3#5.4 Introduction / Nature ou Paysage ?25 Jan 2019

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