Science and Romanticism in Art

How did representations of nature go from this:

…to this:

1. The artist

• Look at these three images. What do each of them tell you?

• By the time we get to the last picture, the artist is seen as a romantic figure – someone along in the wilderness, seeking something, whether beauty, knowledge or spiritual enlightenment

2. Science

• Artists were the first anatomists. Leonardo Da Vinci dissected bodies and made detailed drawings that became the basis for much medical knowledge

• From then on, the scientist was someone who, like great artists, pushed the boundaries of knowledge and perception.

• What do you notice about these two representations of scientific investigations?

• How do they compare to this medieval picture?

• …and to this nineteenth century painting?

…or this?

• The idea of an artificial human that began with Frankenstein took a different turn, again prompted by artistic ideas:

• Jacob Epstein’s Rock Drill was considered so shocking that eventually the artist dismantled it

• He said he did this because after the mechanised slaughter of WW1 he himself was frightened by his own vision

• It is still influential today!

• Other artists who fought in the first world was noticed how men became like machines. David Bomburg produced two versions of the same picture:

http://www.art-ww1.com/trame/024text2.html

• And film makers have picked up on this theme of the mechanised soldiers, and how they, like the monster in Frankenstein, might rebel against their creators

• …although for some artists, mechanisation was simply the way of the world now, and a source of beauty. Mondrian based Broadway Boogie Woogie on the grid-like pattern of yellow taxis on the New York streets:

3. Landscape

• The Garden of Eden was a common subject for paintings. The word Paradise, another way of describing Eden, means Walled Garden in Persian. In the earliest representations, we can see this literally – paradise is a safe, walled garden, where everything is ordered and controlled.

• But soon the walls disappear – in this painting by Rubens, the garden is human, safe and abundant, but no longer so controlled.

• The romantic Eden is a different place- grand, rugged, where the humans are tiny in comparison to the grandness of nature:

• This is the romantic vision of nature – grander than man, and sublime

4. Composition

• The last element of the transformation into a Romantic visual language was composition. The classical ideals of composition in a picture were geometrical – lines, squares, circles, equal divisions

• …whereas Romantic painters used natural shapes reminiscent of mountains and waves…

• So, to return to the two paintings we started with, see if you can identify the ways the romantic world view transformed the visual language. As a clue, both are about time and death – the first is called ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’, and the second is a vision of Judgement Day.