What is romanticism in art ?
The new scientific rationalism was closing in on religious and non-scientific knowledge. To try and hang onto beauty, goodness etc, people started trying to paint it. Essentially it was a reaction against the reductionism (reducing beauty down to details and principles of maths and science) and logical enquiry of the new science. Rather than ‘getting to reality’ (the post Descartes/Kant) problem of the Western mind, through logic and ‘clear and distinct ideas’, the Romantics tried tried to ‘get to reality’ through emotion, intuition and self-evidence. The split here is between Western rationalism and, to an extent, the artistic expressions of the phenomenological school. This emphasised experience, or the ‘here-and-now’ over and above logical analysis. Starting with phenomena (the object that I see), rather than noumena (the object in itself). Hope that helps. A couple of essay tips that I give my students: Remember to use a nice tight structure and to substantially revise your introdu
