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Essay on Neoclassical Art Period vs Romanticism Art Period

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Neoclassical Art Period Romanticism Art Period RIWT Task 1

Swinford, Beth 8/23/2012

Neoclassical Art Period
The Neoclassical art period overlapped with the 18th century Age of Enlightenment and continued into the early 19th century. Neoclassicism left almost no feature of visual culture untouched. This was regardless of the realistic and hypothetical connections to the classical tradition of Western art. Neoclassicism was viewed as a revolutionary denial of the selfindulgence of the baroque. Neoclassicism’s formal stylistic characteristics had a tendency to copy ancient Greco-Roman art with a prominence on poise, self-control, and grandeur of …show more content…

Artists were known to take public stands, or wrote works with socially or politically influenced subject matter (Melani, 2009). A major Romantic subject was the distinction between artist and middle-class that were regarded as being indifferent to artistic and intellectual achievements and values.

Relationship between the Neoclassical and Romanticism Art Period
The clean and straight lines of the neoclassical style provided a passive palette, chiseled forms, low depth of background and excellent plans or designs. Neoclassical artists strived for the best with meticulously drawn line as well as superbly premeditated plans. They were considered to be a higher-class compared to Romanticisms luring of vivid color and high contrasts. Neoclassical thinking was that better to be solicitous and cautious than to rouse the emotions. Romanticism was quite the opposite by accentuating the emotion, the individual, the illogical, the imaginative, the spontaneous, and even the creative thinking and supernatural in art (Irwin). Romantic artist wanted to define their agendas through logical distinction from the rules of Neoclassicism. The 1800 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, the crucial studies of the Schlegel brothers in Germany, the later statements of Victor Hugo in France, and of Hawthorne, Poe, and Whitman in the United States--they self-consciously declared their variances from the previous age declaring freedom from the mechanical "rules" (Melani, 2009). Two major

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