Unit 4 - Romanticism - Sketchbook

▲ Temple of Juno in Agrigento,
Caspar David Friedrich, c.1828-
1830, oil on canvas, small scale
That lack of God in the society and the virtues such as innocence or chivalry,
made the artist of Romanticism nostalgically look back to the medieval times,
when these aforementioned values seemed to play a more important part in the
society.
Romanticism was a response to the ugliness of the industrialisation, which was going away from the Nature they
celebrated. They criticised it. Often, they looked at countryside, which to them evoked the notion of beauty and idyll
that was being blemished by mechanisation, thus making some farm workers lose their job.
Religion, which as I mentioned before was in a sort of a decline, and especially the mystical element, which
constitutes the nature of it in general, and the idea that there is something that even the thinkers of Enlightenment
cannot simply comprehend was what appealed to the Romantic artists.
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