2025-04-03
One of the most famous paintings of the Romantic period is Caspar David Friedrich's "Wanderer on a Sea of Fog". Not surprisingly, the title wanderer looks out over a landscape shrouded in fog, seeming to admire the power of nature on the one hand and contemplate the unknown on the other. This illustrates well the important role of spirituality and untamed nature in the art of the late 18th century and early 19th century.
For the Romantics, in addition to the material, the spiritual side of man was also important, and this was expressed in painting through the depiction of violent atmospheric phenomena, ruins (thus the inevitable passage of time) or, often in German painting, strictly religious themes (especially in the work of Johann Friedrich Overbeck). In the pantheon of the most important landscape painters of the Romantic period, in addition to the German artist Caspar David Friedrich mentioned at the beginning, two English painters should be mentioned, William Turner and John Constable. The former often painted rough seas or fires and is considered a precursor of Impressionism. The latter was a representative of the so-called "melancholic realism", depicted his hometown all his life and was sensitive to various atmospheric phenomena, including the "calmer" ones.
In Germany, on the other hand, during the Romantic period, there were the Nazarenes, who opposed academism and took the painting of the Italian Quattrocento as their model. In Poland, a prominent figure was the self-taught painter Piotr Michałowski, an excellent painter of horses and battle scenes.
Between 1790 and 1840, Romantic architecture was primarily in the historicist trend. Neo-Gothic and Neo-Renaissance castles, villas, palaces and university buildings were built. It is worth noting that Romanticism was the first epoch in which Gothic architecture "came back into favour". In France, Victor Hugo's novel "The Cathedral of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Paris" certainly contributed to this. A popular solution was also the so-called "English garden", which was characterized by irregularity, freedom in planning and an abandonment of symmetry.