Romantic Art Research Articles

Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism ed. by Joseph M. Ortiz (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism ed. by Joseph M. Ortiz Ruth M. E. Oldman Joseph M. Ortiz (ed). Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. 294p. To claim that William Shakespeare is one of the most influential authors in literary history is almost a moot point. The Bard has been read worldwide for centuries, influencing many aspects of the arts and culture. Countless critical editions and essays have been published on his works, providing in-depth and fascinating critiques of his contributions to the English canon and the ways he has influenced culture as a whole. This text edited by Joseph M. Ortiz is no exception. Shakespeare and the Culture of Romanticism is a critical collection of essays which, in short, discuss the influence Shakespeare had on Romantic art, literature, culture, and society. These articles do much more than this, though. The reader does not just get a quick snapshot of how Shakespeare affected one aspect of culture but [End Page 240] rather how that connection contributed to the greater Romantic Movement. Spanning across the whole of the time period, several Western nations, and disciplines, these articles weave a greater cultural understanding of what it meant to truly embrace the Bard as a grand contributor to Romanticism. The most impressive aspect of this collection is the breadth of culture the articles cover. Chapters range from the influence of Shakespeare on Romantic literature such as Wordsworth, Smith, and Dickenson, to the reinterpretation of his dramatic works for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century audiences, to social understandings of gender and history through the staging of his plays. Not only does the reader understand how Shakespeare influenced these aspects but she or he is also provided with an understanding of what culture was during the Romantic era. A strong emphasis is placed on the aesthetic nature of Shakespeare’s influence as well as the relationship between the performance and poetics of his plays. On the whole, these articles provide a cumulative understanding of Romantic culture and how culture in general is understood. This is not to say, of course, that each essay could not stand on its own. Rather, each chapter provides its own unique take on the titular subject. Scholars in a multitude of disciplines could find use in at least one of the essays within the text. Ortiz categorizes the twelve chapters provided into four sections, presenting a different aspect of Romantic culture in each. Within these sections, the chapters illustrate new ideas about a diverse range of cultural artifacts and how Shakespeare’s influence can be read into them. For instance, several of the essays discuss the use of Shakespeare in a manner to create authority for the artist, in particular female artists. Essays do not just reference the influences of Shakespeare on Romantic authors and works, but rather how these influences translate into a culture that could be defined as Romantic. The most appropriate way to describe the presentation is from Ann R. Hawkins’s chapter, “Reconstructing the Boydell Shakespeare Gallery.” Although referencing Boydell’s Shakespearean art pieces, Ortiz’s collection, too, can be seen “as a series of ‘galleries,’ of distinct moments in a complicated cycle of Shakespearean representation and consumption in the Romantic era” (Hawkins 210). The only flaws that can be found when considering this collection are the diversity of the articles in regards to Romantic society and the display of Romanticism as a whole, all-encompassing Western culture. The articles, as stated previously, provide an excellent understanding of the culture but only seem to present certain aspects of society, such as gender constructions and issues. The topic of socio-economics is hinted occasionally throughout but does not have a major role in the collection, save for a part in the final essay “A Written Warning” [End Page 241] by Leigh Wetherall-Dickson. The collection also appears to present Romantic culture as a wide-sweeping, general concept. However, the various countries participating in the Romantic movement each had their own cultural identities and variations of Romanticism. If we are to understand Shakespeare’s influence on Romantic culture without a specific context and instead look at Romanticism strictly from an aesthetic point...

Towards an Understanding of the Transfiguration and Disfiguration of Romantic Art Suspended between Genesis and Apocalypse: An Anatomy of De-Composition in the Balzacian/ Baudelairian Corpus

The primary quest of anthropological man in the XIXth century revolves around the problematics of origination, in particular in the domain of the aesthetic. We propose to examine how the Weltanschauung of an epoch obsessed with the problematics of origination is manifest in the pathological probing of the ontogenetic status of the romantic aesthetic artefact in the Balzacian and Baudelairian corpus. In tracing the aesthetic cartography subtending the creation of the poetic artefact we shall probe the chthonic substratum of romantic art, understood in terms of the systolic and diastolic rhythms of self-creation and self-destruction postulated by Friedrich Schlegel in the concept of Romantic Irony. Through a microanalysis of the crisis of self-representation encapsulated in the myth of poetic origination as it is articulated in the phenomenological grounding of the romantic aesthetic artefact, we propose to investigate the aesthetics of de-composition embedded in romantic art, or to be more precise, the subversion of the romantic aesthetic object disfigured by the visceral corruption operated by the dissolving powers of irony eating away at the core of the romantic text. In short, the subject of our discourse is the incorrigible angst ingrained in the romantic aesthetic artefact, the aetiology of which may be traced to the pathogenic de-composition symptomatic of the iterative suicide of romantic art.

Da seriedade masculina e da mulher como bagatela: considerações sobre a sociedade patriarcal oitocentista a partir de Delacroix

The paper aims to provide an overview of nineteenth-century patriarchal structures through an analysis of the paintings of the French romantic artist Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), with a focus on the conceptions of masculinity and femininity that emerge from an interpretation guided by a feminist perspective. The main argument is that Delacroix's paintings cannot be entirely understood apart from the sexist values that underpinned the nineteenth-century European society, so that the representation of men and women can provide a valuable account about how the social order was conceived by a white male, privileged point of view. The paper's argument is endorsed by excerpts of Eugène Delacroix's essays and from his journal. The analysis covers three paintings: The Massacre at Chios [Scène des massacres de Scio], dated 1824; Death of Sardanapalus [La Mort de Sardanapale], dated 1827; and Odalisque [Odalisque], dated 1857. Keywords: Delacroix, masculinity, femininity, patriarchy, romanticism.

Collaborative Authorship in Film Production : Walter Murch and Film Editing: Walter Murch and Film Editing

Filmmaking is frequently cited as the most collaborative of all arts, yet for the most part, mainstream and scholarly literature have received films as the creative voice of just one artist - the director. The reasons for this are many: general ignorance of how films are made; the hijacking of film theory by literary theory, and the continuing popularity of the myth of the Romantic Artist as solitary genius are some of them. The case for collaborative authorship has gained momentum since the 1980s as studies on the production of individual films, actors, production companies and the history of the film industry as a whole have proliferated and drawn attention to the disparities between how films are perceived and how they are actually made. This article analyses collaboration in film production culture through examination of the role of the film editor. Concentrating specifically on the film/sound editor and mixer Walter Murch, it examines his role as a collaborative author in his early work with director Francis Ford Coppola and his later work with English director Anthony Minghella.

Musikkens betydning på en større gård i mellemkrigstiden

The meaning of music at a large farm during the inter-war periodThis article investigates music as culture from a historical, ethno-musicological perspective. Jens Henrik Koudal bases his work on the preserved music collection and large private archives of Christian Olsen (1881–1968), who was born and spent most of his life on the farm Torpelund in Zealand, Denmark. From Olsen’s collection, it is possible to make a historical reconstruction of the rich musical life that took place on the farm, and the purpose of the article is to examine what the musical activities meant to the Olsen family’s social and cultural identity; i.e., both their self-conceptualisation and their marking of identity towards their surroundings. The article’s method is rooted in a ‘broad’ concept of culture, along with Christopher Small’s concept ‘musicking’ and new musicology’s tendency to focus on the practice of music-making rather than on ‘great’ composers and books of music. Torpelund is compared to similar settings in England (e.g., East Suffolk around 1900, according to Carole Pegg) and Western concert halls (around 1980, according to Christopher Small).During the inter-war period, the Olsen family gathered together a circle of diverse people, including relatives, friends, business connections and other musicians, who all participated in the “musicking” as equals. Their repertoire consisted of classical and romantic art music from c. 1780–1890, plus the family’s old folk-dancing music (arranged by members of the family). In its own opinion, the circle’s music-making was a ‘higher’ kind of music that established clear distinctions towards lower social classes, towards other races (e.g., blacks with their ragtime and jazz) and towards modern music (e.g., art music and popular music). Specific to Torpelund are three concepts, which also characterise the social and cultural identity of the Olsen family: conservatism, privacy and exclusivity. The musical practices of the Olsens at Torpelund indicate that, during the inter-war period, the family represented a particular amalgamation of the peasant family, the part of the country (northwestern Zealand) and an international, middle-class education.

Liryczność brulionowa Zygmunta Krasińskiego w kontekście wiersza "Bóg mi odmówił tej anielskiej miary"

Zygmunt Krasiński’s Notebook Lyricism in the context of the poem entitled Bóg mi odmówił tej anielskiej miary The article is an interpretation of Krasiński’s poem with respect to ‘notebook romanticism’ category. The author analyses the poem in the light of Krasiński’s literary creation process, which is preserved in the Romantic art of editing.

Turner inspired: in the light of Claude

The English Romantic artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) was hailed as the of light for his brilliantly colored landscapes and seascapes. He drew much influence from the French painter Claude Lorrain (c. 1604/5?-1682), who was a vital force in Turner's artistic practice from his formative years until the end of his working life. So great was Claude's influence that Turner stipulated in his will that his works hang alongside Claude's in the National Gallery, London. This book examines the ways in which Turner consistently strove to confront Claude's achievement and legacy. He had encountered Claude's works in salerooms and in the collections of his aristocratic patrons, and applied what he had learned to the British countryside, producing views of the Thames valley that transform it into an idyllic pastoral scene reminiscent of the Roman Campagna. For the balance of his career, Turner continued to pit himself against Claude, paying homage even as he continually sought to go beyond the accomplishments of his master.

Historical dictionary of Romantic art and architecture

Historical dictionary of Romantic art and architecture

Spike Lee's Blues

This is a full-dress article about Spike Lee’s film, Mo’ Better Blues. The penultimate paragraph serves as an abstract: “In attempting to construct the image of jazz, and its musicians, in the stylizations of a black mythology, Spike Lee committed himself to working against the received conventions. By insisting on one simple truth about jazz, that it is disciplined stylization, Lee began to undermine those Hollywood conventions. But he was unable completely to free himself from the Romantic conventions which determine our vision of the artist and his place in society. Lee's displacements don't alter the fact that, at the core, his protagonist is a self-destructive descendent of the Romantic Artist.”

'Mannigfaltigkeit des Farbenspiels': Goethe and Heinrich Meyer on Harmony Through Colour Variation

In Zur farbenlehre (1810), Goethe argued that colour harmony in painting required the presence of all three pairs of complementary colours, but did not specify in any detail how artists should put this principle into practice. Before his time, they had tended to handle colour in one of two distinctive ways, based either on the relationship of the different hues to one another, or on their tonal values. Goethe's and Heinrich Meyer's many scattered observations on the subject show them rejecting tonalism in favour of purely hue-based harmony, using local colour and the colours of reflected light, including cangianti. Their advocacy of this approach, exemplified for them by Veronese but also by ancient fresco artists and by Pietro da Cortona and Gottlieb Schick, brought them closer to Romantic art theorists such as A. W. Schlegel than to their classicizing contemporaries, who tended to diminish the role of colour in painting.

Another Perspective on Robert Schumann's Personality

Although Robert Schumann would become identified in the public imagination as a “Romantic artist” who suffered from mental illness, throughout most of his life he functioned on a high level in his negotiations within the world of music publishing. An examination of the composer's letters and diaries shows that Schumann was able to advocate successfully for his work, both through written correspondence and social contact, until his confinement in 1854. Despite the composer's increasingly erratic behavior and odd affect, he leveraged his ability to persuade publishers to issue his music through relationships built on personal and social activities. It is possible that items related to serious financial concerns, business matters, and career development were held in an isolated section of the composer's psyche, allowing him to function on this level regardless of the stresses at the time, as long as he continued to exist among society.

The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim and Jewish Conflict (review)

Reviewed by: The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim and Jewish Conflict Jonathan Burgoyne Grieve, Patricia E. The Eve of Spain: Myths of Origins in the History of Christian, Muslim and Jewish Conflict. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2009. 312 pp. ISBN-10: 0-8018-9036-9 In The Eve of Spain, Patricia Grieve has produced a tour de force of erudition. The scope of the book spans the eighth to the twenty-first centuries, covering a rang of cultural production from medieval chronicles to nineteenth-century Romantic art, Civil War propaganda, political cartoons, and authors such as Alfonso X, Ahmad al-Razi, Gonzalo de Berceo, Pedro de Corral, Lope de Vega, Fray Luis de León, Washington Irving, Walter Scott, Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Juan Goytisolo, to name only a few of the numerous references to artists, histories and historians, paintings, plays, poetry, myths and legends that tie the stories of the fall of the Visigothic kingdom to Spain's traditions of neo-Gothic nationalism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and maurophobia. The book is divided into three "acts" —"Fall and Redemption" (711-1492); "Promise and Fulfillment" (1492-1700); "Imagining Spain (The Enlightenment to the Present)"— and six chapters, each with separately titled subsections, plus a prologue, interlude, and epilogue. It is accessible to a general audience, revisiting many of the familiar histories of Spain from 711 to the present, but The Eve of Spain is also professionally prepared with extensive endnotes, a critical bibliography and a helpful index that will aid scholarly readers in new research projects that the book will certainly inspire. In spite of its ambitious breadth and what Grieve describes as a "vast array of texts examined and referenced" (207), the author never loses sight of her main subject matter, the myriad recastings of legends and their intersections with cultural anxieties about the nation's gendered, racial, and religious genealogies, many of which are also linked to the histories of the Castilian monarchy. [End Page 220] Grieve outlines the broad goals of her book in the prologue, where she states that it is a history of Spain studied through the lens of its foundational legends, or myths of origins. While the book does indeed explore various legends —such as the story of the Jewess of Toledo, and other notorious lies that stand at the heart of Spain's darkest national atrocities, such as the legend of the Santo Nino de la Guardia— the foundational myth that receives the most critical attention is the popular story of Rodrigo, the last king of the Visigoths, and La Cava, whose rape lead to the revenge of her father, Julián, and the Muslim conquest. Of particular interest to the author in this legend is the character of La Cava, who is gradually transformed into the eroticized temptress that causes the fall of Spain; in essence, she is a new Iberian Eve. In the same development of the legend, Grieve shows how over time, in chronicles, ballads and modern histories, Rodrigo became a morally ambivalent character, led astray by a seductive woman and his own human —and ultimately pardonable— frailties. Grieve is at her best when studying La Cava and the representation of women in general: women's bodies and their sexuality, race and religion as they are rebranded and implicated in both popular and official narratives of Spain's national identity. Characters like La Cava, Leocadia, and the Jewess of Toledo, or real women like Queen Isabel, are studied as templates upon which are inscribed fears of loss and domination, of racial and religious impurity, of subversive sexual impulses that threaten the Christian kingdom from within. They also represent the embodiment of the nation itself in her dichotomized representations: as fallen Eve or redemptive Eva; as the lost Christian nation or the risen new monarchy; or as empire, dictatorship, or modern democracy. Grieve traces the development of this legend in the first three chapters (ch. 1, "Setting the Stage"; ch. 2, "Granada Is the Bride"; ch. 3, "Blood Will Out"), beginning with the earliest Christian and Muslim versions that tend to highlight the notion of God's punishment on one hand and, on...

The hallucinations of Frédéric Chopin

Frédéric Chopin is the epitome of the romantic artist; he had a chronic pulmonary disease that ultimately caused his death at the age of 39. An overlooked neurological condition is...

Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (review)

Cordilla Grewe, Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT:Ashgate, 2009. 418 pp., 104 illustrations. During the past decade- in essays like her interpretation of Wilhelm Schadow's oil painting Mignon as an allegory of romantic art in Goethe und das Zeitalter der Romantik (ed. Walter Hinderer [Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 2002] 307-43)- Cordula Grewe has been working to counteract the all-too-common assessment of the late romantic Nazarene painters as derivative, second-rate emulators of renaissance art. In that regard, her present monograph will be instructive not only for those colleagues in art history for whom the only viable directions in European modern art are developments in France or Great Britain; this incisive, elegantly written, well organized, and handsomely illustrated study also can serve as a model of how to integrate scholarship from fields as diverse as literature, history, theology, and gender and Jewish studies in mutually illuminating ways. Grewe understands the artists associated with theLukasbriider (Brotherhood of St. Luke) founded in 1809 by Franz Pforr and Johann Friedrich Overbeck as typically romantic in that they not only regarded nature and (salvation) history as hieroglyphs in need of deciphering, but also brought into their work the same self-reflective element more commonly associated with literary romanticism. In Overbeck's Raising of Lazarus (1808; pp. 30-33), for example, the artist includes portraits of himself and Pforr as rapt witnesses to the miracle transpiring before their eyes. Both in her introduction and this first chapter, entitled The Great Code of Art: Religious Revival and the Rebirth of Pictorial Meaning, Grewe underscores the missionary impulse behind these artistic strategies; ultimately, artists like Pforr, Overbeck, Schadow, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, and Ferdinand Olivier wanted to inspire in the viewer not only an informed understanding, but also an emulation of the religious revival that features in so many of their works. This proselytizing impulse led to resistance by contemporaries such as Goethe and Johann Heinrich Meyer in their polemic Neu-deutsche religios-patriotische Kunst (1817); it also has caused modern scholars uncomfortable with a discussion of religion in modern art to interpret works such as Pforr's and Maria (1811), the last painting he completed before his death in 1812 at the age of twenty-four, as an allegory of Pforr's friendship with (and repressed desire for) Overbeck. Another attempt to make und Maria more palatable for twentieth-century viewers and critics was to focus on formalistic analyses of the diptych's contrast of an Italianate landscape behind to the old German interior in the room where Maria sits and muses; this harmonious contrast then was understood as being indicative of Overbeck's and Pforr's respective idealization of the Italian and Northern Renaissance that later finds expression in the canvas by Overbeck that we have come to know as Italia and Germania (1828). While not denying the validity of such readings, Grewe also contends - convincingly, in this reviewer's judgment - that a typological reading of and Maria in the context of both medieval mystical and eighteenth-century literal readings of the Song of Songs adds immensely to the richness of Pforr's canvas. Both in Sulamith and Maria: Erotic Mariology and the Cult of Friendship (61-98) and the chapters that follow, Grewe links in-depth interpretation of one particular artistic project with a framing of the work(s) in question within a contemporary context - in this case the burgeoning fascination with the figure of Maria in the works of romantic writers such as Novalis, Tieck, and Brentano. At the same time, these chapters are not hermetically sealed off from one another. question in chapter two as to whether erotic fulfillment has a proper place in Christian women's upbringing is amplified by the succeeding chapter's analysis of an 1841 oil on canvas work by Wilhelm Schadow in the context oi Pietas and Vanitas: Gender, Moralization, and Allegory (99-148). …

The Romantic Artist in the Grip of Inspiration: Melville's COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!

Herman Melville's “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo!” has been read as an embrace of transcendentalism, a parodic rejection of transcendentalism and Romanticism, and even an examination into bipolar disorder. 1 E...

Contradictory Images: The Conflicting Influences of Henri Bergson and William James on T. E. Hulme, and the Consequences for Imagism

This article considers the evolution of Hulme’s thought from his ‘Lecture on Modern Poetry’ to ‘Romanticism and Classicism’, including the development of his belief in poetry as a visual language, why he defines the ‘aesthetic emotion’ in such a limited way, and why he links these ideas to the Classicism of Action Française. What it demonstrates is that William James’s description of the distinction between Romantic and Classical art in Principles of Psychology played a part in helping Hulme to reduce Bergson’s concept of ‘aesthetic emotion’ to sensation, and to see such effects as pertaining to Classical, rather than Romantic art. However, Hulme failed to realise that Bergson’s ideas on art were in fact incompatible with William James’s. This incompatibility caused tensions between the theory and practice of the Imagist movement inspired by Hulme’s ideas. The conflict was caused partly by James’s denial of the uniqueness of aesthetic emotion, and partly because, in reducing the aesthetic emotion to sensation, he negates the importance of memory and association to the image’s aesthetic effect, which is by its very nature temporal in manifestation. The piece concludes by demonstrating how the poem ‘Hermes of the Ways’, by H.D., does not concord with Pound’s doctrine of image as an ‘intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’, and needs memory and association to unravel if the image is to work. This critique demonstrates the divergence between genuine Imagist practice and William James’s prioritisation of immediate sensation, which Hulme had communicated to Imagist theory.

Painting the sacred in the Age of Romanticism

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)This extensive and in-depth study attempts to elevate Nazarene art from the lesser place it has come to occupy in the art historical canon. It is, however, much more a performance of the pleasures of close reading. A reader could hardly form the impression that Grewe has looked too thoroughly or read too much into a work; one always comes to feel that the art objects in question reward a prolonged gaze. Stated specifically, the author's argument concerns visual literacy in relation to biblical motifs, or how Old Testament typology in Nazarene art is linked to its later antitypes. Starting with works by Franz Pforr and Johann Friedrich Overbeck, Grewe investigates themes including friendship, brotherly love and familial love, and the importance of personal witnessing (which is introduced to account for the profusion of self-portraiture during the period). Grewe examines how the Lukasbund , or the Brotherhood of St. Luke, formed in Vienna in 1809, employed Old Testament imagery, refiguring it in a style distinct from the allegorical one that generally guides the reception of Romantic art. Grewe asserts that Pforr's work is allegorical insofar as it is religious at heart, yet it is also quite open to secular themes. She advances her argument about Nazarene secularization by highlighting the interaction between the artists' intellectual engagements and their religious practices. Starting from this methodological point, her study's six thoughtful and thorough chapters approach Nazarene painting from a wide variety of perspectives.Grewe's study of Overbeck's drawing Jacob Reproaching Laban for Giving him Rachel in Place of Leah (1807/1808) is a good example of refined close reading. Here the author attributes substantial intentionality to Overbeck, yet it is really Grewe herself who brings to the image an attention to stillness and a fascination with the figures' emotional states. She examines how Rachel gazes at Leah, and how the story is told through gestures and expressions. What emerges is the refined ekphrasis of the art historian, who sees pathos and desire in the figures' body language. There is something in Overbeck's faces and forms--in their curvature and personality--that permits Grewe to supplement the work persuasively with powerful narrative. She is best where she examines female figures such as Sulamith and Maria, who regularly appear as doubles of one another in Nazarene art. In Pforr's 1811 oil painting, for example, Maria appears as a figure for unsatisfied longing and unfulfilled destiny. Studying the erotic economy (82) of Sulamith and Maria , the author demonstrates a keen eye for detail.The quality of the reproductions throughout the book is impressive, and Grewe was fortunate to have published with Ashgate, who has provided her with ample space for images. To choose one example: the colors in Victor Orsel's Le Bien et Le Mal (1832) are arresting. In her discussion of that work Grewe both plots the trajectory from the Lukasbund to the Nazarenes, and explores how St. …

Philipp Otto Runge and the Semiotic Language of Nature and Patriotism

Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810) was a leading German Romantic artist whose iconography represents a transition from the Neoclassical iconography of classical mythology and allegory to an abstract semiotic system of signs based on a mystical interpretation of nature. An admirer of Herder's theory of language, Runge's iconography was representative of a trend among Romantic artists to promote nationalism and cultural values through the implementation of formal epistemological systems in the medium of art. Runge's individual iconography reveals a synthesis of rational and mystical systems of knowledge that emphasizes Herder's concept of the German Volk as a unique cultural identity, and presents an analogy between the creation of the cosmos, the organic origins of language, and the conception of the German Volk. Runge's iconography expresses the nationalist sentiments and linguistic theory of Herder that formed the basis of German propaganda movements during the Wars of Liberation, 1807–1815.

‘… to give the sensation without the boredom of conveyance’: Francis Bacon and the Aesthetic of Ambiguity

Considerable attention has been paid to Bacon's relationship with Surrealism and a historical tradition of grand masters, and indeed Bacon's own citation in interviews of such painters as Rembrandt, Velázquez, Van Gogh and Picasso is well documented. What is perhaps less well recognized is the tradition of Romantic art and thought of the late nineteenth century with which Bacon's contemporaries identified him, and in particular the legacy in England that manifested itself in a practice of painting associated with J.A.M. Whistler and a canon of literature that was deeply rooted in the writings of Baudelaire, from the ‘Fleshly School of Poetry’ represented by Algernon Swinburne, and the later writings of Walter Pater, through to the poetry of T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats. At the heart of this nexus of practice and thought lay a well-trodden Anglicized argument about the differences between the concepts of analysis and synthesis in art, primarily understood as the difference between an aesthetic of narrative and realism and an aesthetic of ambiguity and sensation. In retrieving the context in which the legacy of British aestheticism and international symbolism had come to frame ideas of an aesthetic of ambiguity this article will aim to suggest the extent to which Bacon was alive to a Romantic tradition of thought – and image – through the writings of Baudelaire and Nietzsche, particularly as they were repopulated and remediated by Eliot in his critical prose and poetry. Furthermore, Eliot's formulation of artistic practice in relation to the technical prerequisite of an ‘objective correlative’ and his concept of the role of an intertextual tradition is also considered in relation to Bacon's own offerings on the construction and reception of his works.

O assunto romântico e o romantismo em Schlegel, Hegel e Heine. Um debate de cultura política sobre a arte e seu tempo

Given their literary and philosophical achievements, German Romanticism and German Idealism enjoy a good reputation, covering up the political and ideological virulence that its main protagonists – such as Schlegel, Hegel and Heine – had to face. This article distinguishes between Romantic and Romanticism. Schlegel devised a typology of Romantic art. This European art form, which developed under the preserve of Christianity, gradually lost its sacred character as it became modern. Romanticism, well characterized by Heine`s “Romantic School,” is the conversion of this Romantic aesthethic into a medievalizing and conservative ideology in the context of a political culture hostile to German Enlightenment, which was criticized by Heine for historical, political and social reasons, and by Hegel for philosophical reasons. In terms of philosophy, the Romantic thought criticized by Hegel was not that of Schlegel but that of Schelling.