Classicism and Romanticism are two artistic movements that have influenced Western art for centuries. Classicism values balance and order, while Romanticism celebrates imagination and strong emotions. Classicism emphasizes traditional forms and structures, while Romanticism values the search for beauty and meaning in all aspects of life. The Romantics placed a higher value on the expression of strong emotion than on technical perfection, and celebrated the grotesque and the outcast through the form of a Byronic hero.
Classicism and Romanticism are artistic movements that have influenced the literature, visual art, music and architecture of the Western world for many centuries. With its origins in ancient Greek and Roman societies, Classicism defines beauty as that which demonstrates balance and order. Romanticism developed in the 18th century – partly as a reaction to the ideals of Classicism – and expresses beauty through imagination and powerful emotions. While the characteristics of these movements are often at odds, both schools of thought continued to influence Western art into the 18th century.
The name “Classico” was given to the Greeks and Romans retroactively by Renaissance writers. Artists and thinkers of the Renaissance, which literally means “rebirth”, considered themselves the heirs of that world after the Middle Ages. His ideals continued to exert a strong influence in the Age of Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries.
In literature, classicism values traditional forms and structures. According to legend, the Roman poet Virgil left the order to burn his masterpiece The Aeneid upon his death, because some of his verses were still metrically imperfect. This rather extreme example demonstrates the importance attached to excellence in formal execution. Such attention to detail can also be seen in the work of Italian poet Dante Alighieri, whose Divine Comedy contains over 14,000 lines written in a strict rhyming pattern known as third rhyme. Other characteristics of the movement include poise, orderliness, and emotional restraint.
Romance can be a bit of a confusing term, since modern English speakers tend to associate the word “romance” with a particular variety of love. As an art movement, however, it celebrates all strong emotions, not just feelings of love. In addition to emotion, Romantic artists valued the search for beauty and meaning in all aspects of life. They saw imagination, rather than reason, as the path to truth.
The treatment of emotions is one of the main ways in which classicism and romanticism differ. The Romantics placed a higher value on the expression of strong emotion than on technical perfection. Classicists did not shy away from depicting emotionally charged scenes, but they generally did so in a more distant way. Romantics, however, were more likely to indulge in expansive emotional statements, as John Keats did in “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “More love! Happier, happier love!”
Also, these movements have different attitudes towards the grotesque. William Shakespeare, writing before the onset of Romanticism, occasionally used deformed characters in his plays, such as Caliban in The Tempest; they are mostly used for comedic effect or as a contrast to another character’s physical perfections. The Romantics, however, celebrated the grotesque and the outcast through the form of a Byronic hero, named after the English poet Lord Byron. A well-known example of this type of character is Edward Rochester, the love interest in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre, who attains spiritual perfection only after undergoing a physical deformation.
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