Sturm Und Drang Movement's Outstanding Writer example essay topic

Amanda Body December 3, 2003 General Humanities Purnins Shah 5: Compare and contrast Realism with Romanticism, using examples from both literature and art as the basis of your essay. Romanticism can be defined as an intellectual, artistic, and literary movement that began in the late eighteenth century as a reaction to the neoclassicism and that stressed the emotional, mysterious, and imaginative side of human behavior and the unruly side of nature. Realism can be defined as, in medieval philosophy, the school that asserted that objects contained common or universal qualities that were not always apparent to the human senses but that were more real or true than the objects' physical attributes; opposed to Nominalism. In art and literature, a mid- to late- nineteenth-century style that focused on the everyday lives of the middle and lower classes, portraying their world in a serious, accurate, and unsentimental way; opposed to Romanticism. Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres inherited the position of neoclassical master painter Jaques Louis David, virtually controlled French academic art until his death in 1846. He understood the mentality of the Salon crowds, and his works catered to their tastes.

What particularly pleased this audience-composed almost exclusively of the wealthy, educated middle class-were chaste nudes in mythological or erotic settings, as in the Turkish Bath. The women's tactile flesh and the abandoned poses, though superbly realized, are depicted in a cold, Classical style and lack the immediacy of Ingres's great portraits. Eugene Delacroix, Ingres's chief rival, remained a significant force in French culture with almost comparable artistic power. Delacroix perfected a Romantic style filled with superb mastery of color and human feeling.

One of his finest works from this period is Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard, based on Act 5, Scene 1, of Shakespeare's drama. In the painting, one of the grave-diggers holds up a skull to Hamlet and Horatio. Delacroix, faithful to the Shakespearean text, captures the men's differing reactions: Hamlet, on the right, seems to recoil slightly, while Horatio appears more curious. In this and later paintings, Delacroix tried to work out the laws governing colors-especially the effects they have on the viewer. The results in Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard are somber hues that reinforce the melancholy atmosphere. Later, the impressionists based some of their color theories on Delacroix's experiments.

A famous painter of realism was Michelangelo Meri si, better known as Carvaggio. Carvaggio favored dramatic realism. His concern with realism led him to pick his models directly from the streets, and he refused to idealize his subjects. To make his works more dramatic and emotionally stirring, he experimented with light and dark-the technique known as chiaroscuro-and he banished landscape form his canvases, often focusing on human figures grouped tightly in the foreground. A great example of Carvaggio's work is The Conversion of St. Paul, which is paired with his Crucifixion of St. Peter, in a Roman church. The two works were part of a commission to paint the founders of the church of Rome, who, according to the Testament, preached in the city.

Caravaggio's revolutionary use of chiaroscuro emphasizes the dramatic event of Paul's Conversion. The light, coming from the upper right focuses on St. Paul and part of the horse's body. This makes the background nearly indistinct except for the groomsman, on the right, who holds the reigns of the horse. St. Paul's head is thrown toward the viewer, and his eyes are shut as he is blinded by the light of Jesus' presence, who, as recorded in the scripture did not appear in human form, but only as light.

Romanticism in literature was foreshadowed in the German literary movement known as Sturm und Drang, or Storm and Stress. This movement flourished briefly in the 1700's and early 1780's, arising as a revolt against Classical restraint and drawing inspiration from Rousseau's emotionalism. On a positive level, this literary movement idealized peasant life. And the unconventional, liberated mind. The Sturm und Drang writers attacked organized religion because of its hipocracy and followed Rousseau in finding God in nature. These middle-class authors objected to the formality and tedium of eighteenth century life and letters and valued free expression in language, dress, behavior, and love.

By the mid-1780's, the movement had settled down, drained of its rebelliousness. The most influential members became fully integrated into the German literary scene. The Sturm und Drang movement's outstanding writer was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the greatest of German writers. In 1774, while still in his twenties, Goethe acquired a Europe-wide reputation with The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel in which the young hero commits suicide because of disappointment in love. So successful was this novel that it led to Wertherism, the social phenomenon in which young men imitated the hero's emotionalism, sometimes even to the point of killing themselves. Werther is a complex character: passionate and excitable, given to inappropriate outbursts, moved by the innocence of children, attracted to social misfits, and overwhelmed by God's presence in nature.

He embodies many characteristics of Romanticism. In literature, the Romantic style continued to dominate poetry, essays, and novels until mid-century, when it began to be displaced by Realism. Realism began in France in the 1830's with the novels of Honore de Balzac. Balzac foreshadowed the major traits of Realism in the nearly one hundred novels that make up the series that he called The Human Comedy. Set in France in the Napoleonic era and the early industrial age, this voluminous series deals with the lives of over two thousand characters, both in Paris and in the provinces.

Balzac condemns the hollowness of the middle-class society, pointing out how industrialism has caused many people to value material things more than friendship and family although there are virtuous and sympathetic characters as well. There are many differences among Realism and Romanticism in literature. The Romantic authors were concerned with the depth of their characters' emotions and had great faith in the power of the individual to transform his or her own life and the lives of others. The Realists, by contrast, tended to be determinists' who preferred to let the facts speak for themselves.

They rejected the bourgeois world as flawed by hipocracy and materialism and denounced the machine age for its mechanization of human relationships.