Romanticism is an art direction. Romanticism in art (XVIII - XIX centuries). Romanticism in music

Exam essay

Theme: "Romanticism as a trend in art".

Performed student 11 "B" class school №3

Boyprav Anna

World Art Lecturer

culture Butsu T.N.

Brest 2002

1. Introduction

2. The reasons for the emergence of romanticism

3. The main features of romanticism

4. Romantic hero

5. Romanticism in Russia

a) Literature

b) Painting

c) Music

6. Western European romanticism

a) Painting

b) Music

7. Conclusion

8. References

1. INTRODUCTION

If you look into the explanatory dictionary of the Russian language, you can find several meanings of the word "romanticism": 1. The trend in literature and art of the first quarter of the 19th century, characterized by idealization of the past, isolation from reality, cult of personality and man. 2. A trend in literature and art, imbued with optimism and the desire to show in vivid images the high purpose of a person. 3. Mood, imbued with the idealization of reality, dreamy contemplation.

As can be seen from the definition, romanticism is a phenomenon that manifests itself not only in art, but also in behavior, clothing, lifestyle, psychology of people and arises at the turning points of life, therefore the topic of romanticism is relevant today. We live at the turn of the century, we are in a transitional stage. In this regard, in society, there is a lack of faith in the future, a lack of confidence in ideals, there is a desire to escape from the surrounding reality into the world of one's own experiences and at the same time to comprehend it. It is these features that are characteristic of romantic art. That is why I chose the topic "Romanticism as a direction in art" for research.

Romanticism is a very large layer of different types of art. The purpose of my work is to trace the conditions of origin and the reasons for the emergence of romanticism in different countries, to investigate the development of romanticism in such forms of art as literature, painting and music, and to compare them. The main task for me was to highlight the main features of romanticism, characteristic of all types of art, to determine what influence romanticism had on the development of other trends in art.

When developing the topic, I used textbooks on art by authors such as Filimonova, Vorotnikov, etc., encyclopedias, monographs dedicated to various authors of the era of romanticism, biographical materials by authors such as Aminskaya, Atsarkina, Nekrasov, etc.

2. REASONS FOR ROMANCE

The closer we are to modernity, the shorter the time periods for the dominance of one style or another become. Time period of the end of the 18th-1st third of the 19th centuries. is considered to be the era of romanticism (from the French Romantique; something mysterious, strange, unreal)

What influenced the emergence of a new style?

These are three main events: the Great French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of the national liberation movement in Europe.

The thunders of Paris echoed throughout Europe. The slogan "Freedom, equality, brotherhood!" Possessed a tremendous attractive force for all European peoples. With the formation of bourgeois societies, the working class began to act against the feudal order as an independent force. The opposing struggle of the three classes - the nobility, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat - formed the basis of the historical development of the 19th century.

The fate of Napoleon and his role in European history for 2 decades, 1796-1815, occupied the minds of his contemporaries. "The ruler of thoughts" - said A.S. Pushkin.

For France, these were years of greatness and glory, although at the cost of the lives of thousands of French people. Italy saw Napoleon as its liberator. The Poles pinned great hopes on him.

Napoleon acted as a conqueror acting in the interests of the French bourgeoisie. For European monarchs, he was not only a military enemy, but also a representative of the alien world of the bourgeoisie. They hated him. At the beginning of the Napoleonic wars in his "Great Army" there were many direct participants in the revolution.

The personality of Napoleon himself was phenomenal. The young man Lermontov responded to the 10th anniversary of Napoleon's death:

He is alien to the world. Everything about him was a secret

A day of rise - and an hour of fall!

This secret attracted the attention of romantics especially.

In connection with the Napoleonic wars and the ripening of national consciousness, this period was characterized by the rise of the national liberation movement. Germany, Austria, Spain fought against the Napoleonic occupation, Italy - against the Austrian yoke, Greece - against Turkey, in Poland they fought against Russian tsarism, Ireland - against the British.

One generation witnessed a startling change.

France seethed most of all: the stormy five years of the French Revolution, the rise and fall of Robespierre, the Napoleonic campaigns, the first abdication of Napoleon, his return from the island of Elba ("one hundred days") and the final

the defeat at Waterloo, the bleak 15th anniversary of the restoration regime, the July Revolution of 1860, the February Revolution of 1848 in Paris, which triggered a revolutionary wave in other countries.

In England, as a result of an industrial revolution in the 2nd half of the 19th century. machine production and capitalist relations became firmly established. The parliamentary reform of 1832 cleared the path of the bourgeoisie to state power.

Feudal rulers retained power on the lands of Germany and Austria. After the fall of Napoleon, they dealt harshly with the opposition. But even on German soil, a steam locomotive brought from England in 1831 became a factor in bourgeois progress.

Industrial revolutions, political revolutions changed the face of Europe. "The bourgeoisie, in less than a hundred years of its class rule, has created more numerous and grander productive forces than all previous generations combined," wrote the German scientists Marx and Engels in 1848.

So, the Great French Revolution (1789-1794) marked a special milestone separating the new era from the age of the Enlightenment. It was not only the forms of the state that changed, the social structure of society, the arrangement of classes. The whole system of representations, illuminated for centuries, was shaken. The educators ideologically prepared the revolution. But they could not foresee all its consequences. The "kingdom of reason" did not take place. The revolution, which proclaimed the freedom of the individual, gave rise to the bourgeois order, the spirit of acquisitiveness and selfishness. This was the historical basis for the development of artistic culture, which put forward a new direction - romanticism.

3. MAIN FEATURES OF ROMANCE

Romanticism as a method and direction in artistic culture was a complex and contradictory phenomenon. In every country, he had a vivid national expression. In literature, music, painting and theater, it is not easy to find features that unite Chateaubriand and Delacroix, Mickiewicz and Chopin, Lermontov and Kiprensky.

Romantics occupied different social and political positions in society. They all rebelled against the results of the bourgeois revolution, but they rebelled in different ways, since each had its own ideal. But for all the many-sidedness and diversity, romanticism has stable features.

Disappointment in modernity gave rise to a special interest in the past: to pre-bourgeois social formations, to patriarchal antiquity. Many romantics were characterized by the idea that the picturesque exoticism of the countries of the south and east - Italy, Spain, Greece, Turkey - is a poetic contrast to the boring bourgeois everyday life. In these countries, then still little affected by civilization, the romantics were looking for bright, strong characters, an original, colorful way of life. Interest in the national past gave rise to a lot of historical works.

In an effort to rise, as it were, above the prose of life, to liberate the diverse abilities of the individual, to maximize self-realization in creativity, the romantics opposed the formalization of art and the straightforwardly judicious approach to it, inherent in classicism. They all came from denial of the Enlightenment and rationalistic canons of classicism, which fettered the artist's creative initiative. And if classicism divides everything in a straight line, into bad and good, into black and white, then romanticism divides nothing in a straight line. Classicism is a system, but romanticism is not. Romanticism propelled the advancement of modern times from classicism to sentimentalism, which shows the inner life of a person in harmony with the vast world. And romanticism opposes harmony to the inner world. It is with romanticism that real psychologism begins to appear.

The main task of romanticism was image of the inner world, mental life, and this could be done on the basis of stories, mysticism, etc. It was necessary to show the paradox of this inner life, its irrationality.

In their imaginations, the romantics transformed the unsightly reality or went into the world of their experiences. The gap between dream and reality, the opposition of the beautiful fiction to objective reality lay at the heart of the entire romantic movement.

For the first time, romanticism poses the problem of the language of art. “Art is a language of a completely different kind than nature; but it also contains the same miraculous force that just as secretly and incomprehensibly affects the human soul ”(Wackenroder and Thicke). An artist is an interpreter of the language of nature, a mediator between the world of spirit and people. “Thanks to artists, humanity emerges as an integral individuality. Through the present, artists unite the past world with the future world. They are the highest spiritual organ in which the vital forces of their outer humanity meet each other, and where the inner humanity manifests itself first of all ”(F. Schlegel).

However, romanticism was not a homogeneous trend: its ideological development went in different directions. Among the romantics were reactionary writers, adherents of the old regime, who glorified feudal monarchy and Christianity. On the other hand, romantics with a progressive outlook expressed a democratic protest against feudal and all kinds of oppression, embodied the people's revolutionary impulse for a better future.

Romanticism left a whole epoch in the world artistic culture, its representatives were: V. Scott, J. Byron, Shelley, V. Hugo, A. Mitskevich, and others; in the fine arts of E. Delacroix, T. Gericault, F. Runge, J. Constable, W. Turner, O. Kiprensky and others; in music F. Schubert, R. Wagner, G. Berlioz, N. Paganini, F. Liszt, F. Chopin and others. They discovered and developed new genres, paid close attention to the fate of the human person, revealed the dialectic of good and evil, masterfully revealed human passions, etc.

The forms of art in their importance more or less equalized and produced magnificent works of art, although the romantics in the ladder of arts gave priority to music.

4. ROMANTIC HERO

Who is the romantic hero and what is he like?

He is an individualist. A superman who has lived in two stages: before colliding with reality, he lives in a ‘pink’ state, he is possessed by the desire for achievement, for changing the world; after facing reality, he continues to consider this world both vulgar and boring, but he does not become a skeptic, a pessimist. With a clear understanding that nothing can be changed, the desire for heroic deeds is reborn into the desire for dangers.

Romantics could give eternal lasting value to every little thing, to every concrete fact, to everything that is singular. Joseph de Maistre calls it "the ways of Providence", Germain de Stael - "the fruitful womb of the immortal universe." Chateaubriand in The Genius of Christianity, in a book devoted to history, directly points to God as the beginning of historical time. Society appears as an unshakable bond, "a thread of life that connects us with our ancestors and which we must extend to our descendants." Only a person's heart, and not his mind, can understand and hear the voice of the Creator, through the beauty of nature, through deep feelings. Nature is divine, it is the source of harmony and creative power, its metaphors are often transferred by romantics into the political lexicon. For romantics, the tree becomes a symbol of the clan, spontaneous development, the perception of the juices of the native land, a symbol of national unity. The more innocent and sensitive a person's nature is, the easier he hears the voice of God. A child, a woman, a noble youth more often than others perceive the immortality of the soul and the value of eternal life. Romantics' thirst for bliss is not limited to the idealistic pursuit of the Kingdom of God after death.

In addition to mystical love for God, a person needs real, earthly love. Unable to possess the object of his passion, the romantic hero became an eternal martyr, doomed to wait for a meeting with his beloved in the afterlife, "for great love is worthy of immortality when it cost a man his life."

A special place in the work of romantics is occupied by the problem of the development and education of the individual. Childhood is devoid of laws, its instant impulses violate public morality, obeying its own rules of child's play. In an adult, similar reactions lead to death, to the condemnation of the soul. In search of the heavenly kingdom, a person must comprehend the laws of duty and morality, only then can he hope for eternal life. Since duty is dictated to romantics by their desire to gain eternal life, fulfilling duty gives personal happiness in its deepest and strongest manifestation. To the moral duty is added the duty of deep feelings and lofty interests. Without mixing the merits of different sexes, romantics advocate the equality of the spiritual development of men and women. Likewise, a civic duty is dictated by love for God and his institutions. Personal striving finds its completion in a common cause, in the striving of the whole nation, of all mankind, of the whole world.

Every culture has its own romantic hero, but Byron's Charles Harold has given a typical representation of the romantic hero. He put on the mask of his hero (says that there is no distance between the hero and the author) and managed to comply with the romantic canon.

All romantic works are distinguished by characteristic features:

First, in every romantic work there is no distance between the hero and the author.

Secondly, the author of the hero does not judge, but even if something bad is said about him, the plot is so built that the hero is not to blame. The plot in a romantic work is usually romantic. Romantics also build a special relationship with nature, they like storms, thunderstorms, cataclysms.

5. ROMANCE IN RUSSIA.

Romanticism in Russia differed from Western European for the sake of a different historical setting and a different cultural tradition. The French Revolution cannot be counted among the reasons for its occurrence, as a very narrow circle of people pinned any hopes on transformations in its course. And the results of the revolution completely disappointed in it. The question of capitalism in Russia at the beginning of the XIX century. did not stand. Therefore, there was no such reason either. The real reason was the Patriotic War of 1812, in which all the power of the people's initiative was manifested. But after the war the people did not receive the will. The best of the nobility, dissatisfied with the reality, came to Senate Square in December 1825. This act also did not pass without a trace for the creative intelligentsia. The turbulent post-war years became the setting in which Russian romanticism was formed.

Romanticism, and, moreover, ours, Russian, developed and molded into our original forms, romanticism was not a simple literary, but a life phenomenon, a whole era of moral development, an era that had its own special color, carried out a special view in life ... Let the romantic trend come from the outside, from Western life and Western literatures, it found in Russian nature a soil ready for its perception, and therefore was reflected in completely original phenomena, as the poet and critic Apollo Grigoriev assessed it - this is a unique cultural phenomenon, and its characteristics show the essential complexity of romanticism , from the depths of which the young Gogol emerged and with whom he was associated not only at the beginning of his career as a writer, but throughout his life.

Apollon Grigoriev accurately determined the nature of the influence of the romantic school on literature and life, including the prose of that time: not a simple influence or borrowing, but a characteristic and powerful life and literary trend, which gave completely original phenomena in young Russian literature.

a) Literature

It is customary to divide Russian romanticism into several periods: initial (1801-1815), mature (1815-1825) and the period of post-Kabrist development. However, in relation to the initial period, the conventionality of this scheme is striking. For the dawn of Russian romanticism is associated with the names of Zhukovsky and Batyushkov, poets whose creativity and attitude are difficult to put side by side and compare within the same period, their goals, aspirations, temperaments are so different. In the verses of both poets, one can still feel the imperious influence of the past - the era of sentimentalism, but if Zhukovsky is still deeply rooted in it, then Batyushkov is much closer to new trends.

Belinsky rightly noted that Zhukovsky's work is characterized by "complaints about imperfect hopes that did not have a name, sadness for the lost happiness, which God knows what it was." Indeed, in the person of Zhukovsky, romanticism was still making its first timid steps, paying tribute to sentimental and melancholic melancholy, vague, barely perceptible hearty yearning, in a word, to that complex complex of feelings that in Russian criticism was called "romanticism of the Middle Ages."

A completely different atmosphere reigns in Batyushkov's poetry: the joy of being, frank sensuality, a hymn to pleasure.

Zhukovsky is rightfully considered a prominent representative of Russian aesthetic humanism. Alien to strong passions, the complacent and meek Zhukovsky was under the noticeable influence of the ideas of Rousseau and the German romantics. Following them, he attached great importance to the aesthetic side of religion, morality, and social relations. Art acquired a religious meaning from Zhukovsky, he strove to see in art a "revelation" of higher truths, it was "sacred" for him. The German romantics are characterized by the identification of poetry and religion. We find the same in Zhukovsky, who wrote: "Poetry is God in the holy dreams of the earth." In German romanticism, he was especially close to gravitation towards everything beyond, towards the "night side of the soul", towards the "inexpressible" in nature and man. Nature in Zhukovsky's poetry is surrounded by mystery, his landscapes are ghostly and almost unreal, like reflections in water:

How incense is merged with the coolness of plants!

How sweet in the silence by the shore of the jets the splashing!

How quietly the marshmallow blows through the waters

And the flexible willow flutter!

The sensitive, gentle and dreamy soul of Zhukovsky seems to sweetly freeze on the threshold of "this mysterious light." The poet, as Belinsky aptly put it, “loves and doves his suffering,” but this suffering does not bite his heart with cruel wounds, for even in melancholy and sadness his inner life is quiet and serene. Therefore, when, in his letter to Batyushkov, “the son of bliss and joy,” he calls the Epicurean poet “relatives of the Muse,” it is difficult to believe in this relationship. Rather, we will believe the virtuous Zhukovsky, who amicably advises the singer of earthly pleasures: "Reject voluptuousness, dreams are fatal!"

Batyushkov is the opposite of Zhukovsky in everything. He was a man of strong passions, and his creative life was cut short 35 years before his physical existence: as a very young man, he plunged into the abyss of madness. He gave himself up to both joys and sorrows with equal strength and passion: in life, as well as in its poetic interpretation, he - unlike Zhukovsky - was alien to the "golden mean". Although his poetry is also characterized by the praise of pure friendship, the joy of a "humble corner", his idyll is by no means modest and quiet, for Batiushkov cannot imagine it without the languid bliss of passionate pleasures and intoxication with life. At times, the poet is so carried away by sensual joys that he is ready to recklessly reject the oppressive wisdom of science:

Can it be true in sad truths

Gloomy stoics and boring sages

Sitting in funeral dresses,

Between the rubble and the coffins

Will we find the sweetness of our life?

From them, I see, joy

Flies like a butterfly from the thorn bushes.

For them there is no charm in the charms of nature,

Virgins do not sing to them, intertwining in round dances;

For them, as for the blind,

Spring without joy and summer without flowers.

True tragedy is rarely heard in his poems. Only at the end of his creative life, when he began to reveal signs of mental illness, one of his last poems was written down under dictation, in which the motives of the vanity of earthly life are clearly expressed:

Do you remember what you said

Saying goodbye to life, gray-haired Melchizedek?

A man was born a slave

A slave will lie in the grave,

And death will hardly tell him

Why did he walk along a valley of wonderful tears,

I suffered, sobbed, endured,

In Russia, romanticism as a literary trend took shape by the twenties of the nineteenth century. Its origins were poets, prose writers, writers, and they created Russian romanticism, which differed from the "Western European" one in its national, distinctive character. Russian romanticism developed by the poets of the first half of the nineteenth century, and each poet introduced something new. Russian romanticism was widely developed, acquired characteristic features, and became an independent trend in literature. In "Ruslan and Lyudmila" A.S. Pushkin has lines: "There is a Russian spirit, there is a smell of Russia." The same can be said about Russian romanticism. The heroes of romantic works are poetic souls striving for the "high" and the beautiful. But there is a hostile world that does not allow one to feel freedom, which leaves these souls incomprehensible. This world is rough, therefore the poetic soul runs to another, where there is an ideal, it strives for the "eternal". Romanticism is based on this conflict. But the poets treated this situation differently. Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, proceeding from one thing, build relationships between their heroes and the world around them in different ways, therefore their heroes had different paths to the ideal.

Reality is terrible, rude, impudent and selfish, there is no place in it for the feelings, dreams and desires of the poet and his heroes. "True" and eternal - in the other world. Hence the concept of a double world, the poet aspires to one of these worlds in search of an ideal.

Zhukovsky's position was not the position of a person who entered into a struggle with the outside world, who challenged him. It was a path through unity with nature, a path of harmony with nature, in an eternal and beautiful world. According to many researchers (including Yu.V. Mann), Zhukovsky expresses his understanding of this process of unity in The Inexpressible. Unity is the flight of the soul. The beauty that surrounds you fills your soul, it is in you, and you are in it, the soul flies, neither time nor space exists, but you exist in nature, and at this moment you live, you want to sing about this beauty, but there are no words to express your state, there is only a sense of harmony. You are not disturbed by the people around you, prosaic souls, more is open to you, you are free.

Pushkin and Lermontov approached this problem of romanticism differently. Undoubtedly, the influence exerted by Zhukovsky on Pushkin could not but be reflected in the work of the latter. The early works of Pushkin were characterized by "civic" romanticism. Under the influence of Zhukovsky's "A Singer in the Camp of Russian Soldiers" and the works of Griboyedov, Pushkin wrote the ode "Liberty", "To Chaadaev." In the latter, he urges:

"My friend! We will devote our souls to our homeland with wonderful impulses ...". This is the same striving for the ideal that Zhukovsky had, only Pushkin understands the ideal in his own way, therefore the poet's path to the ideal is different. He does not want and cannot strive for the ideal alone, the poet calls for him. Pushkin looked at reality and the ideal differently. This cannot be called a riot, this is a reflection on the rebellious elements. This is reflected in the ode "The Sea". This is the strength and power of the sea, the sea is free, it has reached its ideal. A person must also become free, his spirit must be free.

The search for the ideal is the main characteristic feature of romanticism. It manifested itself in the works of Zhukovsky, and in Pushkin, and in Lermontov. All three poets were looking for freedom, but they were looking for it in different ways, they understood it differently. Zhukovsky was looking for freedom sent by the "creator". Having found harmony, a person becomes free. For Pushkin, freedom of spirit was important, which should manifest itself in a person. For Lermontov, only the rebellious hero is free. Rebellion for freedom, what could be more beautiful? This attitude towards the ideal was preserved in the love lyrics of the poets. In my opinion, this attitude is due to time. Although they all worked in almost the same period, the time of their creation was different, events developed with extraordinary rapidity. The characters of the poets also greatly influenced their relationship. Calm Zhukovsky and rebellious Lermontov are completely opposite. But Russian romanticism developed precisely because the natures of these poets were different. They introduced new concepts, new characters, new ideals, gave a complete idea of ​​what freedom is, what real life is. Each of them represents his own path to the ideal, this is the right of choice for each person.

The very emergence of romanticism was very unsettling. The human individuality now stood at the center of the whole world. The human “I” began to be interpreted as the basis and meaning of all being. Human life began to be viewed as a work of art, art. In the 19th century, romanticism was very common. But not all poets who called themselves romantics conveyed the essence of this movement.

Now, at the end of the 20th century, we can already classify the romantics of the last century on this basis into two groups. One and perhaps the most extensive group is the one that brought together the "formal" romantics. It is difficult to suspect them of insincerity, on the contrary, they very accurately convey their feelings. Among them are Dmitry Venevitinov (1805-1827) and Alexander Polezhaev (1804-1838). These poets used the romantic form, considering it the most suitable for achieving their artistic goal. So, D. Venevitinov writes:

I feel it burns in me

Holy flame of inspiration

But the spirit soars towards the dark goal ...

Will I find a reliable cliff

Where can I rest my foot firmly?

This is a typical romantic poem. It uses traditional romantic vocabulary - both “flame of inspiration” and “soaring spirit”. Thus, the poet describes his feelings. But nothing more. The poet is bound by the framework of romanticism, by its “verbal image”. Everything has been simplified to some kind of cliches.

Representatives of another group of romantics of the 19th century, of course, were A.S. Pushkin and M.Lermontov. These poets, on the contrary, filled the romantic form with their own content. The romantic period in the life of A. Pushkin was short, therefore he has few romantic works. The Prisoner of the Caucasus (1820-1821) is one of the earliest romantic poems by A.S. Pushkin. Before us is a classic version of a romantic work. The author does not give us a portrait of his hero, we do not even know his name. And this is not surprising - all romantic heroes are similar to each other. They are young, beautiful ... and unhappy. The plot of the work is also classically romantic. A Russian prisoner of the Circassians, a young Circassian woman falls in love with him and helps him escape. But he hopelessly loves another ... The poem ends tragically - the Circassian woman throws herself into the water and dies, and the Russian, freed from "physical" captivity, falls into another, more painful captivity - the captivity of the soul. What do we know about the hero's past?

A long journey leads to Russia ...

.....................................

Where he embraced terrible suffering,

Where stormy life is ruined

Hope, joy and desire.

He came to the steppe in search of freedom, tried to escape from his past life. And now, when happiness seemed so close, he has to run again. But where? Back to the world where he “embraced terrible suffering”.

Apostate of light, friend of nature,

He left his native limit

And flew to a distant land

With a cheerful ghost of freedom.

But the "ghost of freedom" remained a ghost. He will forever haunt the romantic hero. Another romantic poem is "The Gypsies". In it, the author again does not give the reader a portrait of the hero, we only know his name - Aleko. He came to the camp to experience true pleasure, true freedom. For her sake, he abandoned everything that previously surrounded him. Has he become free and happy? It would seem that Aleko loves, but with this feeling only misfortune and contempt come to him. Aleko, who so longed for freedom, could not recognize the will in another person. In this poem, another of the extremely characteristic features of the worldview of the romantic hero was manifested - selfishness and complete incompatibility with the world around him. Aleko is not punished with death, but worse - loneliness and debate. He was alone in the world from which he fled, but in another, so desired, he was left alone again.

Before writing The Prisoner of the Caucasus, Pushkin once said: “I am not fit to be a hero of a romantic poem”; however, at the same time, in 1820, Pushkin wrote his poem "The daylight went out ...". In it you can find all the vocabulary inherent in romanticism. This is the “distant coast”, and the “gloomy ocean”, and “excitement and longing” that torment the author. The refrain runs through the whole poem:

Worry beneath me, gloomy ocean.

It is present not only in the description of nature, but also in the description of the hero's feelings.

... But the old hearts of wounds,

Deep wounds of love, nothing healed ...

Noise, noise, obedient sail,

Excite beneath me, gloomy ocean ...

That is, nature becomes another character, another lyrical hero of the poem. Later, in 1824, Pushkin wrote the poem "To the Sea". The author himself again became the romantic hero in it, as in “The daylight went out ...”. Here Pushkin refers to the sea as a traditional symbol of freedom. The sea is an element, which means freedom and happiness. However, Pushkin builds this poem unexpectedly:

You waited, you called ... I was bound;

My soul was torn in vain:

Fascinated by a mighty passion,

I stayed on the coast ...

We can say that this poem completes the romantic period of Pushkin's life. It is written by a man who knows that after achieving so-called “physical” freedom, the romantic hero does not become happy.

In the woods, in the deserts are silent

I will transfer, I am full of you,

Your rocks, your bays ...

At this time, Pushkin comes to the conclusion that true freedom can exist only within a person and only she can make him truly happy.

A variant of Byron's romanticism lived and felt in his work first in Russian culture Pushkin, then Lermontov. Pushkin had the gift of attention to people, and yet the most romantic of the romantic poems in the work of the great poet and prose writer, undoubtedly, is the Fountain of Bakhchisarai.

The poem "The Fountain of Bakhchisarai" still only continues Pushkin's search in the genre of a romantic poem. And there is no doubt that this was prevented by the death of the great Russian writer.

The romantic theme in Pushkin's work received two different versions: there is a heroic romantic hero ("prisoner", "robber", "fugitive"), distinguished by a strong will, passed through a cruel test of violent passions, and there is a suffering hero in whom subtle emotional experiences are incompatible with the cruelty of the outside world ("exile", "prisoner"). The passive beginning in the romantic character has now taken on a female guise from Pushkin. The Fountain of Bakhchisarai develops precisely this aspect of the romantic hero.

In "Prisoner of the Caucasus" all attention was paid to the "prisoner" and very little to the "Circassian woman", now on the contrary - Khan Girey is no more than a little dramatic figure, but really the main character is a woman, even two - Zarema and Maria. The solution to the duality of the hero found in previous poems (through the image of the shackled brothers) Pushkin uses here as well: the passive principle is depicted in the person of two characters - the jealous, passionately in love Zarema and the sad Mary, who has lost hope and love. Both of them are two conflicting passions of a romantic nature: disappointment, despondency, hopelessness and, at the same time, spiritual ardor, intensity of feelings; the contradiction is resolved tragically in the poem - the death of Mary did not bring happiness to Zarema either, since they are connected by mysterious ties. Likewise, in Brothers-Robbers, the death of one of the brothers forever darkened the life of the other.

However, BV Tomashevsky justly noted, “the lyrical isolation of the poem also determined a certain paucity of content ... The moral victory over Zarema does not lead to further conclusions and reflections ... ... the questions posed in the first southern poem. The "Bakhchisarai Fountain" does not have such a continuation ... "

Pushkin groped and outlined the most vulnerable point of a person's romantic position: he wants everything only for himself.

Lermontov's poem "Mtsyri" also does not fully reflect the characteristic features of romanticism.

There are two romantic heroes in this poem, therefore, if it is a romantic poem, then it is very peculiar: firstly, the second hero is transmitted by the author through the epigraph; secondly, the author does not connect with Mtsyri, the hero solves the problem of willfulness in his own way, and Lermontov, throughout the entire poem, only thinks about solving this problem. He does not judge his hero, but he does not justify either, but he takes a certain position - understanding. It turns out that romanticism in Russian culture is being transformed into thinking. It turns out romanticism from the point of view of realism.

We can say that Pushkin and Lermontov did not succeed in becoming romantics (however, Lermontov once managed to comply with romantic laws - in the drama Masquerade). Through their experiments, the poets showed that in England the position of an individualist could be fruitful, but in Russia it could not. Although Pushkin and Lermontov did not succeed in becoming romantics, they opened the way for the development of realism. In 1825, the first realistic work was published: "Boris Godunov", then "The Captain's Daughter", "Eugene Onegin", "A Hero of Our Time" and many others.

b) Painting

In the visual arts, romanticism manifested itself most clearly in painting and graphics, less expressively in sculpture and architecture. The outstanding representatives of romanticism in the visual arts were Russian romantic painters. In their canvases, they expressed the spirit of love of freedom, active action, passionately and passionately appealed to the manifestation of humanism. The everyday canvases of Russian painters are distinguished by their relevance and psychologism, an unprecedented expression. Spiritual, melancholic landscapes are again the same attempt by romantics to penetrate the human world, to show how a person lives and dreams in the sublunary world. Russian romantic painting was different from foreign painting. This was determined by both the historical setting and tradition.

Features of Russian romantic painting:

Educational ideology weakened but did not fail, as in Europe. Therefore, romanticism was not pronounced.

Romanticism developed in parallel with classicism, often intertwining with it.

Academic painting in Russia has not yet exhausted itself.

Romanticism in Russia was not a stable phenomenon; romantics were drawn to academism. By the middle of the XIX century. the romantic tradition has almost died out.

Works related to romanticism began to appear in Russia already in the 1790s (works by Feodosiy Yanenko "Travelers Caught by the Storm" (1796), "Self-Portrait in a Helmet" (1792). At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Later, the influence of this proto-romantic artist will be noticeable in the work of Alexander Orlovsky. Robbers, scenes by the fire, battles accompanied his entire career. As in other countries, artists belonging to Russian Romanticism introduced portraiture into the classical genres, landscape and genre scenes have a completely new emotional mood.

In Russia, romanticism began to manifest itself at first in portrait painting... In the first third of the 19th century, it for the most part lost its connection with the noble aristocracy. Portraits of poets, artists, art patrons, depictions of ordinary peasants began to occupy a significant place. This tendency was especially clearly manifested in the work of O.A. Kiprensky (1782 - 1836) and V.A. Tropinin (1776 - 1857).

Vasily Andreevich Tropinin strove for a lively, unconstrained characterization of a person, expressed through his portrait. The portrait of a son (1818), "Portrait of A.S. Pushkin" (1827), "Self-portrait" (1846) are striking not by their portrait resemblance to the originals, but by their unusually subtle penetration into the inner world of a person.

Portrait of a son- Arseny Tropinina is one of the best in the work of the master. The refined, dull golden color scheme resembles the valera painting of the 18th century. However, compared with a typical childhood portrait in 18th century romanticism. here the impartiality of the plan is striking - this child poses in very small measure. Arseny's gaze slides past the viewer, he is dressed casually, the collar is as if accidentally thrown open. The lack of representativeness lies in the extraordinary fragmentation of the composition: the head fills almost the entire surface of the canvas, the image is cut to the very collarbones, and thus the boy's face is mechanically moved to the viewer.

The history of creation is unusually interesting "Portrait of Pushkin". As usual, for the first acquaintance with Pushkin, Tropinin came to Sobolevsky's house on the dog's playground, where the poet lived at that time. The artist found him in his office fiddling with puppies. At the same time, apparently, was written according to the first impression, which Tropinin so appreciated, a small sketch. For a long time he remained out of sight of his pursuers. Only almost a hundred years later, by 1914, was it published by P.M. Shchekotov, who wrote that of all the portraits of Alexander Sergeevich, he “most conveys his features ... the poet's blue eyes are filled with a special brilliance here, the turn of the head is quick, and the facial features are expressive and mobile. Undoubtedly, here are captured the true features of Pushkin's face, which we individually meet in one or another of the portraits that have come down to us. It remains to be puzzled, - adds Schekotov, - why this adorable sketch did not receive due attention from the publishers and connoisseurs of the poet. " This is explained by the very qualities of the small etude: there was neither the brilliance of colors, nor the beauty of the brushstroke, nor masterfully written "roundabouts". And Pushkin here is not a folk "whit" not a "genius", but above all a man. And it is hardly possible to analyze why the monotonous grayish-green, olive scale, hurried, as if accidental strokes of the brush of an almost nondescript-looking sketch contains such a great human content. Going over in memory all the lifetime and subsequent portraits of Pushkin, this study by the power of humanity can only be placed next to the figure of Pushkin, sculpted by the Soviet sculptor A. Matveev. But this was not the task that Tropinin set himself, not the kind of Pushkin his friend wanted to see, although he ordered to portray the poet in a simple, homely form.

In the artist's assessment, Pushkin was a “tsar-poet”. But he was also a folk poet, he was his own and dear to everyone. “The similarity between the portrait and the original is striking,” Polevoy wrote at the end of it, although he noted the insufficient “quickness of glance” and “liveliness of the expression on the face,” which changes and revives in Pushkin with each new impression.

In the portrait, everything is thought out and verified to the smallest detail, and at the same time there is nothing deliberate, nothing introduced by the artist. Even the rings that adorn the poet's fingers are highlighted as much as Pushkin himself attached importance to them in life. Among the picturesque revelations of Tropinin, the portrait of Pushkin amazes with the sonority of its scale.

Tropinin's romanticism has distinct sentimental origins. It was Tropinin who was the founder of the genre, somewhat idealized portrait of a man of the people (The Lacemaker (1823)). “Both connoisseurs and not connoisseurs, - writes Svinin about "Lace", - come in admiration when looking at this picture, which truly combines all the beauties of pictorial art: the pleasantness of the brush, correct, happy lighting, clear, natural color, moreover, this portrait reveals the soul of a beauty and that sly glance of curiosity that she threw at someone the one who entered that minute. Her hands, bare by the elbow, stopped with her gaze, the work stopped, a sigh escaped from a virgin breast, covered with a muslin handkerchief - and all this is depicted with such truth and simplicity that this picture can very easily be taken for the most successful work of the glorious Dream. Ancillary items, such as a lace pillow and a towel, are arranged with great art and finished with finality ... "

At the beginning of the 19th century, Tver was a significant cultural center of Russia. All outstanding people of Moscow have been here for literary evenings. Here the young Orest Kiprensky met A.S. Pushkin, whose portrait, painted later, became the pearl of the world portrait art, and A.S. Pushkin will devote poetry to him, where he will call him "the darling of the light-winged fashion." Portrait of Pushkin O. Kiprensky's brush is a living personification of the poetic genius. In the decisive turn of the head, in the arms crossed vigorously on the chest, a feeling of independence and freedom is reflected in the poet's entire appearance. It was about him that Pushkin said: "I see myself as in a mirror, but this mirror flatters me." In the work on the portrait of Pushkin, Tropinin and Kiprensky meet for the last time, although this meeting does not take place with their own eyes, but many years later in the history of art, where, as a rule, two portraits of the greatest Russian poet are compared, created simultaneously, but in different places - one in Moscow. Another in St. Petersburg. Now this is a meeting of masters equally great in their importance for Russian art. Although Kiprensky's admirers argue that the artistic advantages are on the side of his romantic portrait, where the poet is depicted immersed in his own thoughts, alone with the muse, the nationality and democratism of the image are certainly on the side of Tropininsky's “Pushkin”.

Thus, two portraits reflected two trends in Russian art, concentrated in two capitals. And critics will later write that Tropinin was for Moscow what Kiprensky was for Petersburg.

A distinctive feature of Kiprensky's portraits is that they show the spiritual charm and inner nobility of a person. The portrait of a hero, brave and strong in feeling, was supposed to embody the pathos of freedom-loving and patriotic moods of an advanced Russian person.

In the front door "Portrait of E.V. Davydov"(1809) shows the figure of an officer who directly expressed the expression of that cult of a strong and brave personality, which was so typical for romanticism of those years. The fragmentarily shown landscape, where a ray of light fights against darkness, hints at the hero's mental anxieties, but on his face there is a reflection of dreamy sensitivity. Kiprensky was looking for "human" in a person, and the ideal did not shrink from him the personal traits of the model.

Portraits of Kiprensky, if you look at them in your mind's eye, show the spiritual and natural wealth of a person, his intellectual strength. Yes, he had the ideal of a harmonious personality, which was also discussed by his contemporaries, but Kiprensky did not seek to literally project this ideal onto an artistic image. In creating an artistic image, he proceeded from nature, as if measuring how far or close it is to such an ideal. In fact, many of those depicted by him are on the threshold of the ideal, are driven towards it, but the ideal itself, according to the ideas of romantic aesthetics, is hardly achievable, and all romantic art is just a path to it.

Noting the contradictions in the souls of his heroes, showing them in troubled moments of life, when fate changes, previous ideas break, youth leaves, etc., Kiprensky seems to be experiencing along with his models. Hence - a special involvement of the portraitist in the interpretation of artistic images, which gives the portrait a soulful shade.

In the early period of Kiprensky's work, you will not see persons infected with skepticism, analysis that corrodes the soul. This will come later, when the romantic time outlives its autumn, giving way to other moods and feelings, when hopes for the triumph of the ideal of a harmonious personality collapse. In all portraits of the 1800s and portraits made in Tver, Kiprensky has a bold brush that easily and freely builds a form. The complexity of the techniques, the character of the figure changed from piece to piece.

It is noteworthy that on the faces of his heroes you will not see heroic elation, on the contrary, most of the faces are rather sad, they indulge in reflections. It seems that these people are concerned about the fate of Rossi, they think about the future more than about the present. In female characters representing wives and sisters of participants in significant events, Kiprensky also did not strive for deliberate heroic elation. The feeling of ease, naturalness prevails. Moreover, in all the portraits there is so much true nobility of the soul. Women's images attract with their modest dignity, integrity of nature; in the faces of men, an inquisitive thought, a readiness for asceticism is guessed. These images coincided with the maturing ethical and aesthetic ideas of the Decembrists. Their thoughts and aspirations were then shared by many (the creation of secret societies with certain social and political programs falls on the period 1816-1821), the artist knew about them, and therefore we can say that his portraits of participants in the events of 1812-1814, images of peasants , created in the same years - a kind of artistic parallel to the emerging concepts of Decembrism.

Marked with the bright stamp of the romantic ideal "Portrait of V.A. Zhukovsky"(1816). The artist, making a portrait commissioned by S.S. Uvarov, conceived to show contemporaries not only the image of the poet, who was well known in literary circles, but also to demonstrate a certain understanding of the personality of the romantic poet. Before us is the type of poet who expressed the philosophical and dreamy direction of Russian romanticism. Kiprensky introduced Zhukovsky at a moment of creative inspiration. The wind ruffled the poet's hair, the trees splash alarmingly with their branches in the night, the ruins of ancient buildings are barely visible. This is how the creator of romantic ballads seemed to look. Dark colors accentuate the atmosphere of the mysterious. On the advice of Uvarov, Kiprensky does not finish painting individual fragments of the portrait, so that “excessive completeness” does not extinguish the spirit, temperament, and emotionality.

Many portraits were painted by Kiprensky in Tver. Moreover, when he painted Ivan Petrovich Wulf, a Tver landowner, he looked with emotion at the girl standing in front of him, his granddaughter, the future Anna Petrovna Kern, to whom one of the most captivating lyric works was dedicated - the poem by A.S. Pushkin “I remember wonderful moment .. ". Such associations of poets, artists, musicians became the manifestation of a new direction in art - romanticism.

“Young Gardener” (1817) by Kiprensky, “Italian Noon” (1827) by Bryullov, “The Reapers” or “The Reaper” (1820s) by Venetsianov are works of the same typological series. They are oriented towards nature and were written explicitly with its use. each of the artists - to embody the aesthetic perfection of a simple nature - led to a certain idealization of images, clothes, situations for the sake of creating an image-metaphor. Observing life, nature, the artist rethought it, poeticizing the visible. masters, giving birth to images that were not known to art before, and is one of the features of romanticism of the first half of the XIX century. ... "Portrait of a Father (A. K. Schwalbe)"(1804) was painted by Orest Kiprensky of art and portrait genre in particular.

The most significant achievements of Russian romanticism are works in the portrait genre. The brightest and best examples of romanticism date from the early period. Long before his trip to Italy, in 1816, Kiprensky, internally ready for a romantic world embodiment, saw the paintings of the old masters with new eyes. Dark coloring, figures highlighted by light, burning colors, intense drama had a strong influence on him. "Portrait of a Father" was undoubtedly inspired by Rembrandt. But the Russian artist took only external techniques from the great Dutchman. "Portrait of a Father" is an absolutely independent work, possessing its own inner energy and power of artistic expression. A distinctive feature of album portraits is the liveliness of their execution. There is no picture - the instant transfer of what he saw on paper creates a unique freshness of graphic expression. Therefore, the people depicted in the pictures seem to be close and understandable to us.

Foreigners called Kiprensky the Russian Van Dyck, his portraits are in many museums around the world. The successor to the work of Levitsky and Borovikovsky, the predecessor of L. Ivanov and K. Bryullov, Kiprensky gave European fame to the Russian art school with his work. In the words of Alexander Ivanov, "he was the first to bring the Russian name to Europe ...".

The increased interest in the personality of a person, characteristic of romanticism, predetermined the flourishing of the portrait genre in the first half of the 19th century, where the self-portrait became the dominant feature. As a rule, the creation of a self-portrait was not an accidental episode. Artists repeatedly wrote and painted themselves, and these works became a kind of diary, reflecting various states of the soul and stages of life, and at the same time, they were a manifesto addressed to their contemporaries. Self-portrait was not a custom genre, the artist wrote for himself and here, as never before, became free in self-expression. In the 18th century, Russian artists rarely painted author's images, only romanticism with its cult of the individual, the exclusive contributed to the rise of this genre. The variety of types of self-portraits reflects the perception of artists themselves as a rich and multifaceted personality. They sometimes appear in the usual and natural role of the creator ("Self-portrait in a velvet beret" by A. G. Varnek, 1810s), then they plunge into the past, as if trying it on themselves ("Self-portrait in a helmet and armor" by F. I. Yanenko , 1792), or, more often, appears without any professional attributes, affirming the significance and intrinsic value of every person, liberated and open to the world, seeking and rushing, as, for example, F. A. Bruni and O. A. Orlovsky in self-portraits 1810s. The readiness for dialogue and openness, characteristic of the figurative solution of the works of the 1810-1820s, are gradually replaced by fatigue and disappointment, immersion, withdrawal into oneself ("Self-portrait" by M. I. Terebenev). This trend was reflected in the development of the portrait genre in general.

Self-portraits of Kiprensky appeared, which is worth noting, at critical moments of life, they testified to the rise or fall of mental strength. Through his art, the artist looked at himself. At the same time, he did not use a mirror, like most painters; he wrote mainly of himself on the basis of representation, he wanted to express his spirit, but not his appearance.

“Self-portrait with brushes behind the ear” built on refusal, and clearly demonstrative, in the external glorification of the image, its classical normativity and ideal construction. Facial features are roughly outlined, in general. The side light falls on the face, highlighting only the side features. Individual reflections of light fall on the figure of the artist, extinguished on the barely distinguishable drapery that represents the background of the portrait. Everything here is subordinated to the expression of life, feelings, moods. It is a look at romantic art through the art of self-portrait. The artist's involvement in the secrets of creativity is expressed in the mysterious romantic "sfumato of the 19th century." A peculiar greenish tone creates a special atmosphere of the artistic world, in the center of which is the artist himself.

Almost simultaneously with this self-portrait was written and "Self-portrait in a pink neckerchief" where another image is embodied. Without direct reference to the profession of a painter. The image of a young man who feels at ease, naturally, free has been recreated. The picturesque surface of the canvas is subtly constructed. The artist's brush applies paints with confidence. Leaving small and large strokes. The color is superbly developed, the colors are dull, harmoniously combined with each other, the lighting is calm: the light gently pours onto the young man's face, outlining his features, without unnecessary expression and deformation.

Another outstanding painter was Venetsianov. In 1811 he received the title of Academician from the Academy, appointed for “Self-portrait” and “Portrait of K. Golovachevsky with three students of the Academy of Arts”. These are outstanding works.

The true skill of Venetsianov declared himself in "Self-portrait" 1811 year. It was painted differently than other artists painted themselves at that time - A. Orlovsky, O. Kiprensky, E. Varnek and even the serf V. Tropinin. It was common for all of them to imagine themselves in a romantic halo, their self-portraits were a kind of poetic opposition to the environment. The uniqueness of the artistic nature was manifested in the posture, gestures, and in the unusualness of a specially conceived costume. In Venetsianov's "Self-portrait", researchers note, first of all, the strict and tense expression of a busy person ... Correct efficiency, which differs from the ostentatious "artistic negligence" indicated by the dressing gowns or flirtatiously shifted caps of other artists. Venizianov looks at himself soberly. Art for him is not an inspired impulse, but above all a matter that requires concentration and attention. Small in size, almost monochrome in its olive tones, extremely accurately written, it is simple and complex at the same time. Not attracting with the external side of painting, he stops with his gaze. The ideally thin rims of the thin gold frame of the glasses do not hide, but rather emphasize the sharp-sighted sharpness of the eyes, not so much directed at nature (the artist portrayed himself with a palette and a brush in his hands), but into the depth of his own thoughts. A large wide forehead, the right side of the face, illuminated by direct light, and a white shirt-front form a light triangle, primarily attracting the viewer's eye, which in the next moment, following the movement of the right hand holding a thin brush, slides down to the palette. Wavy strands of hair, bows of a shiny frame, a loose tie round the collar, a soft shoulder line and, finally, a wide semicircle of the palette form a movable system of smooth, fluid lines, inside which there are three main points: tiny glare of the pupils, and the sharp end of the shirt front, almost closing with palette and brush. Such an almost mathematical calculation in constructing the composition of a portrait gives the image a partial inner composure and gives reason to assume that the author has an analytical mind, inclined to scientific thinking. In "Self-portrait" there is not a trace of any romanticism, which was then so frequent when the artists depicted themselves. This is a self-portrait of an artist-researcher, artist-thinker and hard worker.

Another piece - portrait of Golovachevsky- conceived as a kind of plot composition: the older generation of masters of the Academy, represented by the old inspector, gives instructions to the growing talents: a painter (with a folder of drawings. An architect and a sculptor. interprets to adolescents some page read in the book. The sincerity of expression finds support in the picturesque structure of the picture: its subdued, subtly and beautifully harmonized colorful tones create an impression of serenity and seriousness. Beautifully painted faces full of inner significance. The portrait was one of the highest achievements of Russian portraiture. painting.

And in the work of Orlovsky in the 1800s, portraits appear, mostly in the form of drawings. By 1809, there is such an emotionally rich portrait sheet as "Self-portrait"... Filled with a luscious free touch of sanguine and charcoal (illuminated with chalk), Orlovsky's Self-Portrait attracts with its artistic integrity, characteristic image, artistry of execution. At the same time, it allows us to discern some of the peculiar aspects of Orlovsky's art. Orlovsky's “Self-portrait” certainly does not have the goal of accurately reproducing the typical appearance of the artist of those years. Before us - in many ways deliberate. The exaggerated appearance of an “artist” opposing his own “I” to the surrounding reality, he is not concerned with the “decency” of his appearance: a comb and a brush did not touch his lush hair, on his shoulder there is the edge of a checkered cloak right on top of a home shirt with an open collar. A sharp turn of the head with a “gloomy” gaze from under shifted eyebrows, a close-up shot of a portrait in which the face is depicted in close-up, light contrasts - all this is aimed at achieving the main effect of opposing the depicted person to the environment (and thus to the viewer).

The pathos of affirming individuality - one of the most progressive features in the art of that time - forms the main ideological and emotional tone of the portrait, but appears in a peculiar aspect that is almost not found in Russian art of that period. The affirmation of the personality goes not so much through the disclosure of the wealth of her inner world, but rather through a more external way of rejecting everything around her. At the same time, the image undoubtedly looks impoverished, limited.

Such solutions are difficult to find in Russian portrait art of that time, where already in the middle of the 18th century civil and humanistic motives sounded loudly and a person's personality never broke strong ties with the environment. Dreaming of a better, democratic social order, the best people of Russia of that era did not break away from reality at all, deliberately rejected the individualistic cult of “personal freedom” that flourished on the soil of Western Europe, ripped up by the bourgeois revolution. This clearly manifested itself as a reflection of the actual factors in Russian portraiture. One has only to compare Orlovsky's Self-Portrait with the simultaneous "Self-portrait" Kiprensky (for example, 1809), so that a serious internal difference between the two portrait painters was immediately apparent.

Kiprensky also “heroes” the personality of a person, but he shows its true inner values. In the face of the artist, the viewer distinguishes features of a strong mind, character, moral purity.

The whole appearance of Kiprensky is covered with amazing nobility and humanity. He is able to distinguish between "good" and "evil" in the world around him and, rejecting the second, love and appreciate the first, love and value like-minded people. At the same time, we have, undoubtedly, a strong individuality, proud of the consciousness of the value of their personal qualities. Exactly the same concept of the portrait image underlies the famous heroic portrait of D. Davydov by Kiprensky.

Orlovsky, in comparison with Kiprensky, as well as with some other Russian portrait painters of that time, more limitedly, more straightforwardly and outwardly resolves the image of a "strong personality", clearly focusing on the art of bourgeois France. When you look at his "Self-portrait", the portraits of A. Gro and Gericault involuntarily come to mind. Orlovsky's profile “Self-portrait” of 1810, with his cult of individualistic “inner strength,” however, devoid of the already harsh “sketchy” form of “Self-portrait” of 1809 or "Portrait of Duport". In the latter, Orlovsky, just as in Self-portrait, uses a spectacular, “heroic” pose with a sharp, almost cross movement of the head and shoulders. He emphasizes the irregular structure of Duport's face, his disheveled hair, with the goal of creating a portrait image that is self-sufficient in its unique, random character.

"The landscape should be a portrait", - wrote K. N. Batyushkov. This attitude was adhered to in their work by most of the artists who turned to the genre. landscape. Among the obvious exceptions that gravitated towards the fantastic landscape were A.O. Orlovsky ("Sea View", 1809); A. G. Varnek ("View in the Environs of Rome", 1809); P. V. Basin ("The Sky at Sunset in the Vicinity of Rome", "Evening Landscape", both - 1820s). Creating specific types, they retained the immediacy of sensation, emotional saturation, reaching monumental sound with compositional techniques.

Young Orlrvsky saw in nature only titanic forces, not subject to the will of man, capable of causing catastrophe, disaster. Man's struggle with the raging sea element is one of the favorite themes of the artist of his “rebellious” romantic period. It became the content of his drawings, watercolors and oil paintings from 1809 to 1810. the tragic scene is shown in the picture "Shipwreck"(1809 (?)). In the pitch darkness that fell to the ground, among the raging waves, drowning fishermen frantically climb the coastal cliffs on which their ship crashed. The color, sustained in severe reddish tones, enhances the feeling of anxiety. Terrible raids of mighty waves, foreshadowing a storm, and in another picture - "On the seashore"(1809). It also plays a huge emotional role in the stormy sky, which takes up most of the composition. Although Orlovsky did not know the art of aerial perspective, the gradual transition of plans was solved here more harmoniously and softer. The color has become lighter. Red spots of fishermen's clothes play beautifully on a reddish-brown background. Restless and disturbing sea element in watercolor "Sailboat"(about 1812). And even when the wind does not flutter the sail and does not ripple the surface of the water, as in watercolor "Seascape with ships"(about 1810), the viewer does not leave a premonition that a storm will follow the calm.

For all the drama and emotional excitement, Orlovsky's seascapes are not so much the fruit of his observations of atmospheric phenomena as the result of direct imitation of the classics of art. In particular, J. Vernet.

The landscapes of S.F.Shchedrin were of a different character. They are filled with the harmony of the coexistence of man and nature ("Terrace by the sea. Capuccini near Sorrento", 1827). The numerous views of Naples and the environs of his brush enjoyed extraordinary success and popularity.

The creation of a romantic image of St. Petersburg in Russian painting is associated with the work of M. N. Vorobiev. On his canvases, the city appeared shrouded in mysterious Petersburg fogs, a soft haze of white nights and an atmosphere saturated with sea moisture, where the outlines of buildings are erased, and moonlight completes the sacrament. The same lyrical beginning distinguishes the views of the St. Petersburg environs performed by him ("Sunset in the Environs of St. Petersburg", 1832). But the northern capital was seen by the artists in a different, dramatic way, as an arena of collision and struggle of natural elements (V. Ye. Raev "Alexander's Column during a Thunderstorm", 1834).

In the brilliant paintings of I.K. Nevertheless, a large place in the master's legacy is occupied by night seascapes dedicated to specific places where the storm gives way to the magic of the night, a time that, according to the views of romantics, is filled with a mysterious inner life, and where the artist's pictorial quest is aimed at extracting extraordinary light effects ( "View of Odessa on a moonlit night", "View of Constantinople by moonlight", both - 1846).

The theme of the natural elements and a person caught by surprise - a favorite theme of romantic art, was interpreted in different ways by the artists of the 1800-1850s. The works were based on real events, but the meaning of the images is not in their objective retelling. A typical example is the painting by Pyotr Basin "The Rocca di Papa earthquake near Rome"(1830). It is devoted not so much to the description of a specific event as to the image of fear and horror of a person who is faced with the manifestation of the elements.

The leading figures of Russian painting of this era were K.P. Bryullov (1799-1852) and A.A. Ivanov (1806 - 1858). Russian painter and draftsman K.P. Bryullov, while still a student of the Academy of Arts, mastered the incomparable skill of drawing. Creativity Bryullov is usually divided into before "The Last Day of Pompeii" and after. What was created before….?!

“Italian Morning” (1823), “Hermilia at the Shepherds” (1824) based on the poem by Torquatto Tasso “Liberation of Jerusalem”, “Italian Afternoon” (“Italian Woman Removing Grapes”, 1827), “Horsewoman” (1830), “Bathsheba” (1832) - all these paintings are imbued with a bright, undisguised joy of life. Such works were consonant with the early epicurean verses of Pushkin, Batyushkov, Vyazemsky, Delvig. The old style, based on imitating great masters, did not satisfy Bryullov, and he painted “Italian Morning”, “Italian Noon”, “Bathsheba” in the open air.

Working on the portrait, Bryullov painted only the head from life. Everything else was often dictated to him by his imagination. The fruit of such free creative improvisation is "Rider". The main thing in the portrait is the contrast of a flushed, hovering animal with flared nostrils and sparkling eyes and a graceful rider who calmly restrains the horse's stupefied energy (taming animals is a favorite theme of classical sculptors, Bryullov decided it in painting).

V "Bathsheba" the artist uses the biblical story as an excuse to show the naked body in the open air and to convey the play of light and reflexes on fair skin. In Bathsheba, he created the image of a young woman full of joy and happiness. The naked body glows and shines surrounded by olive greens, cherry clothes, a transparent reservoir. Soft elastic body shapes are beautifully combined with the whitening fabric and the chocolate color of the Arab woman serving Bathsheba. The flowing lines of bodies, pond, fabrics give the composition of the picture a smooth rhythm.

Painting became a new word in painting "The last day of Pompeii"(1827-1833). She made the artist's name immortal and very famous during his lifetime.

Its plot, apparently, was chosen under the influence of brother Alexander, who intensively studied the Pompeian ruins. But the reasons for painting are deeper. Gogol noticed this, and Herzen said bluntly that in The Last Day of Pompeii, perhaps, an unconscious reflection of the artist's thoughts and feelings, caused by the defeat of the Decembrist uprising in Russia, found their place. Not without reason, among the victims of the raging elements in the dying Pompey, Bryullov placed his self-portrait and gave the features of his Russian acquaintances to other characters in the picture.

Bryullov's Italian entourage also played a role, which could tell him about the revolutionary storms that swept across Italy in previous years, about the sad fate of the Carbonari in the years of reaction.

The grandiose picture of the death of Pompeii is imbued with the spirit of historicism, it shows the change from one historical era to another, the suppression of ancient paganism and the onset of a new Christian faith.

The artist perceives the course of history dramatically, the change of eras as a shock to humanity. In the center of the composition, a woman who fell from a chariot and crashed to death apparently personified the demise of the ancient world. But the artist placed a living baby near the mother's body. Depicting children and parents, a young man and an old woman, a mother, sons and a decrepit father, the artist showed old generations that are going down into history and new ones coming to replace them. The birth of a new era on the wreckage of an old world crumbling into dust is the real theme of Bryullov's painting. Regardless of the turning points that history brings, the existence of mankind does not stop, and its thirst for life remains unfading. This is the basic idea behind The Last Day of Pompeii. This picture is a hymn to the beauty of humanity, which remains immortal in all cycles of history.

The canvas was exhibited in 1833 at the Milan Art Exhibition, it caused a flurry of enthusiastic responses. Well-worn Italy was conquered. Bryullov's pupil G. G. Gagarin testifies: “This great work aroused boundless enthusiasm in Italy. The cities where the painting was exhibited organized ceremonial receptions for the artist, poetry was dedicated to him, he was carried around the streets with music, flowers and torches ... Everywhere he was received with honor as a well-known, triumphant genius, understood and appreciated by everyone. "

The English writer Walter Scott (a representative of romantic literature, famous for his historical novels) spent an hour in Bryullov's studio, about which he said that this was not a picture, but a whole poem. The Art Academies of Milan, Florence, Bologna and Parma elected the Russian painter as their honorary member.

Bryullov's canvas evoked enthusiastic responses from Pushkin and Gogol.

Vesuvius opened the mouth - the smoke poured out in a club-flame

It has developed widely as a battle banner.

The earth is agitated - from the reeling columns

Idols are falling! ..

Pushkin wrote under the impression of the picture.

Beginning with Bryullov, turning points in history became the main subject of Russian historical painting, where grandiose folk scenes were depicted, where each person is a participant in a historical drama, where there is no main or secondary.

"Pompeia" belongs, in general, to classicism. The artist masterfully revealed the plasticity of the human body on the canvas. All the mental movements of people were transmitted by Bryullov primarily in the language of plastics. Individual figures, given in a stormy movement, are collected in balanced, frozen groups. Flashes of light accentuate the shapes of bodies and do not create strong painterly effects. However, the composition of the picture, which has a strong breakthrough in the center, depicting an extraordinary event in the life of Pompeii, was inspired by romanticism.

Romanticism in Russia as a perception of the world existed in its first wave from the end of the 18th century to the 1850s. The line of the romantic in Russian art did not end in the 1850s. Opened by romantics for art, the theme of the state of being developed later among the artists of the "Blue Rose". The direct heirs of the Romantics were undoubtedly the Symbolists. Romantic themes, motives, expressive techniques entered the art of different styles, trends, creative associations. The romantic outlook or worldview turned out to be one of the most lively, tenacious, and fruitful.

Romanticism as a general attitude, characteristic mainly of young people, as a striving for the ideal and creative freedom, is still constantly living in world art.

c) Music

Romanticism in its purest form is a phenomenon of Western European art. In Russian music of the XIX century. from Glinka to Tchaikovsky, features of classicism were combined with features of romanticism, the leading element was a bright, distinctive national principle. Romanticism in Russia gave an unexpected rise when this trend seemed to be a thing of the past. Two composers of the 20th century, Scriabin and Rachmaninov, once again revived such features of romanticism as the unrestrained flight of fantasy and the sincerity of the lyrics. Therefore, the XIX century. called the century of musical classics.

Time (1812, the Decembrist uprising, the ensuing reaction) left an imprint on the music. Whatever genre we choose - romance, opera, ballet, chamber music - everywhere Russian composers have said their new word.

The music of Russia, with all its salon elegance and strict adherence to the traditions of professional instrumental, including sonata-symphonic writing, is based on the unique modal color and rhythmic structure of Russian folklore. Some - widely based on everyday song, others - on original forms of playing music, and still others - on the ancient modality of ancient Russian peasant modes.

The beginning of the 19th century - these are the years of the first and bright flourishing of the romance genre. Until now, humble sincere lyrics sound and pleases listeners Alexander Alexandrovich Alyabyev (1787-1851). He wrote romances to the verses of many poets, but they are immortal "Nightingale" to the verses of Delvig, "Winter road", "I love you" to the verses of Pushkin.

Alexander Yegorovich Varlamov (1801-1848) wrote music for dramatic performances, but we know him better from famous romances “Red sundress”, “At dawn, you don't wake me up”, “Lonely sail is white”.

Alexander Lvovich Gurilev (1803-1858)- composer, pianist, violinist and teacher, he owns such romances as "The bell rings monotonously", "At the dawn of foggy youth" and etc.

The most prominent place here is occupied by Glinka's romances. No one else had yet achieved such a natural fusion of music with the poetry of Pushkin and Zhukovsky.

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (1804-1857)- a contemporary of Pushkin (5 years younger than Alexander Sergeevich), a classic of Russian literature, became the founder of musical classics. His work is one of the pinnacles of Russian and world musical culture. It harmoniously combines the wealth of folk music and the highest achievements of composing. Glinka's deeply popular realistic creativity reflected the powerful flourishing of Russian culture in the first half of the 19th century, associated with the Patriotic War of 1812 and the Decembrist movement. Light, life-affirming character, harmony of forms, beauty of expressive melodies, variety, brilliance and subtlety of harmonies are the most valuable qualities of Glinka's music. At the famous opera "Ivan Susanin"(1836) the idea of ​​popular patriotism was brilliantly expressed; the moral greatness of the Russian people is glorified in the fairy-tale opera " Ruslan and Ludmila"... Orchestral works by Glinka: "Waltz-Fantasy", "Night in Madrid" and especially "Kamarinskaya", form the basis of Russian classical symphony. Remarkable for the power of dramatic expression and the brightness of the characteristics of the music to the tragedy "Prince Kholmsky". Glinka's vocal lyrics (romances "I remember a wonderful moment", "Doubt") is an unsurpassed embodiment of Russian poetry in music.

6. WESTERN EUROPEAN ROMANCE

a) Painting

If the ancestor of classicism was France, then “in order to find the roots ... of the romantic school,” wrote one of his contemporaries, “we should go to Germany. She was born there, and there modern Italian and French romantics developed their tastes ”.

Shattered Germany did not know the revolutionary upsurge. Many of the German romantics were alien to the pathos of advanced social ideas. They idealized the Middle Ages. They gave themselves up to unaccountable emotional impulses, talked about the abandonment of human life. The art of many of them was passive and contemplative. They created their best works in the field of portrait and landscape painting.

An outstanding portrait painter was Otto Runge (1777-1810). The portraits of this master, with external calm, amaze with their intense and tense inner life.

The image of the romantic poet is seen by Runge in "Self-portrait". He carefully examines himself and sees a dark-haired, dark-eyed, serious, full of energy, thoughtful, self-absorbed and strong-willed young man. The romantic artist wants to know himself. The manner in which the portrait is executed is fast and sweeping, as if the spiritual energy of the creator should be conveyed in the texture of the work; in the dark color scale contrasts of light and dark appear. Contrast is a characteristic pictorial technique of the romantic masters.

A romantic artist will always try to catch the changeable play of moods of a person, to look into his soul. And in this respect, children's portraits will serve as a fertile material for him. V portrait of the children of Hulsenbeck(1805) Runge not only conveys the liveliness and spontaneity of a child's character, but also finds a special method for a light mood, which delights the open-air discoveries of the 2nd floor. XIX century. The background in the picture is a landscape, which testifies not only to the artist's coloristic gift, an admirable attitude to nature, but also to the emergence of new problems in the masterful reproduction of spatial relationships, light shades of objects in the open air. The romantic master, wishing to merge his “I” with the vastness of the Universe, strives to capture the sensually tangible appearance of nature. But with this sensuality of the image, he prefers to see the symbol of the big world, the “artist's idea”.

Runge, one of the first romantic artists, set himself the task of synthesizing the arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, music. The ensemble sound of the arts was supposed to express the unity of the divine forces of the world, each particle of which symbolizes the cosmos as a whole. The artist fantasizes, reinforcing his philosophical concept with the ideas of the famous German thinker 1st floor. XVII century Jacob Boehme. The world is a kind of mystical whole, each part of which expresses the whole. This idea is related to the romantics of the entire European continent. In verse form, the English poet and artist William Blake put it this way:

See eternity in one moment

A huge world in a mirror of sand

In a single handful - infinity

And the sky is in the cup of a flower.

Runge's cycle, or, as he called it, "fantastic musical poem" "Seasons of the Day"- morning, noon, night, is an expression of this concept. He left in poetry and prose an explanation of his conceptual model of the world. The image of a person, landscape, light and color are symbols of the always changing cycle of natural and human life.

Another outstanding German romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), preferred landscape to all other genres and wrote only pictures of nature during his seventy-year life. The main motive of Friedrich's work is the idea of ​​the unity of man and nature.

“Listen to the voice of nature that speaks within us,” the artist instructs his students. The inner world of a person personifies the infinity of the Universe, therefore, having heard himself, a person is able to comprehend the spiritual depths of the world.

The listening position determines the basic form of human “communication” with nature and its image. This is the greatness, mystery or enlightenment of nature and the conscious state of the observer. True, very often Friedrich does not allow the figure to “enter” the landscape space of his paintings, but in the subtle penetration of the imaginative structure of the spreading open spaces, the presence of a feeling, a person's experience, is felt. Subjectivism in the depiction of the landscape comes into art only with the creativity of romantics, foreshadowing the lyrical disclosure of nature by the masters of the 2nd sex. XIX century. Researchers note in the works of Friedrich "expansion of the repertoire" of landscape motifs. The author is interested in the sea, mountains, forests and various shades of the state of nature at different times of the year and day.

1811-1812 marked by the creation of a series of mountain landscapes as a result of the artist's journey into the mountains. "Morning in the mountains" picturesquely represents a new natural reality that is born in the rays of the rising sun. Mauve tones envelop and deprive them of volume and material weight. The years of the battle with Napoleon (1812-1813) turned Frederick towards patriotic themes. Illustrating, drawing inspiration from Kleist's drama, he writes "Tomb of Arminius"- a landscape with the graves of ancient Germanic heroes.

Frederick was a fine master of seascapes: "Ages", "Moonrise over the sea", "The death of" Hope "in the ice".

The artist's latest works - "Rest in the Field", "Big Swamp" and "Remembrance of the Giant Mountains", "Giant Mountains" - a series of mountain ridges and stones in the foreground darkened plan. This, apparently, is a return to the experienced feeling of a person's victory over himself, the joy of ascension to the “top of the world”, a striving for luminous unconquered heights. The artist's feelings compose these mountain masses in a special way, and again the movement from the darkness of the first steps to the future light is read. The mountain peak in the background is highlighted as the center of the master's spiritual aspirations. The painting is very associative, like any creation of romantics, and suggests different levels of reading and interpretation.

Friedrich is very precise in drawing, musically harmonious in the rhythmic construction of his paintings, in which he tries to speak with emotions of color and light effects. “Many are given little, few are given much. The soul of nature opens up to everyone in a different way. Therefore, no one dares to transfer his experience and his rules to another as a binding unconditional law. Nobody is the yardstick for everyone. Everyone carries within himself a measure only for himself and for natures more or less akin to himself, ”- this reflection of the master proves the amazing integrity of his inner life and creativity. The uniqueness of the artist is palpable only in the freedom of his work - this is what the romantic Friedrich stands for.

It seems more formal to differentiate with artists - "classics" - representatives of classicism of another branch of romantic painting in Germany - the Nazarenes. Founded in Vienna and settled in Rome (1809-1810), the Union of St. Luke united the masters with the idea of ​​reviving the monumental art of religious issues. The Middle Ages were a favorite period in history for romantics. But in their artistic quest, the Nazarenes turned to the painting traditions of the early Renaissance in Italy and Germany. Overbeck and Geforr initiated a new alliance, which was later joined by Cornelius, J. Schnoff von Karolsfeld, and Faith Fürich.

This movement of the Nazarenes corresponded to their forms of confrontation with academic classicists in France, Italy, England. For example, in France, the so-called primitivist artists emerged from David's workshop, in England, the Pre-Raphaelites. In the spirit of the romantic tradition, they considered art to be an “expression of the time,” “the spirit of the people,” but their thematic or formal preferences, which at first sounded like a slogan for unification, after some time turned into the same doctrinaire principles as those of the Academy, which they rejected.

The art of romanticism in France developed in special ways. The first thing that distinguished it from similar movements in other countries was its active offensive (“revolutionary”) character. Poets, writers, musicians, artists defended their positions not only by creating new works, but also by participating in magazine and newspaper polemics, which researchers describe as a “romantic battle”. In the romantic polemic, the famous V. Hugo, Stendhal, Georges Sand, Berlioz and many other writers, composers and journalists of France “sharpened their pens”.

Romantic painting in France arises as an opposition to the classicist school of David, academic art, called the "school" in general. But this needs to be understood more broadly: it was the opposition to the official ideology of the epoch of reaction, a protest against its bourgeois narrow-mindedness. Hence the pathetic nature of romantic works, their nervous excitement, gravitation towards exotic motives, to historical and literary plots, to everything that can lead away from the "dull everyday life", hence this play of imagination, and sometimes, on the contrary, daydreaming and complete lack of activity.

Representatives of the “school”, academics, rebelled primarily against the language of the romantics: their excited hot color, their modeling of the form, not the one usual for the “classics”, statuary-plastic, but built on strong contrasts of color spots; their expressive design, deliberately abandoning precision and classic polish; their bold, sometimes chaotic composition, devoid of majesty and unshakable tranquility. Ingres, the implacable enemy of the romantics, until the end of his life said that Delacroix "wrote with a mad broom", and Delacroix accused Ingres and all the artists of the "school" of coldness, rationality, lack of movement, that they do not write, but "paint" your paintings. But it was not a simple clash of two bright, completely different individuals, it was a struggle between two different artistic worldviews.

This struggle lasted for almost half a century, romanticism in art won victories not easily and not immediately, and the first artist of this trend was Theodore Gericault (1791-1824) - a master of heroic monumental forms, who combined in his work both classicistic features and features of romanticism itself. and, finally, a powerful realistic beginning, which had a huge impact on the art of realism in the middle of the 19th century. But during his lifetime, he was appreciated by only a few close friends.

The first brilliant successes of romanticism are associated with the name of Theodore Zhariko. Already in his early paintings (portraits of the military, images of horses), ancient ideals receded before the direct perception of life.

In the salon in 1812 Gericault shows a painting "Officer of the imperial horse rangers during the attack." It was the year of the apogee of Napoleon's glory and the military power of France.

The composition of the picture presents the rider in an unusual perspective of a “sudden” moment, when the horse reared up, and the rider, keeping the almost vertical position of the horse, turned to the viewer. The image of such a moment of instability, impossibility of posture enhances the effect of movement. The horse has one point of support, he must fall to the ground, screw himself into the fight that brought him to such a state. Much converged in this work: Gericault's unconditional belief in the possibility of owning a person on his own, passionate love for the image of horses and the courage of a novice master in showing what previously could only be conveyed by music or the language of poetry - the thrill of battle, the beginning of an attack, the ultimate tension of the forces of a living being ... The young author built his image on the transmission of the dynamics of movement, and it was important for him to tune the viewer to “conjecture”, to finish painting with “inner vision” and a sense of what he wanted to portray.

The tradition of such dynamics of pictorial narration of romance in France practically did not exist, except in the reliefs of Gothic temples, because when Gericault first came to Italy, he was stunned by the hidden power of Michelangelo's compositions. “I was trembling,” he writes, “I doubted myself and for a long time could not recover from this experience.” But Stendhal had pointed out Michelangelo as the forerunner of a new stylistic trend in art even earlier in his polemical articles.

Gericault's painting announced not only the birth of a new artistic talent, but also paid tribute to the author's enthusiasm and disappointment with the ideas of Napoleon. Several other works are related to this topic: “ Officer of the Carabinieri ”,“ Officer of the Cuirassier before the Attack ”,“ Portrait of the Carabinieri ”,“ The Wounded Cuirassier ”.

In the treatise "Reflection on the state of painting in France" he writes that "luxury and arts have become ... a necessity and, as it were, food for the imagination, which is the second life of a civilized person ... needs are met when abundance arrives. A man, freed from everyday worries, began to seek pleasure in order to get rid of boredom, which would inevitably overtake him in the midst of contentment.

This understanding of the educational and humanistic role of art was demonstrated by Gericault after returning from Italy in 1818 - he began to engage in lithography, replicating a variety of topics, including the defeat of Napoleon ( "Return from Russia").

At the same time, the artist turns to the depiction of the death of the frigate "Medusa" off the coast of Africa, which excited the then society. The disaster was due to the fault of an inexperienced captain, who was appointed to the post under patronage. The surviving passengers of the ship, the surgeon Savigny and the engineer Correar, spoke in detail about the accident.

The dying ship managed to throw off the raft, on which a handful of rescued people reached. For twelve days they were carried on the stormy sea, until they were rescued by the ship "Argus".

Gericault was interested in the situation of the extreme tension of human spiritual and physical forces. The painting depicted the 15 surviving passengers on the raft when they saw the Argus on the horizon. "Raft" Medusa " was the result of a long preparatory work by the artist. He made many sketches of the raging sea, portraits of rescued people in the hospital. At first, Gericault wanted to show the struggle of people on a raft with each other, but then he settled on the heroic behavior of the victors of the sea element and state negligence. People bravely endured the misfortune, and the hope of salvation did not leave them: each group on the raft has its own characteristics. In constructing the composition, Gericault chooses a point of view from above, which allowed him to combine the panoramic coverage of the space (the sea distances are visible) and to depict, very close to the foreground, all the inhabitants of the raft. The movement is based on the contrast of the figures lying powerlessly in the foreground and the impetuous ones in the group giving signals to the passing ship. The clarity of the rhythm of the growth of dynamics from group to group, the beauty of naked bodies, the dark coloring of the picture set a certain note of the conventionality of the image. But this is not the essence of the matter for the perceiving viewer, for whom the conventionality of the language even helps to understand and feel the main thing: a person's ability to fight and win. The ocean roars. The sail moans. The ropes are ringing. The raft is cracking. The wind drives the waves and tears the black clouds to shreds.

Isn't this France itself, driven by the storm of history? - thought Eugene Delacroix, standing at the picture. “The raft of“ Medusa ”shook Delacroix, he cried and, like a madman, rushed out of Gericault's workshop, which he often visited.

The art of David did not know such passions.

But Gericault's life ended tragically early (he was terminally ill after falling from a horse), and many of his plans remained unfinished.

Gericault's innovation opened up new possibilities for conveying the movement that excited romantics, the latent feelings of a person, and the coloristic textured expressiveness of the picture.

Gericault's successor in his search was Eugene Delacroix. True, Delacroix was released twice as long as his life span, and he managed not only to prove the correctness of romanticism, but also to bless a new direction in painting, the 2nd floor. XIX century. - impressionism.

Before starting to write on his own, Eugene studied at Lerain's school: he painted from life, copied in the Louvre the greats Rubens, Rembrandt, Veronese, Titian ... The young artist worked 10-12 hours a day. He remembered the words of the great Michelangelo: "Painting is a jealous mistress, it requires the whole person ..."

Delacroix, after Gericault's demonstration speeches, was well aware that times of strong emotional upheaval had come in art. First, he tries to comprehend a new era for him through well-known literary plots. His picture Dante and Virgil presented in the salon in 1822 is an attempt through the historical associative images of two poets: antiquity - Virgil and the Renaissance - Dante - to look at the boiling cauldron, the "hell" of the modern era. Once in his "Divine Comedy" Dante took Virgil as his guide in all spheres (heaven, hell, purgatory). In Dante's work, a new renaissance world arose through the experience of the Middle Ages in the memory of antiquity. The symbol of the romantic as a synthesis of antiquity, the Renaissance and the Middle Ages arose in the “horror” of the visions of Dante and Virgil. But a complex philosophical allegory turned out to be a good emotional illustration of the pre-Renaissance era and an immortal literary masterpiece.

Delacroix will try to find a direct response in the hearts of his contemporaries through his own heartache. Burning with freedom and hatred of the oppressors, young people of that time sympathize with the liberation war of Greece. The romantic bard of England, Byron, is going there to fight. Delacroix sees the meaning of the new era in the portrayal of a more concrete historical event - the struggle and suffering of freedom-loving Greece. He dwells on the plot of the death of the population of the Greek island of Chios, captured by the Turks. At the Salon of 1824, Delacroix shows a painting “Massacre on the island of Chios”. against the backdrop of the endless expanse of hilly terrain. Still screaming from the smoke of conflagrations and unabated battle, the artist shows several groups of wounded, exhausted women and children. They were left with the last minutes of freedom before the approach of enemies. A Turk on a reared horse on the right seems to hang over the entire foreground and the many sufferers who are there. Beautiful bodies, faces of full people. By the way, Delacroix would later write that the Greek sculpture was turned by the artists into hieroglyphs, hiding the real Greek beauty of the face and figure. But, revealing the “beauty of the soul” in the faces of the defeated Greeks, the painter dramatizes the events that are taking place, that in order to maintain a single dynamic pace of tension, he goes to deformation of the angles of the fig. These “mistakes” were already “resolved” by Gericault's work, but Delacroix once again demonstrates the romantic credo that painting is “not the truth of the situation, but the truth of feeling”.

In 1824 Delacroix lost his friend and teacher - Gericault. And he became the leader of the new painting.

The years passed. One by one the pictures appeared: "Greece on the ruins of Missalunga", "Death of Sardanapalus" and others. The artist became an outcast in the official circles of the artist. But the July Revolution of 1830 changed the situation. She ignites the artist with the romance of victories and achievements. He paints a picture “Freedom on the Barricades”.

In 1831, at the Paris Salon, the French first saw the painting by Eugene Delacroix "Liberty on the Barricades", dedicated to the "three glorious days" of the July Revolution of 1830. With its power, democracy and boldness of the artistic solution, the canvas made a stunning impression on contemporaries. According to legend, one respectable bourgeois exclaimed: “You say - the head of the school? Better say - the head of the rebellion! " After the Salon was closed, the government, frightened by the formidable and inspiring appeal emanating from the painting, hastened to return it to the author. During the revolution of 1848, it was again put on public display at the Luxembourg Palace. And they returned it to the artist again. Only after the canvas was exhibited at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1855, it ended up in the Louvre. It still houses this one of the best creations of French romanticism - an inspired eyewitness testimony and an eternal monument to the people's struggle for their freedom.

What kind of artistic language did the young French romantic find in order to merge together these two seemingly opposite principles - a broad, all-embracing generalization and concrete reality, cruel in its nakedness?

Paris of the famous July days of 1830. The air is saturated with gray smoke and dust. A beautiful and stately city disappearing in a powder haze. In the distance, barely noticeable, but proudly rise the towers of Notre Dame Cathedral - a symbol of history, culture, and the spirit of the French people. From there, from the smoky city, over the ruins of the barricades, over the dead bodies of their dead comrades, the rebels stubbornly and resolutely step forward. Each of them can die, but the step of the rebels is unshakable - they are inspired by the will to victory, to freedom.

This inspiring power is embodied in the image of a beautiful young woman, in a passionate impulse calling for her. With inexhaustible energy, free and youthful swiftness of movement, she is like the Greek goddess

Nike's victory. Her strong figure is dressed in a chiton dress, her face with perfect features, with glowing eyes, is turned to the rebels. In one hand she holds the tricolor flag of France, in the other - a gun. On the head is a Phrygian cap - an ancient symbol of liberation from slavery. Her step is swift and light - this is how the goddesses step. At the same time, the image of a woman is real - she is the daughter of the French people. She is the guiding force behind the movement of the group on the barricades. From it, as from a source of light in the center of energy, rays radiate out, charging with thirst and will to victory. Those in close proximity to it, each in their own way, express their involvement in this inspiring and inspiring call.

On the right is a boy, a Parisian gameman brandishing pistols. He is closest to Freedom and is kind of kindled by her enthusiasm and joy of a free impulse. In a swift, boyishly impatient movement, he is even slightly ahead of his inspirer. This is the predecessor of the legendary Gavroche, portrayed twenty years later by Victor Hugo in Les Miserables: “Gavroche, full of inspiration, radiant, took on the task of putting the whole thing into motion. He scurried back and forth, went up, went down

down, rose again, made noise, sparkled with joy. It would seem that he came here to cheer everyone up. Did he have any incentive for this? Yes, of course, his poverty. Did he have wings? Yes, of course, his gaiety. It was some kind of whirlwind. He seemed to fill the air, being present everywhere at the same time ... Huge barricades felt him on their ridge. "

Gavroche in Delacroix's painting is the personification of youth, "a wonderful impulse", a joyful acceptance of the bright idea of ​​Freedom. Two images - Gavroche and Svoboda - seem to complement each other: one is a fire, the other is a torch lighted from it. Heinrich Heine talked about the lively response the figure of Gavroche evoked from the Parisians. "Damn it! cried a grocery merchant. "These boys fought like giants!"

On the left is a student with a gun. Previously, it was seen as a self-portrait of the artist. This rebel is not as swift as Gavroche. His movement is more restrained, more concentrated, meaningful. Hands confidently grip the barrel of the gun, the face expresses courage, firm determination to stand to the end. This is a deeply tragic image. The student realizes the inevitability of losses that the rebels will incur, but the victims do not frighten him - the will for freedom is stronger. An equally brave and determined worker with a saber stands behind him. There is a wounded man at the feet of Freedom. He rises with difficulty in order to once again look up, at Freedom, to see and with all his heart feel the beauty for which he perishes. This figure brings a dramatic start to the sound of Delacroix's canvas. If the images of Gavroche, Svoboda, a student, a worker are almost symbols, the embodiment of the unyielding will of freedom fighters - inspire and call on the viewer, then the wounded one appeals to compassion. Man says goodbye to Freedom, says goodbye to life. He is still an impulse, movement, but already a fading impulse.

His figure is transitional. The viewer's gaze, still bewitched and carried away by the revolutionary determination of the rebels, descends down to the foot of the barricade, covered with the bodies of glorious fallen soldiers. Death is presented by the artist in all the nakedness and obviousness of the fact. We see the blue faces of the dead, their naked bodies: the struggle is merciless, and death is the same inevitable companion of the rebels, like the beautiful inspirer Freedom.

But not quite the same! From the terrible sight at the lower edge of the picture, we again raise our gaze and see a young beautiful figure - no! life wins! The idea of ​​freedom, embodied so visibly and tangibly, is so directed into the future that death in its name is not terrible.

The artist depicts only a small group of rebels, alive and dead. But the defenders of the barricade seem unusually numerous. The composition is built in such a way that the group of combatants is not limited, not closed in itself. She is only part of an endless avalanche of people. The artist gives, as it were, a fragment of a group: the picture frame cuts off the figures from the left, right, bottom.

Usually, color in Delacroix's works acquires an acutely emotional sound, plays a dominant role in creating a dramatic effect. The colors, now raging, now fading, muffled, create a tense atmosphere. In Liberty on the Barricades, Delacroix departs from this principle. Very accurately, unmistakably choosing paint, applying it with wide strokes, the artist conveys the atmosphere of the battle.

But the color scheme is restrained. Delacroix focuses on the relief modeling of the form. This was required by the figurative solution of the picture. After all, depicting a specific yesterday's event, the artist also created a monument to this event. Therefore, the figures are almost sculptural. Therefore, each character, being a part of a single whole picture, is also something closed in itself, is a symbol that has been cast into a complete form. Therefore, color not only emotionally affects the feelings of the viewer, but also carries a symbolic load. In a brownish-gray space, here and there, a solemn triad of red, blue, white flashes - the colors of the flag of the French Revolution of 1789. The repeated repetition of these colors supports the powerful chord of the tricolor flag flying over the barricades.

Delacroix's painting "Liberty on the Barricades" is a complex, grandiose work in its scope. It combines the reliability of a directly seen fact and the symbolism of images; realism, reaching brutal naturalism, and ideal beauty; gross, terrible and sublime, pure.

The painting "Liberty on the Barricades" consolidated the victory of romanticism in French painting. In the 30s, two more historical paintings: "Battle of Poitiers" and “The assassination of the Bishop of Liege”.

In 1822 the artist visited North Africa, Morocco, Algeria. The trip made an indelible impression on him. In the 50s, paintings appeared in his work, inspired by the memories of this journey: "Lion Hunt", "Moroccan Saddling a Horse" etc. A bright contrasting color creates a romantic sound for these pictures. The technique of a wide brushstroke appears in them.

Delacroix, as a romanticist, recorded the state of his soul not only with the language of picturesque images, but also literally framed his thoughts. He described well the creative process of the romantic artist, his experiments on color, reflections on the relationship between music and other forms of art. His diaries became a favorite reading for artists of subsequent generations.

The French romantic school made significant changes in the field of sculpture (Rude and his relief "Marseillaise"), landscape painting (Camille Corot with his light-air images of the nature of France).

Thanks to romanticism, the artist's personal subjective vision takes the form of a law. Impressionism will completely destroy the barrier between artist and nature, declaring art an impression. Romantics talk about the artist's fantasy, “the voice of his feelings,” which allows the work to be stopped when the master considers it necessary, and not as academic standards of completeness require.

If Gericault's fantasies focused on the transfer of movement, Delacroix - on the magical power of color, and the Germans added to this a certain "spirit of painting", then spanish romantics represented by Francisco Goya (1746-1828) showed the folklore origins of the style, its phantasmagoric and grotesque character. Goya himself and his work look far from any stylistic framework, especially since the artist very often had to follow the laws of the material of execution (when, for example, he made paintings for woven tapestry carpets) or the requirements of the customer.

His phantasmagorias came to light in etching series "Caprichos" (1797-1799),"Disasters of War" (1810-1820),"Disparantes (" Madness ")(1815-1820), murals in the House of the Deaf and the Church of San Antonio de la Florida in Madrid (1798). Serious illness in 1792. entailed the complete deafness of the artist. The art of the master after the endured physical and spiritual trauma becomes more focused, thoughtful, internally dynamic. The outer world, which was closed due to deafness, activated Goya's inner spiritual life.

In etchings "Caprichos" Goya achieves exceptional strength in the transmission of instant reactions, impetuous feelings. The black-and-white performance, thanks to the bold combination of large spots, the absence of the linearity characteristic of graphics, acquires all the properties of a painting.

The painting of the Church of St. Anthony in Madrid Goya creates, it seems, in one breath. The temperament of the stroke, the laconicism of the composition, the expressiveness of the characteristics of the characters, whose type was taken by Goya directly from the crowd, amaze. The artist depicts the miracle of Anthony Florida, who made the murdered man rise and speak, who named the murderer and thereby saved the innocent convict from execution. The dynamism of the brightly reacting crowd is conveyed by Goya both in gestures and in the mimicry of the faces depicted. In the compositional scheme of the distribution of murals in the space of the church, the painter follows Tiepolo, but the reaction that he evokes in the viewer is not baroque, but purely romantic, affecting the feeling of each viewer, urging him to turn to himself.

Most of all, this goal is achieved in the painting of Conto del Sordo ("House of the Deaf"), in which Goya lived since 1819. The walls of the rooms are covered with fifteen compositions of a fantastic and allegorical nature. Perceiving them requires deep empathy. Images appear as some kind of visions of cities, women, men, etc. Color, flashing, pulls out one figure, then another. The painting as a whole is dark, white, yellow, pinkish-red spots prevail in it, disturbing feelings in flashes. Etchings of the series "Disparantes" .

Goya spent the last 4 years in France. It is unlikely that she knew that Delacroix never parted with his Caprichos. And he could not foresee how Hugo and Baudelaire would be carried away by these etchings, what a huge influence his painting on Manet would have, and how in the 80s of the XIX century. V. Stasov will invite Russian artists to study his "Disasters of War"

But we, taking this into account, know what a huge impact this “styleless” art of the bold realist and inspired romantic had on the artistic culture of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The fantastic world of dreams is also realized in his works by the English romantic artist William Blake (1757-1827). England was the classic land of romantic literature. Byron. Shelley became the banner of this movement far beyond the borders of “foggy Albion”. In France, in the magazine criticism of the "romantic battles" romantics were called "Shakespeare." The main feature of English painting has always been an interest in the human person, which allowed the portrait genre to develop fruitfully. Romanticism in painting is very closely related to sentimentalism. The romantics' interest in the Middle Ages gave rise to a large historical literature. The recognized master of which is W. Scott. In painting, the theme of the Middle Ages determined the appearance of the so-called Perafaelites.

Ulyam Blake is an amazing type of romantic in the English cultural scene. He writes poetry, illustrates his own and other people's books. His talent sought to embrace and express the world in a holistic unity. His most famous works are considered illustrations to the biblical Book of Job, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Milton's Paradise Lost. He inhabits his compositions with titanic figures of heroes, which correspond to their surroundings of an unreal enlightened or phantasmagoric world. A sense of rebellious pride or harmony difficult to create from dissonances overwhelms his illustrations.

The landscape engravings for the Pastorals by the Roman poet Virgil seem somewhat different - they are more idyllically romantic than their previous works.

Blake's romanticism tries to find its own artistic formula and form of the world's existence.

William Blake, having lived a life in extreme poverty and obscurity, after his death was ranked among the host of classics of English art.

In the work of English landscape painters of the early 19th century. romantic hobbies are combined with a more objective and sober view of nature.

The romantically elevated landscapes are created by William Turner (1775-1851). He loved to portray thunderstorms, showers, storms at sea, bright, fiery sunsets. Turner often exaggerated the effects of lighting and intensified the sound of colors, even while painting the tranquil state of nature. For greater effect, he used the technique of watercolors and applied oil paint in a very thin layer and painted directly on the ground, achieving iridescent shades. An example would be the picture "Rain, steam and speed"(1844). But even the well-known critic of that time Thackeray could not correctly understand, perhaps, the most innovative picture both in design and implementation. “The rain is indicated by spots of dirty putty,” he wrote, “sprinkled on the canvas with a palette knife, the sunlight shimmers dimly out from under very thick lumps of dirty yellow chrome. Shadows are conveyed by cold shades of scarlet crimson and muted cinnabar spots. And although the fire in the locomotive furnace looks red, I do not presume to say that it was not painted in cabalt or in pea color ”. Another critic found Turner's color scheme “scrambled eggs and spinach”. The colors of the late Turner generally seemed completely unthinkable and fantastic to contemporaries. It took more than a century to see the grain of real observations in them. But as in other cases, it was here too. An interesting story of an eyewitness, or rather a witness of the birth of "Rain, Steam and Speed", has been preserved. A certain Mrs. Simone rode in a compartment of the Western Express with an elderly gentleman across from her. He asked permission to open the window, stuck his head out into the pouring rain and was in this position for a long time. When he finally closed the window. Water flowed from him in streams, but he blissfully closed his eyes and leaned back, clearly enjoying what he had just seen. An inquisitive young woman decided to experience his feelings on herself - she also stuck her head out the window. She got wet too. But I got an unforgettable impression. Imagine her surprise when a year later, at an exhibition in London, she saw “Rain, Steam and Speed”. Someone behind her critically remarked: “Extremely typical of Turner, right. Nobody has ever seen such a mixture of absurdities. " And she, unable to resist, said: "I saw."

Perhaps this is the first depiction of a train in painting. the point of view is taken from somewhere above, which allowed for a wide panoramic coverage. The Western Express travels across the bridge at a speed that was absolutely exceptional for that time (exceeding 150 km per hour). In addition, this is probably the first attempt at depicting light through rain.

English art of the mid-19th century. developed in a completely different direction than Turner's painting. Although his skill was generally recognized, none of the youth followed him.

Turner has long been considered the forerunner of Impressionism. It would seem that his search for color from light should have been further developed by French artists. But this is not at all the case. In fact, opinion about Turner's influence on the Impressionists goes back to Paul Signac's book From Delacroix to Neo-Impressionism, published in 1899, where he described how “in 1871, during their long stay in London, Claude Manet and Camille Pissaro discovered Turner. They marveled at the confident and magical quality of his colors, they studied his work, analyzed his technique. At first they were amazed at his rendering of snow and ice, shocked by the way in which he managed to convey the sensation of the whiteness of snow, which they themselves could not get, with the help of large spots of silver-white, flat laid with wide brush strokes. They saw that this impression was not achieved with whitewash alone. And a mass of multicolored strokes. Inflicted one next to the other, which made this impression, if you look at them from afar. "

During these years, Signac looked everywhere for confirmation of his theory of pointillism. But none of Turner's paintings that French artists could see in the National Gallery in 1871 contain the pointillism technique described by Signac, just as there are no “wide spots of white.” In fact, Turner's influence on the French was not stronger in 1870 -e, and in the 1890s.

Paul Signac studied Turner most carefully - not only as a forerunner of Impressionism, about which he wrote in his book, but also as a great innovative artist. Signac wrote to his friend Angran about Turner's late paintings Rain, Steam and Speed, The Exile, Morning and Evening of the Flood: wonderful sense of the word ”.

Signac's enthusiastic appraisal laid the foundation for the modern understanding of Turner's pictorial quest. But in recent years it sometimes happens that they do not take into account the subtext and complexity of the directions of his search, one-sidedly selecting examples from the really unfinished Turner's “underpaintings”, they try to discover in him the predecessor of impressionism.

Of all the newest artists, a comparison naturally suggests itself with Monet, who himself recognized Turner's influence on him. There is even one plot that is absolutely similar for both - namely, the western portal of the Rouen Cathedral. But if Monet gives us a sketch of the sunlight of a building, he does not give us Gothic, but some kind of naked model, in Turner you understand why the artist, completely absorbed in nature, was carried away by this topic - in his image it is precisely that combination of the overwhelming grandeur of the whole and the infinite that is striking. a variety of details, which brings the creation of Gothic art closer to the works of nature.

The special character of English culture and romantic art opened up the possibility of the appearance of the first plein air artist, who laid the foundations for the light and air depiction of nature in the 19th century, John Constable (1776-1837). The Englishman Constable chooses landscape as the main genre of his painting: “The world is great; there are no two similar days or even two similar hours; from the creation of the world on one tree there were no two identical leaves, and all works of genuine art, like the creations of nature, differ from each other, ”he said.

The constable painted large sketches in oil on the plain air with a subtle observation of different states of nature, in which he managed to convey the complexity of the inner life of nature and its everyday life ("View of Highgate from Hempstead Hills", OK. 1834; "Hay cart", 1821; "Dethem Valley", circa 1828). Accomplished this with the help of writing techniques. He painted with moving strokes, sometimes thick and rough, sometimes smoother and more transparent. The impressionists will come to this only at the end of the century. Constable's innovative painting influenced the works of Delacroix, as well as the entire development of the French landscape.

The art of the Constable, as well as many aspects of Gericault's work, marked the emergence of a realistic trend in European art of the 19th century, which initially developed in parallel with romanticism. Later, they parted ways.

Romantics open the world of the human soul, individual, unlike anyone else, but sincere and therefore close to all sensual vision of the world. The instantaneousness of the image in painting, as Jelacroix said, and not its consistency in literary performance, determined the artists' focus on the most complex transfer of movement, for the sake of which new formal and coloristic solutions were found. Romanticism left a legacy to the second half of the 19th century. all these problems and artistic individuality, liberated from the rules of academism. The symbol that the romantics had to express the essential combination of idea and life, in the art of the second half of the 19th century. dissolves in the polyphony of the artistic image, capturing the diversity of ideas and the surrounding world.

b) Music

The idea of ​​a synthesis of arts found expression in the ideology and practice of romanticism. Romanticism in music took shape in the 20s of the 19th century under the influence of the literature of romanticism and developed in close connection with it, with literature in general (an appeal to synthetic genres, primarily to opera, song, instrumental miniature and musical programmaticity). The appeal to the inner world of a person, characteristic of romanticism, was expressed in the cult of the subjective, emotionally intense craving, which determined the supremacy of music and lyrics in romanticism.

Music of the 1st half of the 19th century evolved rapidly. A new musical language has appeared; in instrumental and chamber-vocal music, miniatures have a special place; the orchestra sounded with a varied spectrum of colors; the possibilities of the piano and the violin were revealed in a new way; the music of the romantics was very virtuoso.

Musical romanticism manifested itself in many different branches associated with different national cultures and with different social movements. So, for example, the intimate, lyrical style of German romantics and the "oratorical" civic pathos characteristic of the work of French composers differ significantly. In turn, representatives of new national schools that emerged on the basis of a wide national liberation movement (Chopin, Moniuszko, Dvorak, Smetana, Grieg), as well as representatives of the Italian opera school, closely associated with the Risorgimento movement (Verdi, Bellini), in many ways differ from contemporaries in Germany, Austria or France, in particular, the tendency to preserve classical traditions.

And nevertheless, they are all marked by some common artistic principles that allow us to speak of a single romantic structure of thought.

Due to the special ability of music to deeply and penetratingly reveal the rich world of human experience, romantic aesthetics put it in the first place among other arts. Many romantics emphasized an intuitive beginning to music, ascribed to it the ability to express the “unknowable”. The works of the outstanding romantic composers had a solid realistic foundation. Interest in the life of ordinary people, the fullness of life and the truth of feelings, reliance on the music of everyday life determined the realism of the creativity of the best representatives of musical romanticism. Reactionary tendencies (mysticism, escape from reality) are inherent in only a relatively small number of works of romantics. They manifested themselves in part in Weber's opera "Euryant" (1823), in some of Wagner's musical dramas, Liszt's oratorio "Christ" (1862), and others.

By the beginning of the 19th century, fundamental studies of folklore, history, ancient literature appeared, medieval legends, Gothic art, and the culture of the Renaissance were being revived. It was at this time that many national schools of a special type were formed in the composing work of Europe, which were destined to significantly expand the boundaries of common European culture. Russian, which soon took, if not the first, then one of the first places in world cultural creativity (Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, "Kuchkists", Tchaikovsky), Polish (Chopin, Moniuszko), Czech (Smetana, Dvorak), Hungarian (Liszt), then Norwegian (Grieg), Spanish (Pedrell), Finnish (Sibelius), English (Elgar) - all of them, merging into the general channel of European composer's creativity, in no way opposed themselves to the established ancient traditions. A new circle of images emerged, expressing the unique national features of the national culture to which the composer belonged. The intonation structure of the work allows you to instantly recognize by ear the belonging to a particular national school.

Composers involve the intonation turns of the old, predominantly peasant folklore of their countries into the common European musical language. They, as it were, cleansed the Russian folk song of lacquered opera, they introduced song turns of folk genres into the cosmopolitan intonation system of the 18th century. The most striking phenomenon in the music of romanticism, which is especially clearly perceived when compared with the figurative sphere of classicism, is the dominance of the lyric and psychological principle. Of course, a distinctive feature of musical art in general is the refraction of any phenomenon through the sphere of feelings. Music of all eras is subject to this pattern. But the romantics surpassed all their predecessors in the meaning of the lyrical principle in their music, in strength and perfection in conveying the depths of a person's inner world, the subtlest shades of mood.

The theme of love occupies a dominant place in it, for it is this state of mind that most comprehensively and fully reflects all the depths and nuances of the human psyche. But it is highly characteristic that this topic is not limited to the motives of love in the literal sense of the word, but is identified with the widest range of phenomena. The purely lyrical experiences of the heroes are revealed against the background of a wide historical panorama. A person's love for his home, for his fatherland, for his people - a continuous thread runs through the work of all composers - romantics.

A huge place is given in musical works of small and large forms to the image of nature, closely and inextricably intertwined with the theme of lyric confession. Like the images of love, the image of nature personifies the state of mind of the hero, so often colored by a feeling of disharmony with reality.

The theme of fantasy often competes with images of nature, which is probably generated by the desire to escape from the captivity of real life. Typical for romantics are the search for a wonderful world, sparkling with the richness of colors, opposing the gray everyday life. It was during these years that literature was enriched with fairy tales, ballads of Russian writers. For composers of the romantic school, fabulous, fantastic images acquire a unique national color. The ballads are inspired by Russian writers, and thanks to this, works of a fantastic grotesque plan are created, symbolizing, as it were, the seamy side of faith, seeking to break the ideas of fear of the forces of evil.

Many romantic composers also appeared as music writers and critics (Weber, Berlioz, Wagner, Liszt, etc.). The theoretical work of the representatives of progressive romanticism made a very significant contribution to the development of the most important issues of musical art. Romanticism found expression in the performing arts (violinist Paganini, singer A. Nurri, etc.).

The progressive meaning of Romanticism during this period lies mainly in the activities Franz Liszt... Liszt's creativity, despite the contradictory worldview, was fundamentally progressive, realistic. One of the founders and classic of Hungarian music, an outstanding national artist.

In many of Liszt's works, Hungarian national themes are widely reflected. Liszt's romantic, virtuoso compositions expanded the technical and expressive possibilities of piano playing (concerts, sonatas). Liszt's connections with representatives of Russian music were significant, the works of which he actively promoted.

At the same time Liszt played an important role in the development of world musical art. After Liszt “everything became possible for the piano”. The characteristic features of his music are improvisation, romantic uplifting of feelings, expressive melody. Liszt is appreciated as a composer, performer, musical figure. Major works of the composer: opera “ Don Sancho or the castle of love"(1825), 13 symphonic poems" Tasso ”, ” Prometheus ”, “Hamlet”And others, works for orchestra, 2 concertos for piano and orchestra, 75 romances, choirs and other no less famous works.

One of the first manifestations of romanticism in music was creativity Franz Schubert(1797-1828). Schubert went down in the history of music as the greatest of the founders of musical romanticism and the creator of a number of new genres: romantic symphony, piano miniature, lyric-romantic song (romance). Of greatest importance in his work is song, in which he showed especially many innovative tendencies. In the songs of Schubert, the inner world of a person is revealed deepest of all, the connection with folk-everyday music is most noticeable for him, one of the most significant features of his talent is most clearly manifested - the amazing variety, beauty, charm of melodies. The best songs of the early period include “ Margarita at the spinning wheel ”(1814) , “Forest king”. Both songs are written with words by Goethe. In the first of them, the abandoned girl remembers her beloved. She is lonely and deeply in pain, her song is sad. The simple and soulful melody is echoed only by the monotonous hum of the breeze. “The Forest King” is a complex piece. This is not a song, but rather a dramatic scene, where three characters appear before us: a father galloping on a horse through the forest, a sick child he is carrying with him, and a formidable forest king who appears to a boy in a feverish delirium. Each of them is endowed with its own melodic language. No less famous and loved are Schubert's songs "Trout", "Barcarolla", "Morning Serenade". Written in later years, these songs are distinguished by a surprisingly simple and expressive melody, fresh colors.

Schubert also wrote two cycles of songs - “ Lovely miller"(1823), and" Winter path”(1872) - to the words of the German poet Wilhelm Müller. In each of them, the songs are united by one plot. The songs of the cycle "The Beautiful Miller" tell about a young boy. Following the stream of the stream, he sets out on a journey to seek his happiness. Most of the songs in this cycle have a light character. The mood of the cycle "Winter Path" is completely different. The poor young man is rejected by the rich bride. In despair, he leaves his hometown and leaves to wander the world. His companions are the wind, a blizzard, ominously croaking crows.

The few examples given here allow us to speak about the peculiarities of Schubert's songwriting.

Schubert was very fond of writing music for piano... For this instrument he wrote a huge number of works. Like songs, his piano works were close to everyday music and just as simple and understandable. The favorite genres of his compositions were dances, marches, and in the last years of his life - impromptu.

Waltzes and other dances usually appeared with Schubert at balls, in country walks. There he improvised them, and recorded them at home.

If you compare Schubert's piano pieces with his songs, you can find many similarities. First of all, it is a great melodic expressiveness, grace, colorful juxtaposition of major and minor.

One of the largest French composers of the second half of the 19th century was Georges Bizet, creator of an immortal creation for musical theater - opera “Carmen"And wonderful music for the drama by Alphonse Daudet" Arlesian ”.

Bizet's work is characterized by precision and clarity of thought, novelty and freshness of expressive means, completeness and grace of form. Bizet is characterized by the sharpness of psychological analysis in comprehending human feelings and actions, characteristic of the work of the composer's great compatriots - the writers Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant. The central place in the work of Bizet, diverse in genres, belongs to the opera. The composer's operatic art arose on national soil and was nourished by the traditions of the French opera house. Bizet believed that the first task in his work was overcoming the genre limitations existing in French opera that hinder its development. “Bolshoi” opera seems to him a dead genre, lyric - irritates with its tearfulness and philistine narrow-mindedness, comic deserves attention more than others. For the first time in Bizet's opera, juicy and lively everyday life and crowd scenes appear in the opera, anticipating life and vivid scenes.

Music by Bizet to the drama by Alphonse Daudet “Arlesian”Is known mainly for two concert suites, composed of her best numbers. Bizet used some authentic Provencal melodies : "March of the Three Kings" and "Dance of Frisky Horses".

Opera Bizet " Carmen”Is a musical drama that unfolds before the viewer with convincing truthfulness and with breathtaking artistic power the story of the love and death of its heroes: the soldier Jose and the gypsy Carmen. Opera Carmen was created on the basis of the traditions of French musical theater, but at the same time it brought a lot of new things. Relying on the best achievements of the national opera and reforming its most important elements, Bizet created a new genre - realistic musical drama.

In the history of the opera house of the 19th century, the opera "Carmen" occupies one of the first places. Since 1876, her triumphal procession begins on the stages of the opera houses in Vienna, Brussels, London.

The manifestation of a personal relationship to the environment was expressed in poets and musicians primarily in the spontaneity, emotional "openness" and passion of the statement, in the desire to convince the listener with the help of the incessant intensity of the tone of confession or confession.

These new trends in art had a decisive influence on the appearance lyric opera... It arose as the antithesis of “big” and comic opera, but it could not ignore their conquests and achievements in the field of operatic drama and means of musical expression.

A distinctive feature of the new opera genre is the lyrical interpretation of any literary plot - on a historical, philosophical or contemporary theme. The heroes of the lyric opera are endowed with the features of ordinary people, devoid of the exclusivity and some exaggeration characteristic of a romantic opera. The most significant artist in the field of lyric opera was Charles Gounod.

Among Gounod's rather numerous opera heritage, the opera “ Faust " occupies a special and, one might say, exceptional place. Her worldwide fame and popularity is unmatched by any of Gounod's other operas. The historical significance of the opera Faust is especially great because it was not only the best, but essentially the first among the operas of the new direction, about which Tchaikovsky wrote: “It is impossible to deny that Faust was written, if not brilliantly, then with extraordinary skill and without significant identity. " The image of Faust smoothes out the acute contradiction and “duality” of his consciousness, the eternal dissatisfaction caused by the desire to cognize the world. Gounod was unable to convey all the versatility and complexity of the image of Goethe's Mephistopheles, who embodied the spirit of militant criticism of that era.

One of the main reasons for the popularity of "Faust" was that it concentrated the best and fundamentally new features of the young genre of lyric opera: an emotionally direct and vividly individual transmission of the inner world of the heroes of the opera. The deep philosophical meaning of "Faust" by Goethe, who sought to reveal the historical and social destinies of all mankind on the example of the conflict of the main characters, was embodied by Gounod in the form of a humane lyrical drama of Marguerite and Faust.

French composer, conductor, music critic Hector Berlioz entered the history of music as a major romantic composer, creator of a program symphony, an innovator in the field of musical form, harmony and especially instrumentation. In his work, they found a vivid embodiment of the features of revolutionary pathos and heroism. Berlioz was familiar with M. Glinka, whose music he highly appreciated. He was on friendly terms with the leaders of the "Mighty Handful", who enthusiastically accepted his works and creative principles.

He created 5 musical stage works, including the opera “ Benvenuto Cillini ”(1838), “ Trojans ”,”Beatrice and Benedict”(Based on Shakespeare's comedy“ Much Ado About Nothing ”, 1862); 23 vocal and symphonic works, 31 romances, choirs, he penned the books “The Big Treatise on Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration” (1844), “Evenings in the Orchestra” (1853), “Through Songs” (1862), “Musical Curiosities” ( 1859), “Memoirs” (1870), articles, reviews.

German composer, conductor, playwright, publicist Richard Wagner went down in the history of world musical culture as one of the greatest musical creators and major reformers of operatic art. The goal of his reforms was to create a monumental programmatic vocal and symphonic work in a dramatic form, designed to replace all types of opera and symphonic music. Such a work was a musical drama, in which music flows in a continuous stream, merging together all the dramatic links. Having abandoned the finished singing, Wagner replaced them with a kind of emotionally rich recitative. An important place in Wagner's operas is occupied by independent orchestral episodes, which are a valuable contribution to world symphonic music.

Wagner's hand owns 13 operas: “ The Flying Dutchman "(1843)," Tannhäuser "(1845)," Tristan and Isolde "(1865)," Gold of the Rhine "(1869) and etc.; choirs, piano pieces, romances.

Another outstanding German composer, conductor, pianist, teacher, musical figure was Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy... At the age of 9 he began performing as a pianist, at the age of 17 he created one of the masterpieces - the overture to the comedy “ C he's on a summer night " Shakespeare. In 1843 he founded the first conservatory in Germany in Leipzig. In the work of Mendelssohn, "a classic among romantics", romantic features are combined with the classical structure of thinking. His music is characterized by bright melody, democratism of expression, moderation of feelings, calmness of thought, the predominance of bright emotions, lyrical moods, not without a slight touch of sentimentality, impeccability of forms, and brilliant skill. R. Schumann called it “Mozart of the 19th century”, G. Heine - “a musical miracle”.

Author of landscape romantic symphonies ("Scottish", "Italian"), program concert overtures, a popular violin concerto, cycles of pieces for piano "Song without Words"; opera "Camacho's Wedding." He wrote music for the dramatic performance "Antigone" (1841), "Oedipus at Colon" (1845) by Sophocles, "Atalia" by Racine (1845), "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by Shakespeare (1843) and others; oratorios "Paul" (1836), "Elijah" (1846); 2 concertos for piano and 2 for violin.

V italian musical culture a special place belongs to Giuseppe Verdi - an outstanding composer, conductor, organist. The main area of ​​Verdi's work is opera. Acted mainly as an exponent of heroic-patriotic feelings and national liberation ideas of the Italian people. In subsequent years, he paid attention to the dramatic conflicts generated by social inequality, violence, oppression, denounced evil in his operas. Characteristic features of Verdi's work: nationality of music, dramatic temperament, melodic brightness, understanding of the laws of the stage.

He wrote 26 operas: “ Nabucco "," Macbeth "," Troubadour "," La Traviata "," Othello "," Aida" and etc . , 20 romances, vocal ensembles .

Young Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) strove to develop national music. This was expressed not only in his work, but also in the promotion of Norwegian music.

During his years in Copenhagen, Grieg wrote a lot of music: “ Poetic Pictures " and "Humoresques" sonata for piano and the first violin sonata, songs. With each new work, Grieg's image as a Norwegian composer becomes clearer. In the delicate lyrical "Poetic Pictures" (1863), national features are still timidly breaking through. The rhythmic figure is often found in Norwegian folk music; it became characteristic of many of Grieg's melodies.

Grieg's work is vast and multifaceted. Grieg wrote works of various genres. The Piano Concerto and Ballads, three sonatas for violin and piano and a sonata for cello and piano, the quartet testifies to Grieg's constant craving for the large form. At the same time, the composer's interest in instrumental miniatures remained unchanged. To the same extent as the piano, the composer was attracted by the chamber vocal miniature - a romance, a song. Do not be the main one for Grieg, the area of ​​symphonic creativity is marked by such masterpieces as suites “ Per Gounod ”, “From Holberg's time”. One of the characteristic types of Grieg's work is the processing of folk songs and dances: in the form of simple piano pieces, a suite cycle for piano four hands.

Grieg's musical language is distinctive. The individuality of the composer's style is most of all determined by his deep connection with Norwegian folk music. Grieg makes extensive use of genre features, intonation structure, rhythmic formulas of folk song and dance melodies.

The remarkable mastery of the variation and variant development of the melody, characteristic of Grieg, is rooted in the folk traditions of the repeated repetition of the melody with its changes. "I have recorded my country's folk music." Behind these words lies Grieg's reverent attitude towards folk art and the recognition of its decisive role for his own creativity.

7. CONCLUSION

Based on the above, the following conclusions can be drawn:

The emergence of romanticism was influenced by three main events: the Great French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of the national liberation movement in Europe.

Romanticism as a method and direction in artistic culture was a complex and contradictory phenomenon. In every country, he had a vivid national expression. Romantics occupied different social and political positions in society. They all rebelled against the results of the bourgeois revolution, but they rebelled in different ways, since each had its own ideal. But for all the many-sidedness and diversity, romanticism has stable features:

All of them came from the denial of the Enlightenment and the rationalistic canons of classicism, which fettered the artist's creative initiative.

They discovered the principle of historicism (the enlighteners judged the past in an antihistorical way for them there was "reasonable" and "unreasonable"). We saw in the past human characters shaped by their time. Interest in the national past gave rise to a lot of historical works.

Interest in a strong personality who opposes himself to the whole world around him and relies only on herself.

Attention to the inner world of a person.

Romanticism was widely developed both in Western Europe and in Russia. However, romanticism in Russia differed from Western European for the sake of a different historical setting and a different cultural tradition. The real reason for the emergence of romanticism in Russia was the Patriotic War of 1812, in which the full force of the people's initiative was manifested.

Features of Russian romanticism:

Romanticism did not oppose the Enlightenment. Educational ideology weakened, but did not collapse, as in Europe. The ideal of an enlightened monarch has not exhausted itself.

Romanticism developed in parallel with classicism, often intertwining with it.

Romanticism in Russia in different types of art has shown itself in different ways. In architecture, he was not read at all. In painting - dried up by the middle of the XIX century. It manifested itself only partially in music. Perhaps only in literature did romanticism manifest itself consistently.

In the visual arts, romanticism manifested itself most clearly in painting and graphics, less expressively in sculpture and architecture.

Romantics open the world of the human soul, individual, unlike anyone else, but sincere and therefore close to all sensual vision of the world. The instantaneousness of the image in painting, as Delacroix said, and not its consistency in literary performance, determined the artists' focus on the most complex transfer of movement, for the sake of which new formal and coloristic solutions were found. Romanticism left a legacy to the second half of the 19th century. all these problems and artistic individuality, liberated from the rules of academism. The symbol that the romantics had to express the essential combination of idea and life, in the art of the second half of the 19th century. dissolves in the polyphony of the artistic image, capturing the diversity of ideas and the surrounding world. Romanticism in painting is closely related to sentimentalism.

Thanks to romanticism, the artist's personal subjective vision takes the form of a law. Impressionism will completely destroy the barrier between artist and nature, declaring art an impression. Romantics talk about the artist's fantasy, “the voice of his feelings,” which allows the work to be stopped when the master considers it necessary, and not as academic standards of completeness require.

Romanticism left a whole era in world art culture, its representatives were: in Russian literature Zhukovsky, A. Pushkin, M. Lermontov, etc .; in the fine arts of E. Delacroix, T. Gericault, F. Runge, J. Constable, W. Turner, O. Kiprensky, A. Venetsianov, A. Orlorsky, V. Tropinin and others; in music F. Schubert, R. Wagner, G. Berlioz, N. Paganini, F. Liszt, F. Chopin and others. They discovered and developed new genres, paid close attention to the fate of the human person, revealed the dialectic of good and evil, masterfully revealed human passions, etc.

The forms of art in their importance more or less equalized and produced magnificent works of art, although the romantics in the ladder of arts gave priority to music.

Romanticism in Russia as a perception of the world existed in its first wave from the end of the 18th century to the 1850s. The line of the romantic in Russian art did not end in the 1850s. Opened by romantics for art, the theme of the state of being developed later among the artists of the "Blue Rose". The direct heirs of the Romantics were undoubtedly the Symbolists. Romantic themes, motives, expressive techniques entered the art of different styles, trends, creative associations. The romantic outlook or worldview turned out to be one of the most lively, tenacious, and fruitful.

Romanticism as a general attitude, characteristic mainly of young people, as a striving for the ideal and creative freedom, is still constantly living in world art.

8. REFERENCES

1. Amminskaya A.M. Alexey Gavrilovich Vnetsianov. - M: Knowledge, 1980

2. Atsarkina E.N. Aleksdr Osipovich Orlovsky. - M: Art, 1971.

3. Belinsky V.G. Compositions. A. Pushkin. - M: 1976.

4. Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Chief editor A. Prokhorov).- M: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1977.

5. Vainkop Y., Gusin I. A Brief Biographical Dictionary of Composers. - L: Music, 1983.

6. Vasily Andreevich Tropiin (edited by M.M. Rakovskaya)... - M: Fine Arts, 1982.

7. Vorotnikov A.A., Gorshkovoz O.D., Yorkina O.A. Art history. - Mn: Literature, 1997.

8. Zimenko V. Alexander Osipovch Orlovsky. - M: State Publishing House of Fine Arts, 1951.

9. Ivanov S.V. M.Yu. Lermontov. Life and creation. - M: 1989.

10. Musical literature of foreign countries (under the editorship of B. Levik).- M: Music, 1984.

11. E.A. Nekrasova Turner. - M: Fine Art, 1976.

12. Ozhegov S.I. Dictionary of the Russian language. - M: State Publishing House of Foreign and Russian Dictionaries, 1953.

13. Orlova M. J. Constable. - M: Art, 1946.

14. Russian artists. A.G. Venetsianov. - M: State Publishing House of Fine Arts, 1963.

15. Sokolov A.N. History of Russian literature of the XIX century (1 half). - M: Higher School, 1976.

16. Turchin V.S. Orest Kiprensky. - M: Knowledge, 1982.

17. Turchin V.S. Theodore Gericault. - M: Fine Arts, 1982.

18. Filimonova S.V. History of World Art Culture - Mozyr: White Wind, 1997.

Romanticism in the visual arts relied heavily on the ideas of philosophers and writers. In painting, as in other forms of art, romantics were attracted by everything unusual, unknown, be it distant countries with their exotic customs and costumes (Delacroix), the world of mystical visions (Blake, Frederick, Pre-Raphaelites) and magical dreams (Runge) or dark depths subconsciousness (Goya, Füsli). The artistic heritage of the past became the source of inspiration for many artists: the Ancient East, the Middle Ages and the Proto-Renaissance (Nazarene, Pre-Raphaelites).

In contrast to classicism, which exalted the clear power of reason, the romantics sang passionate, stormy feelings that capture the whole person. The earliest responded to new trends are portrait and landscape, which are becoming the favorite genres of romantic painting.

Flourishing portrait genre was associated with the interest of romantics in the bright human individuality, beauty and wealth of her spiritual world. The life of the human spirit prevails in a romantic portrait over an interest in physical beauty, in the sensual plasticity of the image.

In a romantic portrait (Delacroix, Gericault, Runge, Goya), the uniqueness of each person is always revealed, dynamics, intense beating of inner life, rebellious passion are conveyed.

The romantics are also interested in the tragedy of a broken soul: the heroes of the works are often mentally ill people (Gericault "Madwoman, suffering from an addiction to gambling", "Thief of children", "Insane, imagining himself a commander").

Landscape thought of by romantics as the embodiment of the soul of the universe; nature, like the human soul, appears in dynamics, constant change. The ordered and ennobled landscapes characteristic of classicism were replaced by images of a spontaneous, recalcitrant, powerful, ever-changing nature, corresponding to the confusion of the feelings of romantic heroes. Romantics especially loved to write storms, thunderstorms, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, shipwrecks, which can have a strong emotional impact on the viewer (Gericault, Friedrich, Turner).

The poeticization of the night characteristic of romanticism - a strange, surreal world that lives by its own laws - led to the flourishing of the "night genre", which is becoming a favorite in romantic painting, especially among German artists.

One of the first countries in whose visual arts romanticism was formed wasGermany .

Creativity had a noticeable influence on the development of the genre of romantic landscapeCaspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). His artistic heritage is dominated by landscapes depicting mountain peaks, forests, the sea, the sea coast, as well as the ruins of old cathedrals, abandoned abbeys, monasteries ("Cross in the mountains", "Cathedral", "Abbey among oak trees"). They usually have a feeling of unchanging sadness from the consciousness of the tragic loss of a person in the world.

The artist loved those states of nature that most correspond to its romantic perception: early morning, evening sunset, moonrise ("Two contemplating the moon", "Monastery cemetery", "Landscape with a rainbow", "Moonrise over the sea", "Chalk rocks on the island of Rügen "," On a sailboat "," Harbor at night ").

The constant characters in his works are lonely dreamers immersed in the contemplation of nature. Looking into immense distances and endless heights, they join the eternal secrets of the universe, are carried away to the wonderful world of dreams. Frederick conveys this wonderful world with the help of magically shining light- radiant solar or mysterious lunar.

Frederick's work aroused admiration of his contemporaries, including I. W. Goethe and V.A. Zhukovsky, thanks to whom many of his paintings were acquired by Russia.

Painter, graphic artist, poet and art theoristPhilip Otto Runge (1777-1810) mainly devoted himself to the portrait genre. In his works, he poeticized the images of ordinary people, often - his loved ones ("We are three" - a self-portrait with a bride and brother, has not survived; "Children of the Hulsenbek family", "Portrait of the artist's parents", "Self-portrait"). Runge's deep religiosity was expressed in such paintings as "Christ on the Shore of Lake Tiberias" and "Rest on the Flight to Egypt" (not finished). The artist summed up his reflections on art in the theoretical treatise "The Color Sphere".

The desire to revive the religious and moral foundations in German art is associated with the creative activity of artists Nazarene school (F. Overbeck, von Karlsfeld,L. Vogel, I. Gottinger, J. Zutter,P. von Cornelius). Having united in a kind of religious brotherhood ("Union of St. Luke"), the "Nazarenes" lived in Rome on the model of the monastic community and painted pictures on religious subjects. They considered Italian and German painting as a model for their creative searches.XIV - Xvcenturies (Perugino, early Raphael, A. Durer, H. Holbein the Younger, L.Cranach). In the painting "The Triumph of Religion in Art" Overbeck directly imitates Raphael's "School of Athens", and Cornelius in "Horsemen of the Apocalypse" - the engraving of the same name by Durer.

Members of the brotherhood considered the main virtues of the artist to be spiritual purity and sincere faith, believing that "only the Bible made Raphael a genius." Leading a secluded life in the cells of an abandoned monastery, they elevated their service to art into the category of spiritual service.

The "Nazarenes" gravitated towards large monumental forms, tried to embody high ideals with the help of the newly revived fresco technique. Some of the murals were executed by them together.

In the 1820s and 30s, the members of the brotherhood left for Germany, receiving leading positions in various art academies. Only Overbeck lived in Italy until his death, without betraying his artistic principles. The best traditions of the "Nazarenes" were preserved for a long time in historical painting. Their ideological and moral quest influenced the English Pre-Raphaelites, as well as the work of such masters as Schwind and Spitzweg.

Moritz Schwind (1804-1871), Austrian by birth, worked in Munich. In easel works, he mainly depicts the appearance and life of old German provincial cities with their inhabitants. This is done with great poetry and lyricism, with love for their heroes.

Karl Spitzweg (1808-1885) - Munich painter, graphic artist, brilliant draftsman, caricaturist, also not without sentimentality, but with great humor narrates about urban life ("Poor Poet", "Morning Coffee").

Schwind and Spitzweg are usually associated with a cultural trend in Germany known as the Biedermeier.Biedermeier - this is one of the most popular styles of the era (primarily in the field of everyday life, but also in art) ... He brought to the forefront the burghers, the average man in the street. The central theme of Biedermeier painting is the everyday life of a person, which is inextricably linked with his home and family. Biedermeier's interest not in the past, but in the present, not in the great, but in the small, contributed to the formation of a realistic trend in painting.

French romantic school

The most consistent school of romanticism in painting has developed in France. It arose as an opposition to classicism, which degenerated into cold, rational academism, and put forward such great masters who determined the dominant influence of the French school throughout the 19th century.

French romantic painters gravitated towards plots full of drama and pathos, internal tension, far from the "dull everyday life." Embodying them, they reformed pictorial and expressive means:

The first brilliant successes of romanticism in French painting are associated with the nameTheodore Gericault (1791-1824), who, earlier than others, was able to express a purely romantic feeling of the conflict in the world. Already in his first works, one can see the desire to show the dramatic events of our time. For example, the paintings "Officer of Mounted Riflemen Going to the Attack" and "Wounded Cuirassier" reflected the romance of the Napoleonic era.

Gericault's painting "The Raft of Medusa", dedicated to a recent event in modern life - the sinking of a passenger ship due to the fault of the shipping company, had a huge resonance ... Gericault created a gigantic canvas 7 × 5 m, on which he depicted the moment when people on the verge of death saw a rescue ship on the horizon. Extreme tension is emphasized by a harsh, gloomy color scheme, a diagonal composition. This painting became a symbol of modern-day Gericault France, which, like people fleeing a shipwreck, experienced both hope and despair.

The artist found the theme of his last big painting - "Horse Racing at Epsom" in England. It depicts horses flying like birds (a favorite image of Gericault, who became an excellent rider as a teenager). The impression of impetuosity is enhanced by a certain technique: the horses and jockeys are written very carefully, and the background is wide.

After the death of Gericault (he died tragically, in the prime of his strength and talent), his young friend became the recognized head of the French romanticsEugene Delacroix (1798-1863). Delacroix was comprehensively gifted, possessed musical and literary talent. His diaries, articles about artists are the most interesting documents of the era. His theoretical studies of the laws of color had a tremendous influence on the future impressionists, and especially on V. Van Gogh.

The first picture of Delacroix, which brought him fame, - "Dante and Virgil" ("Dante's boat"), written on the plot of the "Divine Comedy". She amazed her contemporaries with passionate pathos, the power of gloomy color.

The pinnacle of the artist's work was "Freedom on the Barricades" ("Freedom Leading the People"). The reliability of a real fact (the picture was created in the midst of the July Revolution of 1830 in France) merges here with the romantic dream of freedom and the symbolism of images. The beautiful young woman becomes the symbol of revolutionary France.

The earlier painting "The Massacre on Chios", dedicated to the struggle of the Greek people against Turkish rule, was also a response to modern events. .

Having visited Morocco, Delacroix discovered the exotic world of the Arab East, to which he dedicated many paintings and sketches. In "Algerian Women" the world of the Muslim harem first appeared before the European audience.

The artist also created a series of portraits of representatives of the creative intelligentsia, many of whom were his friends (portraits of N. Paganini, F. Chopin, G. Berlioz, etc.)

In the late period of his work, Delacroix gravitated towards historical subjects, worked as a monumentalist (paintings in the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate), and as a graphic artist (illustrations for the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron).

The names of the English painters of the Romantic era - R. Benington, J. Constable, W. Ternera - are associated with the landscape genre. In this area, they truly opened a new page: their native nature found such a wide and loving reflection in their work, which no other country knew then.

John Constable (1776-1837) was one of the first in the history of European landscape to paint sketches completely from nature, turning to direct observation of nature. His paintings are simple in motives: villages, farms, churches, a strip of a river or a sea beach: "The Hay Cart", Detham Valley "," Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Garden. " Constable's works served as an impetus for the development of a realistic landscape in France.

William Turner (1775-1851) - marine painter ... He was attracted by the stormy sea, showers, thunderstorms, floods, tornadoes: "The last voyage of the ship" Brave "," Thunderstorm over the Piazzetta. " Bold coloristic searches, rare light effects sometimes turn his paintings into shining phantasmagoric spectacles: "The Fire of the London Parliament", "Snowstorm. The steamer leaves the harbor and gives distress signals when it gets into shallow water. " .

Turner owns the first image in painting of a steam locomotive running on rails - a symbol of industrialization. In Rain, Steam and Speed, a steam locomotive rushes along the Thames through foggy rain. All material objects seem to merge into a mirage image that perfectly conveys a sense of speed.

Turner's unique study of light and color effects largely anticipated the discoveries of French Impressionist painters.

In 1848 in England there wasPre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (from Lat. prae - "before" and Raphael), which united artists who do not accept contemporary society and the art of the academic school. They saw their ideal in the art of the Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance (hence the name). The main members of the brotherhood areWilliam Holman Hunt, John Everett Milles, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In their early works, these artists used the abbreviation PB instead of signatures. .

With romantics, the Pre-Raphaelites were related to the love of antiquity. They turned to biblical subjects ("The Light of the World" and "The Unfaithful Shepherd" by W. H. Hunt; "The Childhood of Mary" and "Annunciation" by D. G. Rossetti), scenes from the history of the Middle Ages and plays by W. Shakespeare ("Ophelia" by Milles ).

In order to paint human figures and objects in their life size, the Pre-Raphaelites increased the size of the canvases, and made landscape sketches from nature. The characters in their paintings had prototypes among real people. For example, DG Rossetti in almost all of his works portrayed his beloved Elizabeth Siddal, continuing, like a medieval knight, to remain faithful to his beloved even after her untimely death (Blue Silk Dress, 1866).

The ideologist of the Pre-Raphaelites wasJohn Ruskin (1819-1900) - English writer, art critic and art theorist, author of the famous series of books "Contemporary Artists".

The work of the Pre-Raphaelites significantly influenced many artists and became a foreshadowing of symbolism in literature (W. Pater, O. Wilde) and the visual arts (O. Beardsley, G. Moreau, etc.).

the nickname "Nazarene" may have come from the name of the city of Nazareth in Galilee, where Jesus Christ was born. According to another version, it arose by analogy with the name of the Hebrew religious community of the Nazarenes. It is also possible that the name of the group came from the traditional name of the hairstyle "Alla Nazarena", which was widespread in the Middle Ages and known from A. Dürer's self-portrait: the manner of wearing long hair, parted in the middle by a parting, was reintroduced by Overbeck.

Biedermeier(German "brave Meyer", philistine) is the surname of a fictional character from the poetry collection of the German poet Ludwig Eichrodt. Eichrodt created a parody of a real person - Samuel Friedrich Sauter, an old teacher who wrote naive poetry. Eichrodt in his caricature emphasized the philistine primitiveness of Biedermeier's thinking, which became a kind of parody symbol of the era. sweeping brushstrokes of black, brown and greenish colors convey the fury of the storm. The viewer's gaze seems to be in the center of a whirlpool, the ship seems to be a toy of waves and wind.

Romanticism in painting is a philosophical and cultural trend in the art of Europe and America of the late 18th - first half of the 19th centuries. Sentimentalism in the literature of Germany, the birthplace of romanticism, served as the basis for the development of the style. The direction developed in Russia, France, England, Spain and other European countries.

History

Despite the early efforts of the pioneers El Greco, Elsheimer and Claude Lorrain, the style we know as Romanticism did not gain momentum until almost the end of the 18th century, when the heroic element of neoclassicism took a major role in the art of the time. The paintings began to reflect the heroic-romantic ideal based on the novels of the time. This heroic element, combined with revolutionary idealism, emotionality, emerged as a result of the French Revolution as a reaction against the restrained academic art.

After the French Revolution of 1789, significant social changes took place over the course of several years. Europe has been shaken by political crises, revolutions and wars. When the leaders met at the Congress of Vienna to ponder a plan to reorganize European affairs after the Napoleonic Wars, it became clear that the peoples' hopes for freedom and equality were not being realized. Nevertheless, during these 25 years, new ideas were formed that took root in the minds of people in France, Spain, Russia, Germany.

Respect for the individual, which was already a key element in neoclassical painting, developed and took root. The paintings of the artists stood out for their emotionality, sensuality in the transfer of the image of the person. In the early 19th century, various styles began to show traits of romanticism.

Goals

The tenets and goals of Romanticism included:

• A return to nature - an example of which is the emphasis on spontaneity in painting, which the paintings demonstrate;
• Belief in the kindness of humanity and the best qualities of the individual;
• Justice for all - the idea was widespread in Russia, France, Spain, England.

A firm belief in the power of feelings and emotions that dominate mind and intellect.

Peculiarities

Characteristic features of the style:

1. The idealization of the past, the dominance of mythological themes became the leading line in the creativity of the 19th century.
2. Rejection of rationalism and dogmas of the past.
3. Increased expressiveness through the play of light and color.
4. Pictures conveyed a lyrical vision of the world.
5. Increased interest in ethnic themes.

Romantic painters and sculptors tend to express an emotional response to their personal lives, as opposed to the restraint and universal values ​​promoted by neoclassical art. The 19th century marked the beginning of the development of romanticism and architecture, as evidenced by the exquisite Victorian buildings.

Main representatives

Among the greatest romantic painters of the 19th century were such representatives as I. Fussli, Francisco Goya, Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable, Theodore Gericault, Eugene Delacroix. Romantic art did not supplant the neoclassical style, but functioned as a counterbalance to the dogmatic and harshness of the latter.

Romanticism in Russian painting is represented by the works of V. Tropinin, I. Aivazovsky, K. Bryullov, O. Kiprensky. Russian painters tried to convey nature as emotionally as possible.
The preferred genre among romantics was landscape. Nature was seen as a mirror of the soul, in Germany it is also seen as a symbol of freedom and limitlessness. The artists place images of people against the background of the countryside or urban, seascape. In romanticism in Russia, France, Spain, Germany, the image of a person does not dominate, but complements the plot of the picture.

Popular vanitas motifs include dead trees and overgrown ruins, symbolizing the transience and finite nature of life. Similar motifs had taken place earlier in baroque art: artists borrowed work with light and perspective in similar paintings from baroque painters.

Aims of Romanticism: The artist demonstrates a subjective view of the objective world, and shows a picture filtered through his sensuality.

In different countries

19th century German romanticism (1800 - 1850)

In Germany, the younger generation of artists reacted to the changing times with a process of introspection: they retreated into the world of emotions, they were inspired by sentimental aspirations for the ideals of the past, primarily the medieval era, which is now seen as a time in which people lived in harmony with themselves and the world. In this context, Schinkel's paintings, such as Gothic Cathedral on the Water, are representative and characteristic of the period.

In their attraction to the past, romantic artists were very close to neoclassicists, except that their historicism criticized the rationalistic dogmas of neoclassicism. Neoclassical artists set such tasks: they looked into the past in order to justify their irrationality and emotionality, preserved the academic traditions of art in conveying reality.

19th century Spanish romanticism (1810 - 1830)

Francisco de Goya was the undisputed leader of the romantic art movement in Spain, his paintings demonstrate characteristic features: a tendency to irrationality, fantasy, emotionality. By 1789, he became the official painter of the Spanish royal court.

In 1814, to commemorate the Spanish uprising against French forces in Puerta del Sol, Madrid, and the shooting of unarmed Spaniards suspected of complicity, Goya created one of his greatest masterpieces, The Third of May. Notable works: "The Disasters of War", "Caprichos", "Maja Nude".

19th century French romanticism (1815 - 1850)

After the Napoleonic Wars, the French Republic again became a monarchy. This led to a huge boost of Romanticism, which has hitherto been held back by the dominance of the neoclassicists. French painters of the Romantic era did not limit themselves to the landscape genre, they worked in the genre of portrait art. The most prominent representatives of the style are E. Delacroix and T. Gericault.

Romanticism in England (1820 - 1850)

The theorist and the most prominent representative of the style was I. Fusli.
John Constable belonged to the English tradition of romanticism. This tradition has been in search of a balance between a deep sensitivity to nature and advances in the science of painting and drawing. The constable abandoned the dogmatic depiction of nature, the paintings are recognizable thanks to the use of color spots to convey reality, which brings Constable's work closer to the art of impressionism.

The paintings of William Turner, one of the greatest English painters of romanticism, reflect the craving for observing nature as one of the elements of creativity. The mood of his paintings is created not only by what he portrayed, but also by the way the artist conveyed color and perspective.

Significance in art

The romantic style of painting of the 19th century and its special features stimulated the emergence of numerous schools, such as: the Barbizon School, plein air landscapes, the Norwich School of landscape painters. Romanticism in painting influenced the development of aestheticism and symbolism. The most influential painters created the Pre-Raphaelite movement. In Russia and the countries of Western Europe, romanticism influenced the development of the avant-garde and impressionism.

At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, European and, including American, culture experienced a birth that was completely different from the period of thought and philosophy of the Enlightenment - the stage of Romanticism. Infiltrating gradually from Germany into the culture and art of England, France, Russia and other European countries, Romanticism enriched the artistic world with new colors, storylines and the courage of nude.

The name of the new trend was born from the close interweaving of several meanings of one-sounding words from different countries - romantisme (France), romance (Spain), romantic (England). Subsequently, the name of the trend took root and has come down to our days as romantique - something picturesquely strange, fantastically beautiful, existing only in books, but not in reality.

general characteristics

Romanticism replaces the Age of Enlightenment and coincides with the industrial revolution, marked by the appearance of the steam engine, steam locomotive, steamboat, photography and factory outskirts. If the Enlightenment is characterized by the cult of reason and a civilization based on its principles, then romanticism asserts the cult of nature, feelings and the natural in man.

It was in the era of romanticism that the phenomena of tourism, mountaineering and picnic took shape, designed to restore the unity of man and nature. The image of a "noble savage" armed with "folk wisdom" and not spoiled by civilization is in demand. That is, the romanticists wanted to show an unusual person in unusual circumstances. In short, the romanticists opposed progressive civilization.

Romanticism in painting

The depth of their own personal experiences and thoughts is what the painters convey through their artistic image, which is made with the help of color, composition and accents. Different European countries had their own peculiarities in the interpretation of the romantic image. All this is connected with the philosophical trend, as well as the socio-political situation, to which art was the only living response. Painting was no exception.

Germany at that time was fragmented into small duchies and principalities and experienced severe public upheavals. The painters did not depict the heroes-titans, did not make monumental canvases, in this case the deep spiritual world of a person, moral quest, his greatness and beauty evoked enthusiasm. Therefore, to the greatest extent, romanticism in German painting is presented in landscapes and portraits.

The traditional standard of this genre is the Works of Otto Runge. In the portraits of this painter, through the treatment of facial features and eyes, through the contrast of shadow and light, the artist's zeal is conveyed to demonstrate the contradictory nature of personality, its depth and power of feeling. Thanks to the landscape, an exaggerated and, to a lesser extent, mind-blowing image of trees, birds and flowers. Otto Runge also tried to discover the versatility of the human personality, its similarity with nature, unidentified and different.

Self-portrait "Three of us", 1805, Philip Otto Runge

In France, romanticism in painting developed according to different principles. Stormy social life, as well as revolutionary upheavals are manifested in painting by the gravitation of painters to depicting breathtaking and historical subjects, also with "nervous" excitement and pathos, which were achieved by dazzling color contrast, some chaos, expression of movements, as well as spontaneity of compositions.

In the works of T. Gericault, romantic ideas are most vividly presented. The painter created a pulsating depth of emotion, professionally using light and color, depicting a sublime impulse for freedom and struggle.

Derby at Epsom, 1821, Theodore Gericault

"Officer of the Horse Rangers of the Imperial Guard, Going to the Attack", 1812

The era of Romanticism also found its reflection in the canvases of artists exposing inner fears, impulses, love and hate in clear contrasts of light, shadow and halftones. The whitewashed bodies of G.I. Fuesli along with the phantasmagoria of fictional monsters, the naked touching female bodies of E. Delacroix against the background of gloomy debris and smoke, pictures painted by the magical power of the brush of the Spanish painter F. Goya, the freshness of calm and the gloom of the storm I. Aivazovsky - were pulled from the depths of the Gothic and Renaissance centuries to the surface of what was previously so skillfully masked by generally accepted canons.

Nightmare, 1781, by Johann Heinrich Füsli

Liberty Leading the People, 1830, Eugene Delacroix

Rainbow, Ivan Aivazovsky

If the painting of the XIII and XIV centuries was stingy with emotions, and in the next three hundred years of the formation of the art of the Early and High Renaissance, with its overcoming of religiosity and blind faith in something else or the period of the Enlightenment, which put an end to the "witch hunt", then the artistic display on the canvases of Romanticism allowed look into a world different from the real one.

To convey passions, the artists resorted to the use of rich colors, bright strokes and saturation of paintings with "special effects".

Biedermeier

One of the branches of romanticism in painting is the style biedermeier... The main feature of Biedermeier is idealism. In painting, everyday scenes predominate, while in other genres the paintings are intimate in nature. Painting strives to find traits of idyllic appeal in the little man's world. This tendency is rooted in particular in the national German way of life, primarily burghers.

Bookworm, approx. 1850, K. Spitzweg

One of the most important representatives of Biedermeier painting, Karl Spitzweg, painted eccentric philistines, as they were called in Germany, philistines, which he himself was.

Of course, his heroes are limited, these are the small people of the province, watering roses on the balcony, postmen, cooks, scribes. There is humor in Spitzweg's paintings; he laughs at his characters, but without malice.

Gradually the concept of "Biedermeier" spread to fashion, applied art, graphics, interior design, furniture. In the applied arts, painting on porcelain and glass is most developed. By 1900, the word had also come to mean "the good old days."

Biedermeier is a provincial style, although metropolitan artists also worked in this style, in Berlin and Vienna. The Biedermeier also entered Russia. His influence is in the works of Russian masters, A. G. Venetsianov and V. A. Tropinin. The expression "Russian Biedermeier" exists, although it sounds ridiculous.

Sleeping Shepherd, 1823-24, A.G. Venetsianov

Family portrait of Counts Morkov, 1813, V.A.Tropinin

In Russia, Biedermeier is the time of Pushkin. Biedermeier fashion is the fashion of Pushkin's times. These are a jacket, a vest and a top hat for men, a cane, tight trousers with strips. Sometimes - a tailcoat. Women wore dresses with narrow waists, wide necklines, wide bell-shaped skirts, and hats. Things were simple with no elaborate decorations.

Interiors in the Biedermeier style are characterized by intimacy, balanced proportions, simplicity of forms and light colors. The premises were light and spacious, which is why the interior was perceived to be moderately simple, but psychologically comfortable. The walls of rooms with deep window niches were painted in white or other light colors, and pasted over with embossed striped wallpaper. The pattern on the window curtains and upholstery was the same. These cloth interior fittings were colored and contained designs depicting flowers.

The concept of a "clean room" appears, that is, a room that was not used on weekdays. This usually closed "Sunday room" was used only for receiving guests. Furniture painted in warm colors and wall watercolors, engravings, as well as a large number of decorations and souvenirs added additional coziness to the residential interior. As in the case of style preferences, the practical Biedermeier selects only those furnishings that match their idea of ​​functionality and comfort. Never before has furniture so fully met its purpose as in this era - decorativeness fades into the background.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Biedermeier began to be assessed negatively. He was understood as "vulgar, philistine." He really had such features as intimacy, intimacy, sentimentality, poeticization of things, which led to such an assessment.

Romanticism in literature

Romanticism also opposed the Enlightenment in terms of words: the language of romantic works, striving to be natural, “simple”, accessible to all readers, was something opposite to the classics with its noble, “sublime” themes, characteristic, for example, of classical tragedy.

Romantic hero- a complex personality, passionate, whose inner world is unusually deep, endless; it is a whole universe full of contradictions. Romantics were interested in all passions, both high and low, which were opposed to each other. High passion is love in all its manifestations, low passion is greed, ambition, envy. Interest in strong and vivid feelings, all-consuming passions, in secret movements of the soul - these are the characteristic features of romanticism.

Among the late Western European romantics, pessimism in relation to society acquires cosmic proportions, becomes "the disease of the century." The heroes of many romantic works (F.R. Chateaubriand, A. Musset, J. Byron, A. Vigny, A. Lamartin, G. Heine, etc.) are characterized by moods of hopelessness, despair, which acquire a universal human character. Perfection is lost forever, the world is ruled by evil, ancient chaos is resurrecting. The theme of the "scary world", characteristic of all romantic literature, was most vividly embodied in the so-called "black genre", as well as in the works of Byron, C. Brentano, ETA Hoffmann, E. Poe and N. Hawthorne.

At the same time, romanticism is based on ideas that challenge the "terrible world" - above all, the ideas of freedom. The disappointment of romanticism is a disappointment in reality, but progress and civilization are only one side of it. Rejection of this side, lack of faith in the possibilities of civilization provide another path, a path to the ideal, to the eternal, to the absolute. This path must resolve all contradictions, completely change life. This is the path to perfection, "to the goal, the explanation of which must be sought on the other side of the visible" (A. de Vigny).

For some romantics, incomprehensible and mysterious forces dominate the world, which must be obeyed and not try to change fate (poets of the "lake school", Chateaubriand, VA Zhukovsky). For others, the "world evil" provoked a protest, demanded revenge and struggle. (J. Byron, P.B. Shelley, S. Petofi, A. Mitskevich, early A.S. Pushkin). What they all had in common was that they all saw a single essence in man, whose task is not at all reduced to solving everyday problems. On the contrary, without denying everyday life, the romantics sought to unravel the mystery of human existence, turning to nature, trusting their religious and poetic feeling.

By the way, it is thanks to Zhukovsky that one of the favorite genres of Western European romantics enters Russian literature - ballad... Thanks to Zhukovsky's translations, Russian readers got acquainted with the ballads of Goethe, Schiller, Burger, Southey, W. Scott. "A translator in prose is a slave, a translator in verse is a rival", these words belong to Zhukovsky himself and reflect his attitude towards his own translations.

After Zhukovsky, many poets turned to the ballad genre - A.S. Pushkin ( Song of Prophetic Oleg, Drowned), M.Yu. Lermontov ( Airship, Mermaid), A.K. Tolstoy ( Vasily Shibanov) and etc.

The era of classicism and the Enlightenment, which dominated for two centuries in philosophy, literature and art, ended whose progressive ideas quickly degenerated into bloody terror, executions and ideological impatience. The answer to such tangible contradictions between lofty ideas and the very unattractive reality that they gave rise was the emergence of a very extensive and all-encompassing cultural phenomenon - romanticism - the last trend in the history of art in its scope and depth of ideas, which found vivid expression in literature, music and painting ...

Romanticism in literature and art became the highest point of the ideas of humanism, which appeared during the Renaissance. It was then that close attention to the earthly man arose, with his shortcomings and weaknesses, he became the measure of all that exists. The results, which gave rise to sharp contradictions in the minds of young people and showed the entire inconsistency of the ideas of the Enlightenment, forced again to pay attention to the inner world of the individual, to its originality and depth, rejecting the rational socio-political ideas of universal harmony and prosperity.

Romanticism in literature and art presented the world around a person as a mystery and a riddle, which can only be comprehended by feelings, emotions and heart. Rational reality is replaced by fantastic worlds that cannot be cognized by reason. Only strong feelings are able to resist the world, and in strength and depth they are as powerful as the Universe.

The romantic hero always boldly challenges the world around him, he is perfectly aware of his exclusivity, is proud of her, while realizing that his death is inevitable, because he is in conflict not with individuals or social circumstances, but with the whole Universe. Romanticism in literature and art deeply and with great love depicts the hero, his strong emotional experiences. Moreover, these experiences are endless, because romantic heroes are a tight ball of contradictions. Rebelling against an imperfect world, some of them rush upward, trying to achieve perfection equal to God, others, on the contrary, plunge into the frightening depth of evil and vice.

Romanticism in literature builds in the same different ways. Some romantic writers try to find an ideal in the Middle Ages, where they see a cleaner and uncluttered time, others design utopias, creating ideal models of the future. But all of them are trying to get away from the present, where there is nothing but a wretched bourgeois reality.

Romanticism in literature became the founder of new forms and formulated new tasks that remain relevant today. Romantic writers have created new content, proposed new ones, where the main thing becomes a rebellion against dullness and ordinariness, and the hero turns into an integral and harmonious person, comprehending and embracing with his unusual and powerful personality not only the laws of earthly existence, but also heavenly ideals.

Romanticism in art and literature formed the principles of nationality and historicism, which became fundamental in the further development of art. Another interesting undertaking in this direction was the theory of romantic irony, formulated by the theorist, German philosopher F. Schlegel. He proclaimed the great role of art as a perfect tool for cognition and transformation of the world, respectively, the artists of romanticism are great creators, equal to God. But it was also clear that any, even the most talented artist is only a person, and his view of the world is subjective and limited. The theory of romantic irony was the answer to this contradiction between the ideal in romantic art and reality. Schlegel argued that irony must be present in the artist's view not only at the world around him, but also at himself, at the creative process and at its result. Thus, the creator admits his imperfection and the impossibility of creating an ideal, since he is unable to solve the riddle of the world and the universe.