ID 2242 Test 2

Neoclassicism (Late 18th to Early 19th Century)

Political Influence

• French Revolution → “propagandistic” art on how to be good citizens in new French Republic.

• Reformulate how people think

• Storming of the Bastille (1789), stormed and released prisoners

• Signing of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1791), equal in rights - liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression

• Reign of Terror: guillotine executions (1793-4)

• Reworked calendar (reset as YR 1 at 1791)

• 10 day weeks, 10 hour days, 100 minute hours, 100 second minutes

• Baroque Composition

• Didacticism

• Cult of hero

  • ancient/contemporary

Oath of the Horatii (1784) BY Jacques-Louis David

• Story from The History of Rome (1c, BC)

• Rationality in solving conflict between the two regions

• Propagandistic

  • Necessary sacrifice of the individual for the good of the many

• Cult of hero → pivotal moment for our heroes

• Melodramatic moment

• Formal Composition:

  • parallelism of brothers signifying unity

  • stagelike setting

  • all action foreground

  • tenebroso → don’t know outcome

  • life-sized (stand by our heroes and add realism)

  • divided by two columns into triangular grouping

  • RED/BLUE scheme → French Flag

Death of (Jean Paul) Marat (1793) - Jacques-Louis David

• Propagandistic

  • radical journalist/politician assassinated

  • martyr

  • sacrifice for the good of the many

  • pen is mightier than the sword

• Cult of hero

  • peaceful death

Baroque Composition

• all action foreground

• stagelike setting

• tenebroso

Napoleon Crossing the Alps (1800) - Jacques-Louis David

• Cult of hero

  • control of animal

  • engaged eye (from napoleon)

  • following in the footsteps of other heros (hannibal, charles the great on stone in corner)

• Life sized

• 1800, crosses Alps to Italy → expand empire

• Melodramatic moment

Pest House at Jaffa (1804) - Antione Jean Gros

• 1799, during campaigns in Middle East while in Jaffa, Napoleon’s army fell victim in plague epidemic, treated in the Pest House

• Cult of hero

  • touches plague victims → not afraid at all / miraculous touch

• Mosque + hospital + middle east + minaret

• Commissioned by Napoleon

Romanticism

• French (Romance) Literature

• Sublime

  • Irrational nature

  • Irrational consciousness: nightmares

  • Tragic events: shipwrecks, murder, tragic heroes, martyrs, anti-heros

• Edmund Burke, “A Philosophical Inquiry into our idea of the sublime and the beautiful,” (1756)

  • Educational reform → studied “how we learn”, how a lesson is engraved in our being

  • Proposed that we have a sublime experience when we intensel learn something

  • Awe inspiring

  • Intense

  • Emotional

• Tragic story, victim, fear, ugliness, irrationality

• Literature, art, drama: ways of having a sublime experience as a surrogate and not a victim

• Refers to a type of French novel

• Called a Roman a clef

•   French for novel with a key

• Tragic twist in plot

Mary Shelley- Frankenstein(1818) → Science gone amok

Charles Baudelaire- Flowers of Evil (1857)

Lion Attacking a Horse (1763) - George Stubbs

• tragedy (sublime)

• irrationality and power

  • survival of the fittest

The Nightmare (1781) - Henry Fuseli

• sublime

  • incubus-demon lying on top of her representing her nightmare

  • engaged eye (from demon)

• imagery of horse (germanic folktale for bad dreams)

Oedipus and the Sphinx (1801) - J.A.D Ingres

• Tragic life story

  • prophesied to have a tragic life

  • kill his father, marry his mother

• encounters a sphinx on the way to Thebes, solve riddle or die

• What is it that has a voice, walks on four legs in morning, two at noon and three in evening? human

• passes Thebes, fulfills prophecy, blinds himself

• Oedipus embodies riddle:

  • abandoned as a child, crawling on all fours

  • two legs in the cave (as an adult) and stick represented there

  • blinded man (walking stick)

• Planimetric seperation:

  • Foreground: sphinx and oedipus, present

  • Middle ground: man warning him, witness

  • Background: city of thebes, tragedy concludes

• Implied lines

  • eye to eye with sphinx in the shadows

Saturn Devouring his Children (1823) - Goya

• Tragic story (sublime)

• out of focus + tenebroso + engaged (wild) eye → Irrationality

• Roman god Saturn/Cronus

  • Prophesied he would lose power when one of his children depose him

  • To prevent this, each time wife delivered child, Saturn would devour it

  • When his sixth child was born, wife had him spirited away to island of Crete where child survived and eventually defeated father

Third of May, 1808 (1814) - Goya

• Spanish peasants rose up against Napoleon’s occupying army in Madrid → killed by firing squad by the French army

• Tragic (sublime) moment

• Sequence: standing in line watch ur friends die, stand in front of firing squad, outcome

•  Unified firing machine- no faces, no differentiation, only focus on anxiety of waiting

• Viewer’s vantage point: parallel

  • We could be a part of the painting, either the firing squad or those being fired on, or both

  • Intensifies the sublime

• Cross representing crucifixion pose of man being fired upon

• Tenebroso

The Mounted Officer of the Imperial Guard (1812) - Theodore Gericault

• tragic story (sublime)

• anti-hero

• flees from battle, looking back, driven to leave

The Raft of the Medusa (1819) - Theodore Gericault

• Sublime

  • tragic victims → posed artists with water being thrown on them

  • brought body parts from a morgue

  • built full scale raft in studio

• life scale painting → parallel viewers vantage point

• Survival of 150 shipwreck victims (1816) who were put on a jerry-built raft (since they did not fit into the lifeboats) and abandoned, leaving only 15 alive by the time of their rescue.

• Journalist interview revealed they survived through cannibalism

• anti-heroes

• Gericault did a preparatory study in which he included the rescue boat, but in the final painting, there is no boat, making the moment more suspenseful/sublime

Envy (1823) - Theodore Gericault

• Commissioned by French psychiatrist, specializing in psychopathology aka obsessions, to study facial traits of monomaniacs.

• Sublime

  • portrait of irrationality

  • painter has sublime experience

Death of Sardenapalus (1826) - Eugene Delacroix

• Sardanapulus, the last king of Assyria in 8th BC, upon defeat by invading enemy, commits mass suicide

• All his wives slain, palace set fire, suicide of himself

• Tragic (sublime) story

  • shadows, smoke

  • Tenebroso^

  • mid murder

  • watching them have a sublime experience

• Life sized → about to be dragged in

• Dominant red color, but absence of blood

Medea (1838) - Eugune Delacroix

• Literary story

  • Medea, abandoned by her husband (on a quest) Jason of Argonatus takes revenge by murdering her two children with him

  • Euripides, filicide motivated by insanity

• Tragic (sublime) story

  • irrationality

  • before murder

  • shadow over face → blinded from reason

• Viewer’s vantage point

  • children in foreground, moving into our space

• Clothing red color, but absence of blood (creepier)

Cloister in the Snow (1810) - Caspar David Friedrich

• Landscape as sublime

  • human vs nature contrast of scale

  • humans = small, vulnerable in nature

Wanderer (1818) - Caspar David Friedrich

• Sublime nature and experience

  • wanderer climbs above cloud level in the Alps

  • monumentality and force of nature

• Deep background space, going into infinity

  • vanishing point: everything starts to blur

Wreck of the Hope (1824) - Caspar David Friedrich

• HMS Griper expeditional to the North Pole (historical event)

• Danger of the natural world

  • largeness of icebergs

  • irrational nature, science gone amok ← Frankenstein

Burning of the Houses of Parliament (1835) - JMW Turner

• Houses of Parliament by Thames River burning down (1834), 5+ hours, Turner took his easel

• Sublime

  • monumental scale of fire

• reflection of fire in water

Slaves Ship (1840) - JMW Turner

• Tragic (sublime) story:

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