The Romantic movement got underway in the late eighteenth century. It was an age when Europe was undergoing a phase of political upheaval that culminated in the French Revolution (1789) and its consequences. At the same time, the self-conception of the human being was changing. The works of the young Goethe and the literature of Sturm und Drang were already harbingers of a new age. In philosophy, the perceiving subject became the focus of interest. In the programmatic words of Novalis: “The mysterious path leads within. Within us, or nowhere, lies eternity with its worlds, the past and the future.”
Not just the rational mind, but also the senses, passions, emotions, and the power of imagination now counted as fundamental human faculties. Artists — men and, increasingly, women alike — emancipated themselves from art’s traditional purposes and used their fantasies to create worlds of their own.
Thus began a new art-historical epoch. Romanticism’s aesthetic programme was an expression of the experience of crisis, and at the same time an attempt to overcome that crisis. The sense of discontent with the present made longing a central motif and way of being.
People took an interest in the boundaries of consciousness, studied nature, and made trailblazing discoveries. In this period of transition, Romanticism introduced interpretations and forms of expression that have continued to bear an impact to the very present. And it articulated hopes and fears that still preoccupy us today.
