Romanticism & the Triumph of Spirit

Art Historian Dr Matthew Whyte offers a new lecture series, which takes the audience on an art-filled journey through the often beautiful, sometimes scandalous, and always fascinating moments in the development of Western civilisation.

In the wake of the Enlightenment’s efforts to revolutionise human civilisation through the championing of reason and rationality, there emerged a movement for whom the Enlightenment had neglected a key aspect of human experience: the spirit. In response, artists, musicians, poets, writers, and thinkers ushered in the movement we now know as Romanticism, which sought to explore those aspects of the condition that could not be known through the exercise of reason or the pursuit of science: how can we quantify a feeling such as love? How can we qualify superstition using rational means? How can we capture and represent the experience of terror or awe? The response to such questions created some of the most famously stirring, beautiful, and evocative works of art, music, and literature ever created. This week we delve into the realm of the spirit, seeing how landscape, narrative, and expressive introspection defined the work of artists like Francisco de Goya, Eugène Delacroix, and Caspar David Friedrich.