British Romanticism and the Reception of Italian Old Master Art, 1793-1840 by McCue Maureen

Author:McCue, Maureen.
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Published: 2014-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

The Real and Ideal in the Romantic Literary Experience of Art

As demonstrated in the last chapter, a celebration of particulars began to replace the desire for a single, all-encompassing standard of ideal beauty. Yet ideal beauty was not abandoned, but, rather, redefined. The mind might conceive of ideal beauty but that beauty could only be expressed through the particular. By valuing both the real and the ideal, especially as they converge in ‘expression’, Romantic writers created a vocabulary which lent itself to both art and literature.

Many Romantic writers, especially those with an interest in the classics, were familiar with the work of aesthetic philosophers such as Reynolds and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, even though they adopted a different approach. In particular, Romantic writers were interested in how an artwork visually manifested the genius of the artist or the mind of the figure represented. In his Thoughts on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, Winckelmann stresses how the quality of the soul may be expressed through the body:

The calmer the state of a body, the fitter it is to express the true character of the soul: in all physical postures too far removed from the state of rest, the soul is not in the condition most proper to it, but subject to violence and constraint. The soul becomes more expressive and recognisable in powerful passions: but it is great and noble only in the state of unity, the state of rest. (43)

Chapter 1 discussed the ways in which the Laocoön’s creator balanced the expression of physical pain with the need to retain the calmness of feature appropriate to the priest’s noble soul. Here, Winckelmann argues that a calm face, like a still sea, conveys a depth of soul. Similar notions might be used by Protestant critics to justify their appreciation of Catholic painting. The divine rapture depicted on a saint’s face might easily be understood as a representation of the poetic feeling and inspiration associated with genius, both the genius of the painter and his subject. Raphael’s painting The Ecstasy of St Cecilia, housed in Bologna’s Pinacoteca, overwhelmed Percy Bysshe Shelley. He writes to Peacock:

You forget that it is a picture as you look at it, and yet it is most unlike any of those things which we call reality. It is of the inspired and ideal kind, and seems to have been conceived & executed in a similar state of feeling to that which produced among the antients those perfect specimens of poetry & sculpture which are the baffling models of suc[c]eeding generations. There is an unity & perfection in it of an incommunicable kind. The central figure St. Cæcilia seems rapt in such inspiration as produced her image in the painter’s mind, her deep dark eloquent eyes lifted up, her chesnut hair flung back from her forehead, one hand upon her bosom, her countenance as it were calmed by the depth of its passion & rapture, & penetrated throughout with the warm & radiant light of life.

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