Romanticism was the opposite of scientific rationality yet had a formative influence on many German scientists, who were aware of the arguments and discussions in the romantic movement and who developed their ideas in opposition to those arguments, as an answer to those arguments, or on some other basis influenced by the fact that the romantic movement was so powerful at the end of the eighteenth century.
The Romantic movement affected all the arts and was a break from the classical traditions that preceded it. Changes in the styles of artistic expression throughout history have reflected not only developments in materials and shifting patters within the art world itself but have also reflected changing circumstances in society at large, including political changes, historical movements, altered social conditions, changed economic circumstances, shifts in religious thinking, and so on. In the nineteenth century, the prevailing artistic style for the first part of the century was romanticism, an art based on a form of "disorder," but a disorder seen as the emblem of the unfettered processes of the imagination:
In historical terms, fully developed Romanticism is the successor to the cults of nature and of feeling which sprang up in the course of the eighteenth century. . . Romanticism took pride in its own contradictions: it embraced free thought on the one hand,m and religious mysticism on the other (Lucie-Smith 373).
Romanticism was the heir to the spirit of the French Revolution, a spirit of freedom and self-determination manifested artistically as freedom of expression. It contrasts sharply with the controlled and ordered world of classicism in the Renaissance period, but it bears a relation to the mode of thought that created humanism and an emphasis on individual thought. The forces that would shape Europe and the art world for the nineteenth century were already in place at the turn of the century. The ideals of...