elopments 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, and religious mysticism on the other.
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 the French Revolution spread throughout Europe, and the goal of self-determination that had been at the root of that event took root in Holland, Germany, Italy, and Austria and affected not only nations but also individuals. Heightened sensibility was now a convention in literature, and intensified feeling became characteristic of the visual and musical arts. This tendency toward images of impassioned or poignant feeling lasted until about the middle of the century and cut across all national boundaries. Romanticism was the term applied to this movement of writers, musicians, painters, and sculptors away from rationalism to...