The Baroque and Romantic Art Movements Sample Essay

The Baroque and Romantic Art Movements Sample Essay Every style that is known from the history of art describes a certain state of society. The baroque and the romanticism are the styles that determine the look of the European cities that are clearly visible and noticeable in big cities nowadays. The Baroque movement was the leading one in the 16th and 17th centuries. Jonah Heising describes the major elements that reflect the culture and philosophy of the baroque style as “Magnificence and dignity, strict observance of standards” in the book “The Dutch culture of the seventeenth century.” A German historian Richard Alevin described the spirit of the baroque movement as the connection between the motion and space. Space should correspond to the movement and there’s no much space in the exterior and interior details. This style has a kind of excessive enthusiasm because of a big number of architectural elements. In the decoration of the facades, there are complex undulating shapes that create the feeling of motion and flow. The major principle of Barocco lies in achieving a strong expression that is possible thanks to curved lines of the cornice at the top of the buildings. The baroque style is characterised by the formation of the so-called fear of emptiness. The space on the facade of the buildings is fully filled with a lot of details that hide the true design. There was a popular principle of no boundaries in the decor. The columns and walls don’t look like pillars but as unstable mass. The romantic movement is the cultural revolution of the personality that was crushed by a baroque cult of decency. This is a revenge of the Renaissance. This got out from under the piles of form and at the top of its voice announced its rights. This tree, which is tired of the fact that its crown is constantly cut, giving the most pretentious shape, and on the roots are constantly hurt. A romantic person is similar to a baroque person that turns out to be eye-to-eye with chaos. And there is a fundamental difference between the baroque and romantic worldview: the baroque person seeks to build up and regulate this chaos as far as he or she can, and the romanticist person simply lives in it. If he/she does not live in it, its only for a short time. The romanticist deliberately refuses to try to tear himself a corner among the chaos and comfortably equip it. He does not oppose himself to active protoplasm, he wants to be even more active. We cannot find this in the architectural designs and we can observe clearly in the literature and arts. The inner soul of Romanticism, all its pain and passion are precisely the desire to live in a perfect world with a full awareness of the fact of its unattainability. With the recognition of this fact, deep inner pessimism is inherent in romance as a worldview system. The comparison of the two movements leads to the understanding of the two different cultural styles that left a lot of legacy for us that we observe today.