Romanticism in Religious Art

“Romanticism” generally refers to a set of movements that solidified around the turn of the 19th century and continued to influence cultural production for decades. Romantic ideology emphasized individual expression, and many Romantic artists sought to rejuvenate religious experience that was personal and beyond the strictures of established institutions. Romantic artists used the awe-inspiring power of nature as means of evoking divinity and sought inspiration from periods seen as embodying nobler forms of religious expression, especially the Middle Ages. The Romantic emphasis on the individual and creative expression often resulted in loose and dynamic uses of material. Romanticism and its frequent interest in revivifying spirituality are often seen as reactions against the Enlightenment and the artistic style with which it was closely aligned, Neoclassicism. In many ways, though, Romanticism is indebted to, overlaps with, and evolved from Enlightenment ideas of knowledge formation and related developments like industrialization, liberal state formation, colonialism, and empire. Many artists now associated with Romanticism, moreover, adhered to the rational precision of Neoclassicism. Romantic interest in nature and the representation of the Sublime cannot be divorced from the emergence of professionalized fields of study like geology, archaeology, and paleontology. Medieval art and literature likewise gained greater scholarly and popular attention and became bound up with the codification of national identities and heritage. Rising literacy, new technologies for image reproduction, and widening travel networks brought Romantic aesthetics and ideology to the masses through illustration and popular entertainment. The era of Romanticism (c. 1790s–1840s) saw increased skepticism of religious beliefs, traditions, and institutions—developments that did not begin with but were certainly accelerated by Enlightenment thought and the advent of secular nation-states. Nonetheless, religious culture and practice survived and even thrived, in part due to Romanticism’s creative adaptations and broad conceptualizations of individual spiritual struggle and transcendence. Although Romanticism would peter out across Europe by the mid-19th century, its rebellious, anti-institutional spirit set the stage for many later avant-garde art movements.