Neoclassicism / Romanticism

The eighteenth century's faith in reason produced two related but temperamentally opposite art movements that share a period and a generation of artists. Neoclassicism took its cue from the excavations at Pompeii (1748) and the moral philosophy of Winckelmann: painting should instruct and elevate, its models should be ancient Greece and Rome, its figures should be noble and composed. Jacques-Louis David's *Oath of the Horatii* (1784) is the manifesto image — three rigid male figures pledging sacrifice in a composition of geometrical severity. Romanticism looked at the same post-Revolutionary world and concluded that reason was insufficient: emotion, nature, the sublime, the terrifying and the historically remote were the proper subjects of art. Géricault's *Raft of the Medusa* (1819), Delacroix's *Liberty Leading the People* (1830), Turner's dissolving seascapes and Friedrich's solitary figures before infinite landscapes — all insist that what cannot be measured is what matters most.

How to recognise it

Neoclassical paintings are immediately legible from their compositional rigidity: freeze-frame action, figures in profile like Roman bas-reliefs, local colour kept clean and unmodulated, lighting even and rational. Subjects are drawn from classical antiquity — Roman republicans, Greek heroes, allegorical virtues. Romantic paintings, by contrast, are organised around feeling rather than structure: skies dominate, weather is extreme, figures are small against vast landscapes or engulfed in crowds. Colour is hot and agitated in French Romanticism (Delacroix's oranges and prussian blues), dissolved and atmospheric in British (Turner), melancholy and desaturated in German (Friedrich). If the painting seems to have been arranged for maximum emotional impact rather than rational clarity, it is Romantic.