Rebelling or Reconstruction: A New Understanding of the Classical by the Romantic Painters with Exploration Centered on Francisco Goya

Abstract

The classic, originating in the intellectual development of Greek and Rome, has consistently been an essential subject of the Western culture, occupying an important role as well in Germanic law and Christian religion with its highlight on the spirit of reason, logic and humanity even in the Middles. With the discovery of Greece and Roman antiquity in Italian in the Renaissance, the classical mythologies and the masterpieces by Aristotle and Plato were once again emphasized, and interpreted from a different perspective. Hundreds of years later, the Enlightenment thinkers and neo-classical artists extracted the spirit of reason and morality from the classic. The neo-classical artists criticized the frivolous Rococo, choosing serious subjects aiming to elevate the morality of human, focusing on the integrity of the painting, strengthening sketch than color, and in this way restoring and revoking the Greco-Roman classical spirit. Yet the turmoil of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic war for decades doubts the limitation of the reason, revealing the madness of discipline and organization, displaying the mechanized and the alienated will of human-being. Delacroix and Goya, the representatives of romanticism artists, have been considered the rebels of neo-classic and the academy and the pioneers of modernity. Their works show the might of passion and emotion, depicting the fear, numbness, and indifference of human-being facing death, contrasting with the dignity and the firm attitude expressed by the neo-classical figures. This modernity roots in a certain historical context of the classic. Through pictorial analysis and the study of Delacroix's diaries and historical materials in contrast to the Baroque and Neo-classical artists to show Goya and Delacroix spontaneously invoke and reconstruct the spirit of ancient Greco-Roman art.