The Aesthetics of Romanticism

Romanticism was a revolution in sensibility and taste that embraced and irreversibly transformed the whole of European culture. In this clear synthesis, the author explores the originality of the contribution the Romantic movement made to the philosophy of art, beginning with the Schlegel brothers, then Novalis, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Chateaubriand, Foscolo, Manzoni and Leopardi.

After a chronology and geography of Romantic aesthetics, its constituent features are illustrated: from the polarity between antiquity and modernity, naive and sentimental, classical and romantic, to the discovery of the Middle Ages and the Orient, art as the supreme form of knowledge, and finally nihilism. The discussion then turns to the categories on which this aesthetic is built: overcoming imitation, irony, the ugly and the grotesque, a taste for the fragmentary, the sublime, the marvellous, allegory, symbol, and how these are reflected in the theory of the novel and tragedy, in criticism, literature, painting and music.

Paolo D’Angelo is professor of Aesthetics at the University of Messina. Among his books are: “L’estetica di Benedetto Croce” (1982), “Simbolo e arte in Hegel” (1989), “L’estetica italiana del Novecento” (1997).