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Aragón PAU Cultural and Artistic Movements study materials
Aragón PAU Cultural and Artistic Movements study resources

Aragón PAU Cultural and Artistic Movements: Neoclassicism, Romanticism and the 19th Century

Aragón PAU Cultural and Artistic Movements · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.

All guide sections

Neoclassicism, Romanticism and the 19th Century

Neoclassicism, Romanticism and the 19th Century tests the shift from rule-based art to subjectivity and then to modernity. Expect to place movements chronologically, cite key dates or texts, and read style as ideology rather than decoration.

Neoclassicism

  • Winckelmann's Gedanken (1755) and Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764) supply noble simplicity and calm grandeur; the excavations at Herculaneum (1738) and Pompeii (1748) feed the taste for antiquity.
  • Canova's polished marble, David's oath scenes, Ingres' line; architecture: Juan de Villanueva's Prado (1785) and neoclassical urban planning.

Romanticism

  • Subjectivity, the sublime (Burke, 1757), nature as mirror of feeling, the national past, dreams and the irrational; colour and visible brushwork over contour.
  • Friedrich's Rückenfigur, Turner's atmosphere, Géricault's Raft of the Medusa (1819), Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People (1830).
  • Goya, born in Fuendetodos (Zaragoza, 1746), is the hinge: court painter, then Los Caprichos (1799), Dos de Mayo and Tres de Mayo (1814), and the Black Paintings (1819-23). Witness rather than myth.

Realism, Impressionism, Post-impressionism

  • Courbet's 1855 Realism pavilion; Millet; the ordinary subject as a claim, not a style.
  • Impressionism: first exhibition 1874, plein air, broken colour, light over contour (Monet, Morisot, Renoir, Degas).
  • Post-impressionism: Cézanne's structure, Van Gogh's stroke, Gauguin's flat cloisonnist colour, the routes into the avant-garde.
  • Spanish academic history painting: Pradilla's Doña Juana la Loca (1877).

Worked example

Compare Goya's Dos de Mayo with Delacroix's Liberty. Both are political and both use a pyramid. Goya's pyramid is a pile of bodies lit by a lantern, with no allegorical figure and no heroic general: the event as witnessed. Delacroix puts an allegory of Liberty at the apex with the tricolour and a street boy as symbol of the people: the event as national myth. Same compositional device, opposing intentions.

Traps

  • Calling Goya a Romantic without qualification; he precedes and enables the movement.
  • Merging Impressionism and Post-impressionism, when the second reacts against the first's optical fleetingness.
  • Treating Realism as photography; it is a programme about subject matter and class.
  • Dating Delacroix's Liberty to 1789 instead of the July Revolution of 1830.