Visual Culture : classical and gothic/romantic art

The main difference between classical art and romantic/gothic art is that classic art is generally based on history, ideas and legends to be used as metaphors for stability and it's style places emphasis on symmetry, geometry quite often the architecture of ancient rome.Whereas on the other hand, Romantic art was generally more based on the emotion of the art in a sense, and at the time romanticists were seen as revolutionary in comparison to classicists, in terms of style romanticism is very free flowing and usually involves a lot of nature.

One famous classical painting is the girl with the pearl earring, painted by Johannes Vermeer in 1665, you can see that this is classical from different ratios used, such as the golden rule with the amount of black background on the left to the woman being about 1.6, and the pearl earring which stands out is about a third of the way from right so is also used the rule of thirds.

Below are more examples of classical work.

Ingres- Apotheosis of Homer

Jean Antoine- Two cousins

Louis Jean Francois Lagrenee - Mars and Venus

Hugely different from the girl with the pearl earring is Rain, steam and speed, by Joseph Mallard William Turner,this is a great example of an romanticism artist and piece of work due to it defying all the rules and typicality which is seen through classicism. The work is that of a steam engine and the oil paints used were really free flowing and is quite an abstract take on the scenery which it was intended to replicate because of the lack of details. Unlike classicism, this sticks to a very one sided colour scheme, which to me expresses a lot of a specific emotion.