Difference between Classicism and Romanticism

 Romanticism emerged as a response to Classicism.

 Classicism stressed on reason. Romanticism on imagination.
 Classicism follows the three unities of time, place and action. Romanticism only follows the unity
of action, but does not follow the unities of time, place.
 Romanticism uses simple diction of common men from their everyday life. Classicism uses strict,
rigid and logical diction and theme.
 Classicists thought about the world as having a rigid and stern structure, the romanticists
thought about the world as a place to express their ideas and believes.
 Classicism was based on the idea that nature and human nature could be understood by reason
and thought. Classicist believed that nature was, a self-contained machine, like a watch, whose
laws of operation could be rationally understood. Romanticists viewed nature as mysterious and
ever changing. Romantic writes believed that nature is an ever changing living organism, whose
laws we will never fully understand.
 Classicists thought that it was literature's function to show the everyday values of humanity and
the laws of human existence. Their idea was that classicism upheld tradition, often to the point
of resisting change, because tradition seemed a reliable testing ground for those laws. As for the
Romantics, they wrote about how man has no boundaries and endless possibilities. The
Romantics stressed the human potential for social progress and spiritual growth.

o The primary difference is one of basic orientation: the Classicists looked to the past, the
Romanticists to the future. The Classicist is the type of man who reveres the established,
unquestioned values and institutions which all men take for granted. The Romantic is a
rebel who questions values and institutions, who takes nothing for granted, and reveres
nothing higher than his own potential.

o These differences can be seen in the subject-matter of the respective schools. To take
the field of painting as an example, the Classicists took legends, biblical stories and
myths and made grand scale illustrations of them. The meaning of the painting was to
be known in advance by the viewer, since they knew the story it was based on, and their
reaction to it was based on how well the painter suggests the story. The Classicists also
had a canonized view of a “hierarchy” of subject-matter. Their illustrations, or “history”
paintings as they called them, were the grandest; portraits, landscapes and still-lifes
were considered lesser and undignified.

o Romanticism threw out the history books of the Classicists and each artist was called
upon to present his own unique vision of life. The Romantic painting created its own
subject-matter as an independent projection of the artist’s values, not the ossified
traditions of the past. Perhaps the first unadulterated, pure painting of the Romantic
orientation was Caspar David Friedrich’s “Cross in the Mountains,” and this painting was
attacked violently by the Classicists precisely because it did not present its religious
subject in the form of a “history,” but in the form of a landscape.

o Because the from Greek Mythology, but uses this as a background context for the
artist’s independent projection of his own unique theme, and the painting can be
understood on its own merits without knowing the original story.two schools overlap
historically, so do the orientations of the artists. Some Classicists ventured into
Romanticism, and some Romanticists used classical subjects. A good example of this
“cross-over” is Antoine-Jean Gros’s “Sappho at Leucate” which depicts an event