What is the Romantic Image?

The Lady of Shalott. Cica 1988. By John William Waterhouse. Via Google Arts & Culture

How did the Romantics consider the image? How did the Romantic image differ from others? The answer lies in the expression of obscurity. The classical image gives you a world clearly ordered and laid out, but with the romantic image, there is always a suggestion of something beyond what can be seen toward what is indefinable. 

One of the best ways of exploring this very abstract concept is through a work by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea, and the commentary that the great German dramatist Heinrich von Kleist made of it. Kleist famously said of the work that you feel as if your 'eyelids have been cut off'. This gives a perfect sense of intensity and even veiled violence that is so typical of Romantic imagery. 

Natural Exists Only as Raw Material for the Artist to Shape

With Romanticism, the objectivity of the image is overturned, and the phantom-like contours of the image from early Greece returns with self-conscious intensity. External 'Nature' existed only as the raw material for the artist to model and shape, modify and distort, escape into, and perfect. 

This perfection was by all accounts subjective. If it was called universal, it was either through the notion of seeing the general in the particular or just because Romantic poets and philosophers had that charismatic habit of thinking themselves absolutely right. 

Their veneration of the world was aestheticized and what would later with Surrealism be called free-associative.

The Romantic artist and critic play over the surface of the object or scene. His or her (it was an era that saw a flowering of woman talents) response forms a flamboyant carapace that fuses with the object itself. 

Another way of thinking about this relationship was summed up by Friedrich Schlegel when he stated that Romantic art must 'hover and the midpoint between represented and the representer […] on the wings of poetic reflection'. 

Romanticism was deeply indebted to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who attempted to account for the limitations of perception. In a way that Kant did not entirely approve, the Romantics took subjective expression to be a strength and not a limitation. 

The Nightmare. 1781. By Henry Fuseli. Via Google Arts & Culture

No More Objective Truth

What the Romantic saw was always altered, self-consciously an embellishment while all the more worthy of what was seen because felt, filtered, and experienced, rather than allowed to dry out in the thankless task of objective truth. Arthur Schopenhauer (1778-1860), loosely extrapolating Kant's philosophy, said that the force underriding our perception's formal boundaries was the will, formless and the thing that steers us to action or inaction. 

What we see is guided and coloured by our will. And as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), Schopenhauer’s most distinguished devotee before Freud, repeatedly advised, what we see and believe in our world to be reality should not be subordinated to philosophical diatribe. 

The only problem with this notion, however, is that reality, the image we have of the world, ends up becoming chronically plural since it depends on the individual's unique point of view—everyone to his or her own.

Despite the lop-sidedness of the Romantic approach (the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard grumbled that Romanticism could not come up with an overarching vision, only isolated feelings), it continues to be the most popular because of the license it gives to free expression and response. The image need not be measured up to a pre-ordained standard or external ideal. The respondent, the maker of the image as either artist or perceiver, is before else a free agent or at least is given that confidence. 

Metaphor

The role of metaphor is crucial to understanding the Romantic image, as is the notion of the palimpsest, writing on something erased. Since my image of a thing bears the stamp of my unique subjectivity, then it follows that everything is seen through the veil of my own, incommunicable imaginative powers. 

‘What is truth?’ Nietzsche asked early in his career, ‘It is moving hoard of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations'. The image was seen as comprised of an endlessly proliferating chain of associations whose validity lay in what more associations they set in motion. 

Romanticism was a communicative logic of cross-galvanization: the originality of my image seeks to spark an equally original image in you. No wonder that so many Romantic artists drove themselves, and each other, round the twist.

Since the location of the image was within the individual, it therefore also meant that it is located within time. The Romantic image witnesses the increased usage of the word 'impression'—by artists, critics, poets, and even composers well before its widespread use in the 1860s with French Impressionism—where perception and the image partake of an unrepeatable moment and is the trace of something ungraspable. 

Hence the melancholy that permeates Romanticism, rooted in the imminence of death. The Romantic image, in particular, is transient and all the more compelling because of this. The German word for impression, Eindruck, coveys the sense of inscription, an imprint made by the sensorium, of something immediate, lived, and undeniable. 

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), a radical synthesizer of the late Romantic vision, echoing Nietzsche, declared that ‘the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not’. It is one of Wilde’s joyous paradoxes, as he loved playing complexity and contradiction. 

The critic—the trained, voracious and audacious observer—is also a maker of new images, no less an artist except one who makes art based on the former artist’s form: ‘To the critic, the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own, that need not bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticizes.’ 

Wilde is voicing the philosophy of the aestheticist movement of art-for-art’s sake or l’art pour l’art, which persisted from the 1880s until WWI. These Decadents, as they were proud to be called, abjured the empirical world for that of their artifice. Since the cognitive construction was the real one, then the world was made up; if the world was made up, those with the most superior images of the world were the artists because of the acute refinement of their sensibilities, which made them the best at unleashing the forces of the imagination. 

It was an approach that left ample space for artistic change, though it was not an effective approach for models such as democracy, whose measurable standard is consensus.

Image: TBA 

Monk by the Sea. Circa 1808-1810. By Caspar David Friedrich. Via Google Arts & Culture

Kleist’s Commentary on Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea

Because it developed out of the aesthetic liberties offered by early Romanticism, the extreme subjective license hallmarking the aestheticist movement is already discernible in the poet-dramatist Heinrich von Kleist’s (1877-1811) famous response to Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (1809-10). 

The piece is a model of brooding Romantic criticism, exemplifying how the respondent's images take over from that of the artist, epitomizing the Romantic primacy of the inner world over the outer. 

With his back to the viewer, the Monk stares into a non-descript beyond; since there is nothing much of note to see, the viewer has no choice but to follow through with an imaginative response; the viewer’s own images take over from those withheld by the pictorial image before us.  

Here is Kleist’s text in full:

It is splendid to look out on the water’s edge with endless loneliness, under a gloomy sky, at the limitless sea. All this belongs to life, where we have perhaps once gone and whence we must return, where we want to overreach and where we cannot; where everything belonging to life is missing while yet the voice of life can still be discerned in the rush of the waves, in the blowing of the wind, in the drift of the clouds, in the lonely cry of the birds. This belongs to the claim made by the heart and then one’s break, caused by my own expression, from nature. But this isn’t possible to do before an image [vor dem Bilde], and what I myself should find in the image was what I first found between myself and the image, namely a claim [Anspruch] that my heart made upon the image and the loss [Abbruch] that the image wrought upon me; and thus ‘twas I who was the Monk, the image was the dune, but what I might so yearningly have looked out upon—the sea—altogether absent.  Nothing could be sadder or more discomforting than this kind of position in the world: the sole spark of life in the vast empire of death, the lonely centre in the lonely circle. With its two or three mysterious things, the image stands before us like the Apocalypse, as if it were dreaming Young’s Night Thoughts, and in its uniformity and horizonlessness, and nothing but the creamy white of its foreground, and it is thus, when looking at it, one feels as if one’s eyelids were cut off. Indeed the painter has indubitably paved a new path in the field of his art; and I am convinced that with his spirit I could represent a quarter-mile of Prussian sand, with a barberry shrub on which a lonely crow ruffling its feathers, and that this image could have a truly Ossian or Kosegarten-like effect. Indeed, were one to depict this landscape using its very own chalk and water, then I believe that would be enough to make the foxes howl: the most potent that one could doubtless bring to its apogee of this kind of landscape painting. And yes—my own impressions over this wonderful panting are too crazed; and so rather than venturing to describe it all have set out [zu belehren] the appearance that passes in the alternations of day and night. 

The most-quoted phrase from this article is 'as if one's eyelids were cut off', in which Kleist characterizes a contemplation of such intensity that it permits of no retreat.

Bild means both picture and image, which makes for some stimulating confusions, but as Kleist admits at the end, he has not attempted anything more than his own ‘crazed’ gloss. 

But the way Kleist describes it, the Romantic image is interminably tragic: by being able to lay claim to the world with our own images of it, we also, at the same time, signal our alienation from that world because such images are our own separate. Isolated inventions, tied to yet always distant from the world to which they refer. 

We are distant witnesses to the internal unfolding of the image within the Monk, and, in our wonder, are made interminably conscious of our failure to share in his experience. It is the lot of the Romantic to be brought to the lonely conclusion that the only sure things are the unspeakable, unverifiable constructs of our own mind.