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      III. The Romantic Inspiration

      Was the movement that we have just described only a violent bout of fever? Was it anything more than exaggeration and distortion? Did it only have a superficial and, when all is said and done, perhaps regrettable influence on artists? Was it going to be remembered as a movement marked by a strong and rampant taste for trinkets, cheap rubbish and mundane anecdotes, a movement mostly interested in subjects taken from fiction or history and easy to turn into vivid scenes? Those subjects corresponded to the fashion of the time, and if Romanticism had been limited to illustrating books and popular historical stories it would then be difficult to understand why it faced such strong resistance. If it was only made of mannerism and failings would it have kept raising so much passion and would it have remained polemical a century later?

      Romanticism actually marked a general change of minds. As mentioned at the beginning of this book, it had expressed itself in all areas of human thinking and in all activities; it had had a deep impact on the arts. The works that it had influenced were linked together not just by superficial analogy but were closely related. They had been created according to the same norms and had used similar methods. It is those norms and methods that we are now going to try to unveil.

      A Romantic person was first of all sensitive and someone on whom logic and pure ideas had little impact. It was a knowledgeable person whose actions were based on intuition: as a statesman, he would obey a generous or imaginary impetus; as a writer or poet his thinking was taking shape in images. All the more so for artists, who had no interest in abstraction but were indeed visionary. Others tried to draw a perfect type, a pure ideal beauty out of the diversity of humankind, but the Romantic, on the contrary, saw vivid creatures, all different and all touching in some way. He would develop friendships with certain individuals but was never exclusive and, in fact, was ready to change as he feared monotony more than anything else. In turn he would be interested in hook-nosed, pug-nosed, turned up-nosed people, slim or stocky types. He was seduced by unexpected appearances: irregular faces, deformities, alterations caused by illnesses and age. He was accused of cherishing ugliness whilst looking for character above all. Nature provided him with an infinite diversity of individuals and he could not see Apollo anywhere. If, by a miracle, Apollo were to spring up in front of his eyes, he would not represent the god in a fixed eternal attitude but would show him changing all the time, always different from himself because of the miracle of life. The classical man ignored it or, at least, always tried to fight against it whilst the Romantic observed it with pleasure and saw the source of beauty in it. The lines and volumes that the classicist aspired to give balance to according to blind geometry were perceived by the Romantics as a sacred interaction of internal forces. Flesh quivered, blood ran, muscles tensed. Man was a magnificent machine: his shapes were not abstract calligraphy but they expressed the workings of physiological life. Catching life in action and movement before it was finished, observing the short instants when, guided by passion and under the pressure of dramatic circumstances, life reached a paroxysm, avoiding what pretended to be constant and celebrating the transitory and short-lived in life: these were the joys of the artist.

      In studios, models would wrap themselves in indifferent clothes with more or less harmonious folds. Man would dress according to the climate he lived in, his needs and his tastes; his dressing style would reflect his personality and participate in his restlessness and existence itself.

      To finish, man was not an isolated creature in the middle of a silent world. Life was all around him. Animals ran, flew or crawled, being moved (like humans) by a subtle system of forces. There were tangible affinities between man and animals. Less complex by nature, they provided the eye with sights which man could not rival. Nature was not an empty architectural structure, mere décor or background. It was full of elementary beings, close to us, visible or invisible, and even the things in it were constantly changing. The landscapes that seemed most stable were continually changing with leaves

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