| OCR Text |
Show 92 formative years; it may give some understanding of how and why Bodmer painted America the way he did. Far removed from the artistic centers of Rome and Paris, in some respects Zurich was isolated; artists there believed they had to leave in order to develop. Nonetheless, Zurich, positioned mid-way between Italy and Germany, was an intellectual crossroads where the principles of neoclassicism and romanticism converged. The literary and philosophical foundations of both the classical revival-inspired by the rediscovery of Roman antiquities to the south-and of the German gothic revival to the north merged in the open intellectual environment of Zurich. Neoclassical and romantic art was inspired by the literary and philosophical works of men such as Goethe, Winckelmann, and Rousseau, whose writings flooded Europe in the closing years of the eighteenth century. The neoclassical and romantic movements at first may appear polarized and certainly the arts fluctuated between the two, striving for balance and equilibrium. However, upon closer examination both movements had much in common. Romanticism, derived from the late eighteenth-century fashion for medieval romances and interest in the "gothic," was a response to the detached, rational, and unemotional values of the Enlightenment. In an attempt to "return to nature" romanticism venerated passion, freedom, power, love, antiquity, the Middle Ages-in fact, anything that promoted direct and unrestrained emotional response. To balance this emotionalism, the classical revival strove for regularity and ordered harmony through imitation of the antique. The neoclassical preoccupation with classical art was, however, no |
