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Show 93 less emotional and sentimental than the romantic's embrace of the past. In this respect, the neoclassical movement could easily be considered as simply one aspect of the broader concept of romanticism, which was more an attitude of mind than a specific style and, therefore, a more far-reaching concept. It is not surprising, then, that in the arts there was a great deal of crossing-over between the two movements and that interest by writers and artists in both was not viewed as inconsistent. Zurich was a microcosm of the late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century European intellectual world, in which the conflicting, yet strangely compatible philosophies of neoclassicism and romanticism converged. In Zurich itself poets, historians, and artists easily moved between the two and the city was simultaneously exposed to a renaissance of classical and medieval literature and to neoclassical and romantic art. How did landscape painting fit into the European neoclassical and romantic model? For the most determined neoclassicists the landscape was negligible. Nature was too undisciplined to give proper form to the democratic principles espoused by the Age of Reason. In order to depict the noble ideals of the Enlightenment, neoclassicists believed that beauty and truth could only be demonstrated through the human figure or through the didactic of narrative painting. This conviction was somewhat modified in the Germanic countries to include the classical landscape, in as much as such landscapes were conceived as mirroring the sublime grandeur of the human spirit that confronted it. Certainly, the Germanic temperament played a part in this |
