Joe Student
Humanities 1302
Critical Analysis
During the Romantic Era, (1773-1887), artists such as musicians, painters and writers, began focusing their art on personal feelings and their expression. They also stressed emotion and the expression of the subjective. This contrasted to the earlier objective art that stressed intellectual ideals rather than these concepts. These subjective concepts focused on the artists’ personal feeling rather than try to generalize certain ideals. Another focus of art during the romantic period was concepts of exotic and extraordinary ideas, such as dreams. And a final idea of romanticism was the importance of nature and its spiritual characteristics. This era of art was far more expressive than previous ones and the works produced during this time strived to convey powerful messages from the artists’ ideals.
One painting produced by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya, Execution of the Madrilenos on May 3, 1808, conveys powerful messages of the artist’s own personal feelings to the current events in his world. The painting focuses on the French occupation in Madrid, where they executed many civilians who opposed the occupation. Being a native born Spaniard, Goya sympathized with the civilians and despised the tyranny of the French military. Goya uses the contrast of light to emphasize the different emotions in the painting. The faceless soldiers are shadowed to emphasize there lack of emotion in executing the innocent civilians, whose expressions are illuminated. Their helplessness is stressed by their expressions and emphasizes Goya’s protest to such cruel human violence. The sprawled victims show the merciless brutality of the troops by the many wounds they suffered and their blood streaming out onto the ground. These elements contrast the portrayal of violence in earlier art in which Neo-Classicism was used to depict war hostility without actual signs of violence. Goya further emphasizes the horror and despair of the scene by the landscape of the environment. The event takes place at night which symbolizes fear and desperation of man of enduring this darkness until the dawn. Unfortunately these victims will never see it again. They are hopelessly cornered against bare rock while their now occupied homes loom over them in the distance as sign all hope is now extinguished and death is inevitable.
The man in white can be absolutely conveys Goya’s message of protest to this mindless human cruelty. It is uncertain but perhaps the man could be a self portrait of Goya to show him taking side with the victims and extending his arms in defiance to the French. Goya’s depicts his feelings so powerfully in this painting that they become our own. He would never have accomplished this by using previous styles of art such as Neo-Classicism. The powerful expression of feeling in this painting therefore classifies it as romantic.
His own insightful nature and strong personal feelings, led Goya to directly express his values in his art. This direct form of expression could partially be accounted for Goya’s personal suffering due to the fact that he was totally deaf. Goya produced many pieces of art that stress the values of romanticism.His powerful forms of expression have led him to become one of the most important romantic painters during this time.