Double Transformation

From1789to1848, France witnessed the most tremendous period of shakiness. swamping in revolutions between toppling and resetting social orders. Painting during this time was subject to profound transformations and transitions in a dual sense of subject and narrative convention. For the former, the fatal waning of religion emerged as a painting subject, which was also trendy in realms of fiction, theater, and poetry; for the latter, artists started to bring in their painting literal narrative, dramatic and poetic qualities.The dual transformation was bestowed by literature, which was the art practice of dominancy from the late18th to early half of19th century. The Enlightenment in the18th century and the growing bourgeois altogether contributed to social secularization, matched by the raising standing of intellectuals, freelancing, and striving for publishing freedom, literature in the circumstance unleashed in secularization and market principles from both religion and elitism. Technologically, reading proliferated among almost all social classes from improvement of printing, increasing literacy rate, thriving theater going, and the widespread of public reading rooms. Figures like Chateaubriand, Hugo, Byron, Goethe, Scott had become idols at the summit of Romanticism, the influence exerted reached all art forms including painting. Undeniably, in a time of revolutionary enthusiasm and dictatorship substituting one another, all of the movements inevitably intertwined with ideology, social upheavals and Zeitgeist. Be it idealism of the Enlightenment era, ambition of Napoleon, raising up of the middle class, or the mal du siecle followed the defeat, all manifested in very specific forms, among those La Nouvelle Heloise(1761) readers falling over each other at bookstalls, in all pirated books published underground in France, those liberalists and royalists throwing at each other umbrellas and walking sticks in theaters, those artistic and romantic youths haunted by The Sorrows of Young Werther and Chatterton, and Byronism in Romantic painting, which in term effected the dual transformation of painting in such a subtle manner. The present paper attempts to approach Neoclassical and Romantic painting through a socio-cultural historical perspective, and deeply analysis the transformations in literary painting and their narrative conventions during a period from1789to1848.