Saturn Devouring His Son, The Gleaners, And

Description: According to Scheidenhelm, “Romanticism tends to see the individual at the center of all life, and it places the individual at the center of art, making literature valuable as an expression of unique feelings and particular attitudes more than it values completeness, unity, or demands of genre.” In this time period, everyone was really starting to step outside of the box. Francisco Goya’s oil painting of Saturn Devouring His Son comes from a short story where Saturn learns of his fate, that one of his sons will kill him in order to take over for themselves. He decided to not live in fear, and instead to eat his children moments after they are born (Vallone). The whole painting is dark and dreary, exerting only dull colors. Because
I was immediately captivated on the emotion displayed in Saturn’s eyes in Goya’s painting. He looks really scared as if he was immersed with some type of inner demon that he cannot handle. It is by no means a beautiful piece of art, but rather one that is raw, painful, and dark. On the other hand, Millet’s painting expressed emotion in a completely different way through the three women. Times were very hard back then, and this painting makes a powerful and timeless statement about the working class. The emotion of the three women is especially strong by not showing their faces, and instead focusing on the coarse curves of the women’s figures and the remorseless hunching of the backs. Chopin’s piece expresses powerful emotion with finely detailed beauty. Chopin created the piece in hopes that it would invoke in the listener the same emotions he would have felt. The Romantics were all about emotional expression. Individualism was an important, fast rising development in the Romantic Period. At this time, people were beginning to realize that they were now able to start pursuing their individual tastes in way that was not possible before. Individualism is portrayed in all three pieces. All three are distinctly different and have their own tastes in the pieces. The artists and composers were discovering their own individual identities in each painting and composition. According to Brians, “The modern fascination with self-definition and self-invention, the notion that adolescence is naturally a time of rebellion in which one "finds oneself," the idea that the best path to faith is through individual