The Triumph of Feeling

Before Romanticism, art was meant to depict the world objectively, morally, or beautifully. The Romantics changed both what art could do and what artists were expected to be:

• Géricault's Raft of the Medusa turned a political scandal into one of the most emotionally intense paintings ever made
• His psychiatric portraits treated mental illness with dignity unprecedented in art
• Blake's visionary worlds proved art could bypass reality and work from pure imagination
• Delacroix's color theory — stressing optical vibration and emotional impact — fed directly into Impressionism

That idea — that art should express individual feeling — remains the dominant model for artists today.