Inspiration

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German Romanticism

This [uniquely German movement], inspired by the Middle Ages, regarded art as a product of emotion akin to religious devotion, and valued states of solitude and introspection, together with qualities of mystery, intangibility, and the unattainable.

Knowledge and understanding, the Romantics believed, were acquired not from a mastery of facts, but through imagination and revelation, and they chose to convey meaning through symbols, allegories, and hieroglyphs, referents that are indirect and endlessly suggestive. They came to admire landscape not merely as a reproduction of the material world, but as a genre infused with the highest spiritual content.

German Romanticism: The Search for “A Quiet Place”

Carl Wilhelm Kolbe (German; 1759-1835), Bathing Girl (1800)