Romanticism or the Romantic Era, is an attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism and historiography in Western civilization over a period of the late 18th to the mid-19th century, in Germany, France and the United Kingdom in particular, but also in Belgium and the Netherlands. It was above all a counter reaction to the Enlightenment that had preceded before.

This period, partially a reaction to the Industrial Evolution, can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization and rationality that typified Classicism in general, with the Neoclassicism in particular. As we already mentioned, to some extent it was also a reaction against the Enlightenment and 18th century rationalism and physical materialism, preferring the medieval rather than the classical. During the Romantic Era, subjective experience was taking as the starting point. As a result, Romanticism emphasized the individual, subjective, irrational, imaginative, personal, spontaneous, emotional, visionary and transcendental as a center stage. As a source of knowledge, romantics put the not directly sensory perception above intellectual rational knowledge. They focused on the past in which the present would be rooted and without those roots the present could not be known.

Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature, a general exaltation of emotion over reason and the senses over intellect. There was a turning point upon the self and heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities. The artist got a new view as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures.

It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble. Romanticism revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early urban sprawl and industrialism. The imagination was a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth, an obsessive interest in the folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins and a predilection for the exotic, remote, mysterious, weird, occult, monstrous, diseased and even satanic.

However the events and ideologies of the French Revolution were proximate factors. Romanticism assigned a high value to the achievements of heroic individualists, whose examples would raise the quality of society.