Romantic Inter-Mediality

by Berthold Hoeckner, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Chicago

by David Wellbery, Professor of Germanic Studies and Social Thought at the University of Chicago

last edited on Fri. May 15 2015

Romanticism is the spawning bed in which the idea of the “total work of art” was born. Its artists and theoreticians understood the arts of poetry, music, painting (drawing), and theater as united by the subterranean flow of the imagination.

The suite of images presented in the Objects and Voices micro-exhibition Romantic Inter-Mediality highlights the musical aspects of landscape, the visual aspects of poetry, and the theatrical synthesis of the arts.

Song dissolves in the graphic image. Arresting vistas resound as memorable moods. And Germany’s greatest work of dramatic art is rendered in pregnant moments that recall the style of Albrecht Dürer.

A version of this article was originally published in the gallery guide to Objects and Voices.

Romantic Inter-Mediality is made possible by The IFPDA Foundation.

Here visual representation deepens rather than limits our appreciation of the poet's imagined world”