Julie Ramos Examines Romanticism's Musical-Painting Nexus

In 'Nostalgie de l'unité', published by Presses universitaires de Rennes, Julie Ramos explores the complex relationship between painting and music within early German Romanticism. The study reveals a Romanticism marked by tensions and reversals, driven by a dialectic between an ideal of unity and its impossible or partial realization. Ramos demonstrates that the Romantic blurring of artistic boundaries was based on a shared desire among painters, writers, and intellectuals to 'musicalize painting'—to inscribe temporality and immateriality into the visible. This challenge to neoclassical taxonomy and traditional mimesis relied on an innovative conception of instrumental music and harmony, fostering artistic autonomy, and a religious view of nature. The conjunction of painting and music is particularly evident in the idea of the musical landscape, traced through Philipp Otto Runge's 1803 project 'The Times of Day' and Caspar David Friedrich's 1830 transparencies. These pictorial translations of timbre and rhythm through color and line prefigure later debates on synesthesia and the total artwork, and contribute to the emergence of abstract works by Kupka, Kandinsky, and Klee.