In stark contrast to last week’s lecture we have Realism. Goya is one of my all-time favorite artists. I think that the realists get something particularly right about the way they decide to show what the real world looks like, and I have always liked that realism does not mean the same thing as naturalism. And the fact that when all of these artists decided they needed tos how the state of affairs as accurately to life as possible, their instinct was not to go towards the most life-like or illusionistic depiction of what the world looks like, but the most accurate synthesis of what it is to live in the real world.
Form takes precedence from color (again, opposite to romanticism) which is why these artists decided that light was particularly important, as it helped show the true form of things. Profe Plesch talked about this one Corot that she thinks the book miscategorizes as a romantic painting while it in fact is a great example of a realistic landscape. I think that honestly, from discussing wether this painting belonged to one period or the other I learnt a lot about what a realistic landscape is supposed to look like.