This structure contains a colonnaded dome, a Neoclassical version like that found at St. Peter's in Rome. However, although the entire building, both inside and out, reflects the Roman style, it is essentially Gothic. Another example is the Virginia State House in Richmond, designed by Thomas Jefferson (1743 to 1826) which resembles a Roman temple and is based on Jefferson's "admiration for the pure beauty of antiquity and as a symbol of an idealized Roman Republic government." 6 a prime example of sculpture from this period can be found in the works of Antonio Canova (1757 to 1822), specifically his Pauline Borghese as Venus (1808) which shows "the victorious Venus personified as the goddess of love with all of her voluptuousness and exquisite beauty" and recalls the earlier Rococo style when important women of society were often represented as semi-nude goddesses. 7 After 1750, another new style of artistic expression came about known as Romanticism which originated among certain German critics who wished to distinguish modern traits from classical traits. Of course, the term romance can refer to the literary novel form with its sentimental heroes and to the old Medieval tales of adventure written in the Romance languages of Europe. Overall, Romanticism as a form of artistic expression in painting, sculpture and architecture symbolizes "the freedom of inquiry and criticism, along with personal judgments leveled at established forms and values and which arouses pleasant, aesthetically-pleased emotions in the viewer." 8

One of the best representative artists of this period,...

As a giant of Western art, Goya invented his own impressionistic realism long before the Impressionist painters of France. Between 1794 and 1799, Goya created a series of satirical paintings called Los Caprichos ("The Caprices") in which monsters, grotesques and caricatured men and women "represent the repulsiveness of human stupidity and folly." One other painter of this period is Jacques Louis David (1748 to 1825), regarded as the father of academic art produced under the patronage of France. As Arthur B. Williams sees it, Goya and David symbolize the epitome of early Romantic art and rebelled against "the Rococo as artificial while exalting the classical styles of the Neoclassic period" in order to create "an imitation of nature in her most beautiful and perfect form." 9 Thus, the Romantic period in Western art began with the rise of such great artists as Goya and David and gradually led into another period and style known as Impressionism which allowed some of the most gifted artists of all time to produce a number of truly startling and revolutionary works.
ENDNOTES

Williams, Arthur B. Art of Eighteenth-Century Europe. New York: Abrams Publishing, Inc., 2003, 67.

A de la Croix, Horst. Art Through the Ages. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, 2001, 630.

Williams, 90.

A de la Croix, 660.

Williams, 156.

Works Cited

De la Croix, Horst, ed.,…