Perhaps I am Nitpicking the Mean Nurse...

This is in response to Lollote's post:

That is a good analysis and overview of Romanticism, but I don’t entirely agree with your last paragraph. The modern sensibility of art and the artist that many of us have definitely came from the Romantic period, and Romanticism had a very large impact on the course of European history. However, Romanticism was only a reaction to a way of viewing the world and creating art. Modernism, for the most part, was a conscious attempt to make a significant break with the past. Many romantics looked to the past for inspiration or used texts from the past in their work. They did react to Classicism, but they were continuing the traditions of European art and culture on at least a technical level, whereas the modernists put their focus mainly on the present and the future and experimented with the basic building blocks of their respective mediums. Perhaps that distinction is not strong enough, and the two movements were similar in many ways, particularly in terms of a rejection of the past and individuality, but I still think that, while Romanticism did break with the past to some extent, this break was not enough to warrant a division in European history between everything that happened before Romanticism and everything that happened after.