Pg. 23, "The dazzling give and take of the interchange between Voltaire and the king on the subject of war had been conceived behind that brow; those eyes, wearily peering out through their lenses, had seen the gory inferno of the sick bays in the Seven Years War. On a personal level, too, art is life intensified: it delights more deeply, consumes more rapidly; it engraves the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventure on the countenance of its servant and in the long run, for all the monastic calm of his external existence, leads to self-indulgence, overrefinement, lethargy and a restless curiosity that a lifetime of wild passions and pleasures could scarcely engender (Death in Venice, Pg. 23)".

Mann uses Romantic elements in Death in Venice; in a way idealizing the Aschenbach character.

ROMANTICISM

Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly thought of as "romantic," although love may occasionally be the subject of Romantic art. Rather, it is an international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world.

Simultaneously, as opposed to everyday subjects, various forms of the exotic in time and/or place also gained favor, for the Romantics were also fascinated with realms of existence that were, by definition, prior to or opposed to the ordered conceptions of "objective" reason. Often, both the everyday and the exotic appeared together in paradoxical combinations.

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/rom.html

As Aschenbach dreams: "In the glow of some smoky embers he discerned a mountainous region similar to the one in which his summerhouse was located, and down from the wooded heights, in the spotty light, past tree trunks and mossy boulders, down tumbled whirling men and beast, a swarm, a raging horde, inundating the slope with bodies, flames, bedlam, a reeling rounddance: women, stumbling over long hide garments hanging free from the waist, shaking tambourines over heads flung back and moaning. Brandishing blazing, sparking torches and naked daggers, holding up snakes with flickering tongues by the middle of their bodies, or cupping their breasts in both hands and shrieking; men with horns coming out of their foreheads, fur loincloths, and shaggy torsos, with necks bent and arms and thighs raised, with a pounding of brazen cymbals and frenzied beating of drums; smooth-skinned youths prodding he-goats with leafy staffs, clutching their horns, letting themselves be dragged along and whooping at each leap (Death in Venice. Chapter 5, pages 126-127)."

A definition and examination needs of Romanticism as a movement to be explored in order to better understand the context with which it can used with Thomas Mann and in particular, in relation to “Death in Venice”.

Romanticism

Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution.[1] It was partly a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature, and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature.

The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and custom to something noble, and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage.

Our modern sense of a romantic character is sometimes based on Byronic or Romantic ideals. Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar and distant in modes more authentic than chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.

The ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which Romanticism emerged. The confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.

Characteristics

In a general sense, the term "Romanticism" has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers, musicians, as well as political, philosophical and social thinkers of the late eighteenth and early to mid nineteenth centuries. It has equally been used to refer to various artistic, intellectual, and social trends of that era. Despite this general usage of the term, a precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism has been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the twentieth century, without any great measure of consensus emerging. Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some see in it the inaugural moment of modernity, some see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to the Enlightenment— a Counter-Enlightenment— and still others place it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution. An earlier definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling."[2]