In an era that sees Europe as the protagonist of a dramatic period, a literary, artistic and philosophical movement, known as Romanticism, was born. Although it appeared for the first time in Germany, in the 1700s, and then spread throughout Europe in the 1800s, the term romanticism derives from the English word romantic, used to describe the romances of chivalry in the Middle Ages, which told fantastic stories based on contexts, real historians. (Honour, H. and Fleming, J., 2009) Romanticism bases its ideals by opposing classical beauty, rationality and Neoclassicism with the imagination, spirituality and individual creativity, elevating the idea that human beings are in harmony with themselves only through freedom. While the Neoclassical artists believed that the ancients had achieved the perfection of art and considered the Middle Ages as a purely negative period, the romantics, on the other hand, draw inspiration from it. Therefore, the Middle Ages was widely re-evaluated by the romantics, considered a period of mystical and religious importance men placed great attention and reverence towards the world. Furthermore, in that period, born the concept of the united nation, where the work was all the result of ingenuity and the human hand and not entrusted to machines. Machines, increasingly present in large cities, were despised by the Romantics as they had supplanted craftsmanship, considerably lowering the quality of the objects produced. (Dissidentvoice.org. 2020) The Romantic man, living isolated from the technological world and feeling the need to connect with God, since its strengths were disproportionate to his ideals, lived in an extreme pessimism. “Man is born free and is chained everywhere.� (J.J. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762) Melancholy led artists to a life of inner suffering and pain, encouraging them to focus on their individualism, feeling, devotion and exoticism. Taking over, the principle of irrationality explained the essence of man as an exploration of the irrational or an investigation of everything that escapes logic in the sphere of sentiment and passion. Moreover, considered as a creative genius in contact with the infinite, because crossed by a great desire, the romantic was an individual who pursued his autonomy, rebelling against the rigid rules of the artistic tradition and bourgeois conformity. The romantic idea did not distinguish art and life however, made art to be the only way of escaping materialism through nature. According to the conception of this movement, nature was the main engine of reality, able to provide images to man, which lead to two feelings: the picturesque and the sublime, features ubiquitous in romantic landscapes and, more generally, in the Romantic portrayal. (Encyclopaedia Britannica. 2020) In 1947, Paulo Coelho, one of the most loved and influential living examples of neo-romantic writers of our time, born in Brazil, from a middle-class and Catholic family. Although he came from a different era, his ideologies and life choices contain similarities with this artistic current. The rebellion and obsessiveness in affirming his creativity, through writing, lead Coelho to have conflicts with his parents, who did not support this passion of his. Being a bourgeois and prominent family, the parents wanted it to follow a traditional path, consisting of discipline and religion, which led Coelho to rebel. “ The chains of rigour were so heavy throughout my youth that very quickly I started to doubt
this religion that showed no mercy, only constraint and suffering. I remember being obliged to attend mess and the constant threats of hell in the mouth of the priests. Everything was sin, everything was forbidden, joy was ruled out.� (paulocoelhoblog.com, 2016) Due to the constant clashes with the parents, and believing his rebellion to be a mental disorder, his mother sent him to a psychiatric hospital. He was subjected to electroshock, marking his entire life. This traumatic adolescence, defined by the severity of parents, priests and doctors, pushed the writer to leave his hometown, to be free to profess his ideas and follow his vocation. During the following years, Coelho became a guerrilla and a follower of the political and social ideology of Karl Marx, an exponent of romanticism movement, that questioned capitalism and called for a radical change in society. His desire to reform the world, lead him to be arrested and tortured, passing from being a misunderstood teenager by his parents to a misunderstood adult by society. (Mayer, C., 2017) Believing that each human being is unique, Coelho never adapted himself or followed any rules imposes by society. In Romanticism, the artists who preserved their soul and conscience, exposing their interests and feelings to discover their true essence were definite as a genius. (More, V. 2015) Today, he is known as one of the most famous Latin American authors capable of enchanting his worldwide readers with his novel for nearly three decades. Coelho hard life has led him to have a similar vision of the world to the Romantics of the 19th century. Going against the social constructs imposed on him, he developed the desire to undertake an internal journey to free himself from the chains that keep the human beings attach to material life and elevate his spirit from the corruption of the modern era. As a result of his philosophy, Coelho wrote many books, most of which reputed as masterpieces. In these books, he underlines the importance of the individual human experience, the mysticism, the nature as sublime and the symbols as a visual translation of the unspeakable. Nowadays, likewise the Romantic era, images are a fundamental element in advertising communication. Their role is essential in arousing curiosity or interest and capturing viewer attention, directing him on purchasing the publication. In such wise, Paulo Coelho publishing house committed his cover books, representing his philosophy and reflecting the contents and themes through images. (Vastani, S., 2015)
The Pilgrimage is the first autobiographical book written by Coelho, where he expresses the concept of nature power, embarking himself on a spiritual pilgrimage started in France and ended in Santiago de Compostela. (Coelho, P. 2003a) The symbolisms contained in the book, are fundamental since they push the protagonist to investigate on the meaning and the purpose of his journey. The cover book invokes nature seen as a transcendental space of shelter, as something that cannot be understood ordinarily, and it is then that symbols and feelings have acquired their importance: it is in fact through them that men understand the true essence of their purpose, totally connected with the surrounding nature. In the Romantic era, artists applied symbols to their visual art, giving their representations realistic imagery and point of views, which generally hidden psychological contents. (Tate,n.d) The use of colour is not a coincidence; it contains many shades of blue starting with the darkness on the bottom and arriving at the light and clear blue on the top. It suggests how important it is to elevate your spirit in a vertical way to arrive at the lightest side of your soul. The background is not vivid but leaves room to a blurred landscape that merges with the sky, to make a man disappear in the vagueness of a material space that offers no support and even though the book talks about a man and his journey, in the cover book, there is not any representation of human beings. Romantic ideology tends to attribute the expression of the moods of nature which, depending on the case, can be a sweet mother or terrible stepmother. The cover book presents natural elements captured in all their essentiality, giving the sense of the picturesque. If for classical culture the ideal beauty is represented by regularity and perfection, for the Picturesque beauty is to be found in diversity, in continuous change and uncontaminated nature, capable of arousing sudden, unexpected and therefore pleasant sensations. (Honour, H. and Fleming, J., 2009) The presence of the blue colour reflects the melancholy and nostalgia present in Romanticism; as a finite being, the romantic tends to infinity, of which nature is the immanent manifestation and the experience of it generates the sublime in man: wonder and terror, a lack that relegates him to an irreparable situation of unsatisfaction and leads to a sense of powerlessness towards the greatness of nature. Indeed, the image seems to invite the public to carry on discovering the unknown, which has behind a beautiful and mysterious meaning, leading to the light. “We must never stop dreaming. Dreams provide nourishment for the soul, just as a meal does for the body. Many times, in our lives we see our dreams shattered and our desires frustrated, but we have to continue dreaming. If we do not, our soul dies, and agape cannot reach it.� (Coelho, P. 2003a)
A year later the Pilgrimage was published, Paulo Coelho wrote The Alchemist. Originally in Portuguese, this book was translated into 44 other languages and sold more than 11 million copies, making Coelho famous worldwide. Like the previous cover, the nature is the main protagonist, represented by a landscape coloured by orange, which conveys a much warmer setting than the first book. The concept of nature represents one of the great themes of romanticism, especially the German one. Indeed, the ardour towards nature finds its roots in the cultural climate of the "Sturm und Drang", in English "storm and stress" born in Germany, which constitutes the most significant aspects of this movement. (Encyclopaedia Britannica. n.d.) The investigation of this current analyses the relationship between the individual and nature and between the individual and society. As society bound men to specific duties, hindering them to achieve their dreams, they arrived to believe that men could satisfy their aspirations only thanks to nature. This concept of nature, expressed in romanticism, is no longer seen as an object to be studied or controlled, but as a dynamic, living and animated force organized according to pairs of opposing forces, formed by positive and negative poles that constitute the dynamic units. Additionally, nature assumes a spiritual meaning, considered as the manifestation of the spirit that reproduces itself in an unchangeable way and that comes to reveal itself only at the end. The darkest point is represented by a building on the side as if to underline that human artifice is the worst part of a spiritual journey and the wrong aspect to focus the attention. The union between the clouds and the building emphasise the power of nature seen as something capable of destroying anything built by men. "And, when you want something, the whole universe conspires to help you achieve it." (Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist, 1988)
In 2008, Paulo Coelho published The Winner Stands Alone in which he analyses the lives of different characters belonging to the upper-class; the novel, set at the annual International Cannes Film Festival, happening in only 24 hours. It talks about a psychopath man whom intents to win back the love of his ex-wife. The story goes along with a different point of view from different successful characters. (Coelho, P. 2008a) This cover book is different from the others analysed before: the cover’s outlines blur into black, giving a sense of mystery and a suspicious profile to the picture. In the foreground, the female figure intents to transpire the theme of love in the book. Coelho often talks about the face of the Great Mother Goddess as the female aspect of divinity. Like the romantics, he compares the spiritual experiences with the path of love, analysing that, despite love bring suffering, it led people closer to the spiritual experience. In Romanticism, in fact, the woman represented love, sensibility and kind. Intellectuals and especially poets described love as a mad feeling able to tarnish your mind. For them, love was an invincible fatality because it gives the vital impulse in happiness, but it transforms itself into a desperate passion that leads people to accomplish the most abominable crimes, like betrayals, destruction of the love one, suicides, murders. (More, V. 2015) On the cover, the woman is on a red carpet, surrounded by photographers shooting their pictures. She poses with a dress that seems to be expensive and gets ready to climb the stairs in front of her, which symbolises how these upper-class’s characters desire to rise to the “superclass”, that is a little group of elites described often as shallow, a bit ignorant and with no need to work because already rich enough to have everything they want. Here Coelho opens a satire of society’s obsession with fame and fortune underlining that people, to get there, are capable of everything. This criticism can be reconnected with the same point of view that romantic intellectuals had during their time towards their society. They rejected the materialism world in the same way that Coelho is denouncing the thirst of fame and power in which his characters are inspiring. “People are never satisfied. If they have a little, they want more. If they have a lot, they want still more. Once they have more, they wish they could be happy with little, but are incapable of making the slightest effort in that direction.” (Coelho, P. 2008a)
Veronika decides to Die was written and published in 1998. Based on his own experience in mental institutions, it talks about Veronika, who in her 20s seems to have everything in life but when she realises that is all ephemeral decides to kill herself to find freedom. Unfortunately for her will she fail in the action and she wakes up in a mental hospital where doctors say she damaged her heart, and she has just a few days to live. She starts to appreciate life more, living without inhibitions as she has nothing to lose. She meets a lot of patients and getting to know them she starts to question the nature of madness. She even falls in love for one of them, and at the dawn of her last 24 hours her doctor reveals that it was not true that she was dying but he said it just to shock her into appreciating life. Perhaps without intention, Coelho in this book takes in hand one of the most relevant theme in Romanticism: the death as a way to free yourself from troubles. The theme of death is often taken up by Coelho, not always with a negative meaning, in which instead, he celebrates the man and his will to continue living despite his days numbered. To find this will the human being is forced to look forward to his life and come back to believe in the afterlife. Romantic intellectuals used to look at the death with no fears but to escape from reality and become part of the universe again, finally falling asleep for eternity and having the opportunity to dream endlessly, in which a man can see his innermost thoughts and desire and accomplish them. The romantic men saw themselves as lonely outsiders, that is why they realised works containing supernatural entities, such as monsters and vampires, portrayed as half-man and half-animal, which could not die because already dead, representing the death of their soul with the union of their melancholy and the modern era, which ranges from a sense of reflectivity to a sense of mourning. “Death frees from the fear of dying� (Coelho, P. 2014) Paulo Coelho embodies the romantic man of the 18th century in all, or almost all, of its aspects. In his books, he analyses themes and ideas belonging to romanticism even though he belongs to another era, resuming attitudes such as symbolism, religion, reason, personal individuality and the journey to unknown places, from which he takes inspiration. Coelho questions himself and his behaviour to understand the purpose of his life. He reflects on the need to detach himself from society materialism and elevate to reach inner happiness. Furthermore, Coelho believes that each human being is unique, each with his instincts. However, society always imposes to behave in a certain way and when the human being does not follow the conventions, it punishes him. (More, V. 2015) In conclusion, Romanticism still exists today, not only because some of its needs are universal, such as the aspiration to infinity, sensitivity, the anguish of universal doubt, restlessness and dissatisfaction, the clash between ideal and real, but also for the current active individualism, which involves the autonomy of the individual, limited however by the full mastery that he must have over himself and by the concept of the superiority of the interest of the social fabric to which he belongs. (Dissidentvoice.org. 2020)