La sphère romantique – la cathédrale

Abstract

The paper draws its hypothesis from Romanticism: one way to understand modern (post-Revolution) French aesthetic thought is the interpretation and comparison of the reflections on historical (external) and psychological (internal) time and space. Romantic thinkers used innumerable metaphors for history, and some of these are closely related to images representing contemporary perspectives on space (circle, spiral, sphere) that are not exclusively typical to this particular age, but they were already expressing a possible attitude to the world whereMan ismostly at the centre, and they also give an anthropomorphic character to Man’s surroundings.