Romania of those times was no different. The three provinces inhabited by Romanians (Transylvania, Moldavia and Wallachia) found themselves under different spheres of geopolitical influence. They were denied their union in 1600 when Michael the Brave unified the three only to be assassinated a year later. The three provinces feel again under different “masters” – Transylvania became part of the House of Habsburg, Wallachia part of the Turkish Empire and Moldavia remained solitary, fighting off Tatar invasions. It was not until 1859 that Moldavia and Wallachia finally united (in what is known today as The Small Union) and became The Great Kingdom of Romania. Transylvania will not take its place in this union until the devastating conclusion of World War One. 

            Beginning with the Small Union of 1859 nationalistic themes began to appear in the Romanian arts. The Kingdom of Romania’s capital, the city of Bucharest, was enjoying the same francophonic influences as Saint Petersburg was under the Great Duchess Catherine.  The extravagant architecture and cosmopolitan high culture of this period won Bucharest the nickname of “The Paris of the East” (or “Little Paris”, Micul Paris), with Calea Victoriei as its Champs-Élysées or Fifth Avenue. 

            Not everyone in the country appreciated the foreign influences manifested by the urban culture. Most of the artists of the period ridiculed the behaviors of the bourgeoisie and advocated for a return to the Romanian spirit, traditions and habits, much like the great artists in Russia. This artistic current was further fueled by the desire of the Romanians to bring Transylvania into the union and complete the unification of the provinces once and for all.

            Music: One of the most extraordinary composers of the period was Ciprian Porumbescu (1853-1883). (hint: if you come across a last name that ends in ‘escu’ chances are that it is a Romanian name). His beautiful Ballad for Violin and Orchestra skillfully introduces into the world of classical music the traditional Romanian leitmotif of “doina”.  Doina is poetic and often melancholic. Doinas are often played with a slow, free rhythm melody against a fast accompaniment pattern in fixed tempo, giving an overall feeling of rhythmic tension. The skillful way in which the Romanian composer masters to introduce this folkloric motif into a classical composition is amazing. It is also a good representation of the way that nationalism penetrated the arts, with artists focused on promoting national elements. (For a contemporary example of how Romanian Romanticism transcended through time I invite you to listen to The Lonely Sheppard played by Gheorghe Zamfir on pan flute – you might recognize this song from the soundtrack of Kill Bill)  

            Painting:  Nicolae Grigorescu (1838-1907) can be associated with the period’s nationalistic movement. During his carrier he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and had as colleagues Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Jean-François Millet, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Gustave Courbet and Théodore Rousseau. Early in his career he concentrated more on drawing and composition and later on he looked for new means of expression and followed the trend of en plein air painting.

The compositions that I have selected to illustrate the nationalistic tendencies are Happy Peasant Girl, Cart with Oxen and Peasant Girl from Muscel. In the Happy Peasant Girl the image of the girls strikes me as a portrait of Romanian spirit. Her eyes are honest; her posture open, welcoming and her attitude is hospitable, much like the Romanian culture traditionally is thought to be. I see this in opposition with the French tendencies to introduce sexual tension in the portraits of women. There is no sexual tension here because this is a traditional girl acting in a traditional way. The second composition Cart with Oxen is very similar with Ilya Repin’s Leo Tolstoy Ploughing. It is meant to show the Romanian’s attachment to land, its main mean of existence.

            Poetry: The same theme of land as quintessence of the Romanian spirit comes across in the works of George Cosbuc (1866-1918). He is probably one of the most nationalistic poets of the time. This can be understood if we consider the fact that he was still living in a Romanian land found under the Austro-Hungarian occupation (Transylvania). He was one of many poets who led the charge for unification with what was called “the mother land”. I have selected the poem called We want land to illustrate the theme of land as a symbol of Romanian cultural identity. (Appendix 3)The voice of the poem can be any of the hundred of thousands of suppressed voices that were starting to question the foreigner’s right to rule them. Along the lines of the poem we also see another motif that identifies with the Romanian spirit: the Romanian commoner’s ability to suffer in silence and endure punishment only to explode later into violent revolt in search for social balance. This theme can be repeatedly seen throughout the country’s history. The final stanza of the poem is very strong in its message and it is viewed by the Romanians as the symbol of their fight for independence.

One of the most beautiful English Gardens today is the Englischer Garten located in Munich, Germany. It covers an area of more than 2 square miles, from the city’s center all the way to its northern limits.  It is bigger that the New York City’s Central Par but smaller than Richmond Park in London, which is the biggest city park in Europe. It includes a beer garden that can seat 2500 visitors at one tine (who are there to admire the nature, off course), a Japanese tea house, a Chinese pagoda, a monopteros(Greek stile temple), and why not, a nude sunbathing spot (I believe quite different than what Capability brown had imagined for the future of his work). The total length of the pathways is 578 Km (approximately 360 miles), the length of its streams is approximately 5 miles, it has over 100 bridges and it contains over 50 species of birds.

For more information about this beautiful park please visit the park’s official web site.

We all know what a garden is. But why is it English? Well, let’s just say that it has a British “accent”.

            According to Wikipedia the English Garden is a type of garden that has as defining elements “statues, water and the surrounding land.” Probably the accent should be put on the term “surrounding land” since the other elements can easily be found in other different types of gardens.

            The Greeks and the Romans were among the first in the western culture to start developing the idea of the garden as a place of perfection, purity and beauty where one could find peace. It was a sublime refugee from the imperfect world around them. It constituted also a place where the humans could take control over the irregularities and randomness of the nature and model it to their own taste. One of the most influential gardens from European antiquity surrounded the villa of the emperor Hadrian at Tivoli, near Rome. The garden covered approximately seven square miles and included theaters, baths, libraries, sculpture gardens and pavilions of an enormous extent. (www. Litencyc.com). Most of the other early gardens we know of in Greece, in Roman villas, in the Islamic world, in Japan and in medieval Europe were enclosed courtyards. During the fifteenth century in Italy and Spain gardens that borrowed their elements from nature and relocated them in enclosed spaces began to appear. 

            During Europe’s Dark Ages gardening was mostly left aside because people were too busy trying to stay alive. However, starting with the Renascence and continuing into the Baroque period, the idea of the garden as a way to represent nature’s perfection began to reemerge. The French garden, which began to impose itself as the leading landscape in the nobility’s preferences, had developed first and it mirrored a return to the Greek and Roman tendencies to bring perfection into the natural landscape. This trend was further accentuated during the neoclassical period when the whole society was looking for ways to bring the classical aspects inherited from Greeks and Romans into their daily life.

            Good illustrations of the elements of the French garden are the gardens surrounding the palace of Versailles, located in Paris, France. A way to describe them would be that they are an unnatural depiction of nature. The paths are straight and they converge in precise geometrical patterns. Most of the elements that compose the gardens are symmetric and the bushes are trimmed to perfection. Like in ancient times, they are a representation of man exerting his influence over the nature and taking control. In this formal type of a garden, content becomes subservient to form. That is, nature supplies the plants but the gardeners apply such rigid guidelines in their arrangement that most of the attention is drawn to form.

            The English Gardens, coinciding with the birth of the Romantic current in arts, are almost the reverse of the French Gardens and their predecessors, the Greek and Roman gardens. Content becomes more important and their aesthetic properties received most of the attention. In this stile of garden, the eye is intended to be impressed by the diversity of the surroundings, distributed in a random pattern and suggesting thoughts of natural landscape. I would say that this way of looking at a garden fits very well the romantic tendencies of the time, when nature and the feelings created by it began to replace logic and reason. People started looking at nature with their hearts and were impressed more by the irrational harmony of the nature than by the logic and predictable manmade architecture.