"Characteristic of Romantic art and literature are unfulfilled longing, passionate devotion, and a universal, poetic approach that makes room for the visionary, the irrational, and the sublime. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Symbolist painters such as Arnold Böcklin, Franz von Stuck, and James Ensor contrasted a worldview increasingly marked by science and technology with the dark side of life--the uncanny--as discovered by Romanticism. After World War I the Surrealists added a new aesthetic dimension to this, turning dreams and intoxicating experiences into sources of artistic inspiration. The fantastical, unsettling visual worlds of painters such as Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Salvador Dali conjure up the spirit of 'Dark Romanticism.' The original CD audio guide from the series Art to Hear revises the 'romanticizing' view of Romanticism and discusses important masterpieces with the help of a compact, illustrated companion book." --Publisher description.