Symbolism

A late 19th-century European movement, generally rooted in Romanticism, that was originally literary but expanded to the visual arts, where it was manifested as the painting of ideas. Although the term itself was much debated and the works to which it applied involved a vast array of concepts and concerns, Symbolism generally sought to counter 19th-century materialist thought and the Industrial Revolution with an involvement in emotions, the artificial and unnatural, spiritual life, and earlier models of experience.