‘romanticism’ became an effective,though practically indefinable, umbrella term for a complex set of interrelated factors that not only reshaped the way western artists, writers and musicians understood their role but also, it was widely belived, had transformed people’s very sense of what it meant to be human. The root meaning of roman ticism, from the medieval narrative poems known as ‘romances’, associated the phenomenon with legand, fantasy, violence, passion and the isolated figure of the suffering young liero, traversing wild landscapes in pursuit of an ideal. This vision is mirrored in the new selfimage of the artist tht emerges around the 1970s: the lonely, heroic figure whose imagination gives privileged access to truths (that core value of the foregoing Enlinghtenment period).