Caspar David Friedrich
(Greifswald, September 5, 1774 - Dresden, May 7, 1840)
Friedrich is a German artist. From the point of view of technique, his painting is very close to that of neoclassical painters, but the themes of his paintings are deeply romantic: endless expanses of sea, tragic events such as shipwrecks, landscapes with Gothic ruins.
Georg Friedrich Kersting, Caspar David Friedrich in his study (ca.1819)
Georg Friedrich Kersting's painting is a portrait in which we see Friedrich at work in his studio in Dresden, a beautiful German city located along the Elbe River.
Friedrich is stationary in front of his easel and holds a palette and a long rod in his hand, a fundamental tool for the painters of the time that allowed him to rest the wrist of the hand and maintain a subtle and perfectly controlled sign. The studio is very bright and overlooks the large navigable river, populated by small and large boats.
Next, the map of Germany's largest island, Rügen, overlooking the Baltic Sea. Many of Friedrich's paintings are set here: by clicking on the image you can access the Google map where you can see many images of the coast with very high white cliffs overlooking the infinite expanse of the sea.
Caspar David Friedrich, The white cliffs of R ü gen (1818), Oskar Reinhart Am Römerholz Collection, Winterthur, Switzerland
Monk by the sea (1808 - 10)
Caspar David Friedrich, Monk by the Sea (1808-10) oil on canvas (110 x 171.5 cm), Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin
The painting immediately strikes us for the empty space and the very small size of the only character present.
It is clearly a representation of the sublime : the painting has a horizontal development; most of the painting is occupied by the sky of dawn with a thick dark fog that still thickens above the very dark sea moved by some ripples.
The monk is on a promontory from which he contemplates the immensity that surrounds him. The size of the character highlights the mood: in front of the spectacle of nature, the monk feels small.
The painting is large (171.5 cm) and being in front of it, the observer is captured by this immense space. The dark colors underline, once again, the quite dramatic mood of the monk: nature is strong and dominant and man knows he has no power over it.
Caspar, David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice ( The Shipwreck of Hope ), 1822
oil on canvas (98 x 128 cm)
Kunsthalle, Hamburg (Germany)
Let's look at the picture
In the background we see a wasteland, cold and icy, accompanied by a livid sky that seems almost an impenetrable wall, while the first floor is dominated by shattered ice sheets, which for the colors used could seem like the rubble of a building. The light is clear, the painting clear, so much so that the first impression could be that of being in front of a photograph.
In the structure of the work, we see that a group of plates in the background has a prevalent diagonal direction from right to left. The set of slabs forms a sort of pyramid, which however is a far cry from the straight pyramid which was the preferred structure of Renaissance artists. This pyramid has an inclined height, which rather reminds us of the diagonal compositions of the Mannerist period and which is taken up by another ice pyramid, with the same inclination, which is in the background.
In front of the slabs oriented to the left, we see a series of smaller plates oriented in the opposite direction, creating the impression of a rotating movement around the central axis of the painting.
The title of the work speaks of a shipwreck, but where is the ship?
To identify it we must carefully scrutinize the work and, only with difficulty, we can recognize more or less large fragments of a darker material that are what remains of a sailing ship crashed by impact with the pack ice. Nature, powerful and destructive, even when represented by an inert form such as an ice sheet might appear, has inexorably claimed its victims.
The work is inspired by the artist from one of the numerous shipwrecks of ships that had long been engaged in expeditions in search of the mythical 'north-west passage', a route that was supposed to connect the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean in the Northern hemisphere passing through the Arctic archipelago of Canada, within the Arctic Ocean. There had been so many failures, yet these explorers continued for years to heroically pursue their goal.
The subject of the painting, therefore, is not a simple pictorial restitution of reality, but is the representation of a 'stepmother' Nature , fundamentally hostile, against which man, even in his finitude, exercises his heroic qualities of resistance and perseverance. , even when everything seems doomed to failure.
Alongside this, the sense of the sublime also emerges, of that sensation of total absorption and dismay in the face of the strength and power of nature.
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer on the Sea of Fog (1818), oil on canvas (95 x 75 cm), Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg
Wanderer on the Sea of Fog (1818)
Always dear to me was this hermitage hill,
and this hedge, which goes so far
of the last horizon the gaze excludes.
But sitting and looking, take it forever
spaces beyond that, and superhuman
silence, and very deep stillness
in my thoughts I pretend, where for a little while
the heart is not afraid. And like the wind
I hear rustling among these plants, I that one
infinite silence to this voice
I am comparing: and I remember the eternal,
and the dead seasons, and the present
and alive, and the sound of her. So between this
immensity drowns my thought:
and shipwreck is sweet for me in this sea.
Selected poems: GIACOMO LEOPARDI, The infinite, May 28, 1819 (Canti, XII).
Look at the picture :
the format is vertical, to leave more space for the landscape that unfolds before the eyes of the protagonist.
We see him from behind and we don't know who he is. We sense that he is a young man in good physical health who has climbed a mountain path until he reaches a spur of rock on which he has climbed to be able to look at the valley below him.
You don't see much: the top of some mountain with some trees that give us the measure of things;
everything is immersed in the fog, a fog that moves like the waves of a sea and in this sea the mountain tops look like islands.
In the distance other mountains, less steep, and behind them, still others, more and more tenuous in colors ... they seem made of air.
The protagonist of the painting is not a historical figure and does not even represent a person of an important social class. Yet, he is in all respects a heroic character: the bearing is proud, the pose is that of someone who is the master of his own life. Alone, like all romantic heroes, he contemplates in front of him a wide, luminous, even if mysterious landscape. Thus it is the hero who dedicates his life to achieving a goal and leaves behind everything that could distract him from this goal.
This work has always been associated with Leopardi's poem Infinity, written only a year after the painting was made. These two works are inspired by the same romantic spirit, by the irresistible attraction for the limit that separates the ordinary finiteness of human life from being part of something greater, even at the cost of getting lost.