The German romantic
painter Caspar David Friedrich, b. Sept. 5, 1774, d. May 7, 1840, was
one of the greatest exponents in European art of the symbolic landscape.
He studied at the Academy in Copenhagen (1794-98), and subsequently settled
in Dresden, often traveling to other parts of Germany. Friedrich's landscapes
are based entirely on those of northern Germany and are beautiful renderings
of trees, hills, harbors, morning mists, and other light effects based
on a close observation of nature.
Some of Friedrich's best-known paintings are expressions of a religious
mysticism. In 1808 he exhibited one of his most controversial paintings,
The Cross in the Mountains (Gemaldegalerie, Dresden), in which--for the
first time in Christian art--an altarpiece was conceived in terms of a
pure landscape. The cross, viewed obliquely from behind, is an insignificant
element in the composition. More important are the dominant rays of the
evening sun, which the artist said depicted the setting of the old, pre-Christian
world. The mountain symbolizes an immovable faith, while the fir trees
are an allegory of hope. Friedrich painted several other important compositions
in which crosses dominate a landscape.
Even some of Friedrich's apparently nonsymbolic paintings contain inner
meanings, clues to which are provided either by the artist's writings
or those of his literary friends. For example, a landscape showing a ruined
abbey in the snow, Abbey with Oak Trees (1810; Schloss Charlottenburg,
Berlin), can be appreciated on one level as a bleak, winter scene, but
the painter also intended the composition to represent both the church
shaken by the Reformation and the transitoriness of earthly things.