Caspar David Friedrich: Landscape as Language

In Germany, as in England, landscape was the finest achievement of Romantic painting, and Friedrich is the outstanding German painter in this field. His landscapes symbolize and express subjective human experience; his approach to nature is naïve and his religious thought has a melancholy aspect. The pantheistic interpretation of landscape in Friedrich's art - that is to say, the sense of God informing the universe - made an important break with tradition. At first glance, many of the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich may not strike us as religious in theme. They depict empty moorlands, becalmed ships, lone trees on the horizon, perhaps a ruined church or churchyard gate. His technique is often stunningly illusionistic, recreating the visual world in a way which we might think earthly rather than spiritual. Yet, as Walter Koch is at pains to reveal here, all the artist's work carry an intense contemplative atmosphere, in the light of which we come to perceive a symbolism also at work - each lone tree, spire or mast is a recollection of Calvary, and each threshold, gateway or vista stretching before us speaks of entry into an eternal, spiritual world. As in anothe film in this section, Rembrandt's Christ, in which seemingly 'secular' landscapes are juxtaposed with biblical events to reveal the religious intensity which the artist sensed was manifest in the 'neutral', natural world, so here we are shown Friedrich's pantheistic notion of nature embodying the divine.

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