One of the most beautiful paintings in the Caspar David Friedrich show The Soul of Nature, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11, shows a roiling ocean crashing against a rocky coast by moonlight. The tiny figure of a monk stares out into the void, alone. The juxtaposition of terror and poetry brings to mind a line from the memoirs of François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, a contemporary of Friedrich’s and a fellow Romantic:
“Not a day passes when, reflecting on what I have been, I do not see in my mind’s eye the rock where I was born, the room where my mother inflicted life on me, the raging tempest that was my first lullaby…Heaven itself seemed so to arrange these circumstances to place in sight of my cradle an emblem of my destinies.”
Caspar David Friedrich’s life spanned an era of revolutionary quests for political liberty and a reaction which sought an internal, spiritual liberty away from the violence of politics. He was born in 1774 on the Baltic coast of Swedish Pomerania (now Germany), and he spent most of his life in Dresden, where he died in 1840. Friedrich rose to prominence as an artist in the first decade of the 19th century with large-scale watercolor and pencil drawings of landscapes imbued with a mystical spirituality. He was a perfect exemplar of the original generation of sensitive young men.
The year Friedrich was born, Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther, a proto-Romantic novel about a painfully sensitive young man who, following a sketching holiday in nature, is so overcome with unrequited love that he commits suicide. The success of the book was so immense that it led to international "Werther Fever," which caused young men to dress like the hero and even, reportedly, to commit copycat suicides.
Friedrich was a teenager at the time of the French Revolution, in which the German-speaking Queen of France was, from the perspective of traditional Europe, violently murdered in an act of martyrdom to the Catholic Church and the traditional family. Following the French Revolution, the artistic and intellectual youth of Europe divided along political and aesthetic lines. Some young people became revolutionaries; others, like Friedrich, became Romantics. They rejected both contemporary revolutionary politics and older Enlightenment values: Catholicism was preferable to Protestantism, pirates to merchants, the moon to the sun, a violent storm to a clear sky, and the crooked way to the straight path.
Friedrich’s early drawings and watercolor paintings, well-represented in this exhibition, show a focus on explicit depiction of religious icons, which will evolve in his later oil paintings to a focus on nature itself. A portent of his future direction, the ca. 1799 watercolor sketch Figures Contemplating the Moon, depicts two figures turning away from the large cross and church to admire a full moon, partially hidden between dramatic clouds.
We see the young artist developing a clear iconography and compositional style: most often, a mountain rises at the center of the work of art, with a cross or statue of the Virgin at its pinnacle. In the distance, pine covered hills rise and fall to an obscure background in which sea, sky, and mountains merge.
The Cross in the Mountains, from 1806, is a gorgeous example of his early mastery. A central peak is crowned by a life-size crucifix and back-lit pines. Beyond it is a turbulent sky which glows in the supernatural manner Friedrich is able to conjure from mere paper, brown watercolor, and pencil. Friedrich later adapted this drawing into an altarpiece, which caused a scandal at the time–its mixture of religious and natural imagery was thought by many to be sacrilegious.
By the time the viewer arrives at the pinnacle of the show, the cross has been replaced with the selfie. Friedrich’s most famous painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, painted in 1817, is the kind of painting that is so famous it is hard to see clearly. First, because on both of my visits, the view was blocked by a crowd of people whose backs mimicked those of the wanderer, although their raised iPhones did not. Second, because the painting has become a meme rather than a work of art. It is hard to look at it without thinking of the many reproductions, parodies, and posts it has inspired.
At the center of the painting, a man very much like Friedrich in age, build, and blondness stands with his back to the viewer, his feet planted on a rocky peak, looking down into a misty valley from which spooky rocks, pines, and mountains rise. A wall text informs us that the motif of the figure depicted from behind was known as the Rückenfigur and was meant to “prompt viewers’ imaginative engagement with the landscape.” If you have ever opened Instagram, you have seen many conscious and unconscious imitations of this painting, usually featuring shapely young women in yoga pants rather than men in green velvet suits. The engagement they are hoping to prompt from viewers is, I think we can assume, not with the landscape. Indeed, there are several Rückenfigurs in this exhibition depicting the artist’s wife, Caroline. Although she is just as lovely as any contemporary influencer, the depictions lack the sublimity of the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.
What are we to take from Friedrich’s painting? Is the young man a wanderer adrift, lost in the post-religious currents of the 19th century, unsure of where the ideologies of his age will lead, with the cross supplanted by the individual? Is his journey, as they say, the destination? As he stands at the edge of the cliff, is he thinking of beauty, nature, or suicide? Or is he, like the Rückenfigur selfie-taker of today, merely declaring I was here? Anyone who doubts the deep origins of this impulse can visit the Temple of Dendur on the other side of the museum, where Europeans of exactly the same age as Friedrich have left their names carved as graffiti onto the walls of the ancient temple.
Indeed, as much as The Soul of Nature inevitably stirs in the viewers’ mind the imagery and political currents of the present, it also calls back to a deeper past. The temporary exhibit is housed amongst the Greek and Roman statuary galleries, exactly where the sensitive young men of X/Twitter, with their Greek statue profile pics, would choose to place it. Moreover, the medieval imagery in the paintings is contemporary in its anachronism. In several of the paintings, young men of the 1800s are depicted in medieval costumes featuring a cape and beret. Friedrich’s inclusion of these costumes was rather daring, as they had been banned in 1819 because of their association with liberal student groups.
The first stirrings of landscape painting in European art came in the late medieval period. Artists who wanted to paint nature, mostly in Northern Europe, had to disguise their landscapes as depictions of the lives of saints. A beautiful example is in Gallery 613, in the Netherlandish painter Joachim Patinir’s 1515 triptych The Penitence of Saint Jerome, where the saint in the foreground occupies less space than the gorgeously rendered trees and water behind him. Over time, the saints in the foreground retreated farther and farther back, until, in Friedrich, the medieval background landscape has become the foreground. From the landscape creating the background to spiritual transformation, the landscape itself is the spiritual actor.
Such anachronisms are extremely modern in their ambiguity. At the same time as “medieval” costumes were being banned for their liberal symbolism, monarchs across Europe were enacting an iconographic war for the past. Revolutionaries cloaked themselves in the imagery of Ancient Roman democracy while reactionary royals commissioned palaces and artworks eliciting the Gothic style of the medieval past.
The connections between spirituality, nature, and man-made art are as old as spirituality, art, and possibly man himself. However, the specific context of Friedrich’s work is relevant to the present. Robert Eggers’ 2024 film Nosferatu is set in a fictional German town on the Baltic coast–the same coast where Friedrich was born and made his earliest drawings. Production designer Craig Lathrop used Friedrich’s work as visual inspiration for the film, which expresses the anxieties of an industrializing world through its haunting by a medieval, aristocratic beast.
As the world undergoes a painful change again, this time from industry to information and AI, young men and women are once again looking to the medieval and Romantic past for aesthetic and spiritual inspiration. The past contains beasts as well as saints, suicide cults as well as spiritual succor, but we can hope that the present will produce artists like Friedrich who are able to create a contemporary vision from the ruins of revolutions gone by.
Jennifer May Reiland is an artist and set designer in New York City whose work focuses on history and religious experiences, drawing inspiration from artists of the middle ages. You can follow her at @jennifermayreiland on Instagram.
