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geometries of window mullions, frames, site into an eerie symbolic structure : in the paintings conform to no pre-existing patterns.
shutters, and walls, becomes a locale of private foreground, the filmy silhouettes of spiderweb On the contrary, his use of Christian motifs
enclosure, a secular shrine. For another, the riggings, deserted hulls, skeletal moorings was a wholly personal one in which the
figure, seen from behind, conceals her face provide the symmetrical frame through which evocative trappings of the church are
from us, thus permitting the spectator a we see the hauntingly remote, centralized vista of resurrected in a new guise. Gothic architecture,
maximum of personal identification with the the town with its Northern Gothic spires, as if for one, stirred his imagination as a symbol not
wistful posture and mood. But no less one were contemplating from the material only of the conquest of spirit over matter but as
important, there is an abrupt spatial jump remains of a graveyard some radiant medieval a man-made form that was, in the tradition of
between the material restrictions of the room, vision of resurrection, a Heavenly City of Goethe's earlier eulogy of Strasbourg
so close to the spectator, and the clues to an Jerusalem. Cathedral, almost a growing, organic part of
infinite space beyond, a jump that must be Elsewhere, people sit in rapt silence and nature in which the nave might be seen as a
traversed by feeling rather than by foot. immobility before the unexpected drama of forest of trees. Like many Romantic artists,
And when this is done, those suggested fishing boats returning to shore. It is a voyage poets, and tourists, Friedrich contemplated the
fragments—the top of a mast, a dimly visible that may never end, for the boats are as stone survivors of the Gothic world, singling
distant shore, a sky that must extend above the wraithlike as the Flying Dutchman and may out for special scrutiny the crumbling ruins of
invisible upper ledge of the window, a waterway only be projections beyond some scrim of the the Cistercian Abbey at Eldena. But his
that, if unseen by us, must nevertheless be spectator's own fantasies about imaginary reading of this harmony of architecture and
there—permit a fantasy voyage of the heart to travels, perhaps even from this restless material nature was thoroughly unlike, say, Constable's
some unspecified destination. And here, too, is world to the motionless realm of death. Again, sun-dappled studies of Salisbury Cathedral
Friedrich's persistent use of compositional we can enter such pictures only up to a shallow from shifting vantage points. Predictably,
axes that verge on the most elementary patterns point in the foreground, the rocky coastline; Friedrich saw these abbey ruins through
(in this case, a cruciform symmetry), simple then, we are stopped before the gulf that places spiritual eyes that sought out a metaphor of
geometries that suddenly freeze the transient us on the brink of the unknown, even of the death and resurrection.
and casual events of our prosaic world into afterlife, an expanding, gravity-defiant infinity His favoured setting for them was winter,
static symbols of uncommon purity. that, as in Turner, dissolves all matter in a the same bleak season that chills the bones and
Such new pictorial orderings are the perfect mysterious continuity of sea and sky, light and heart in Schubert's Winterreise cycle; and to
conveyors of Friedrich's new, acutely colour. reinforce this grim metaphor, he often included
Romantic feelings; and they become still more That such readings are not our own views of a graveyard or the actual burial of a
evocative when applied to pictures of greater twentieth-century fantasies is more than monk. And on occasion, these funereal
ambition than this little window view. In an supported not only by Friedrich's occasional networks of spiky Gothic ruins and twisted,
earlier work, Morning (c. 1808), the symbolic remarks about his intentions but by his leafless trees would include a vista through the
components are so strong that it is impossible frequent efforts at more explicit allegories such ruinous portal of a luminous but remote church
to mistake the scene for a morning stroll down as the Stages of Life, in which similar maritime choir, inaccessible by any but spiritual
a country lane. Although characteristically her images of boats coming in from sea become locomotion. Here, as always, Friedrich's lean
face is hidden, the silhouetted woman, in her symbols, like Turner's own Fighting Temeraire, and linear style of drawing, his ghostly tinted
hypnotic symmetry, seems emotionally of the inevitable passage from life to death, here colours, his brushless, translucent paint
transfixed before some strange ritual of nature, ritualized in the time-worn sequence of surfaces become the perfect pictorial vehicles
the rising sun; and her arms extend and move childhood, maturity, and old age. With this in for his goals of expressing the silent, symbolic,
upward in empathy with this pagan deity which mind, even Friedrich's images of the times of and immaterial nature of the eternal verities.
resides, inaccessibly, beyond the terrestrial day—a four-part series of morning, midday, As such, it is wrong to judge Friedrich's
confines of the minutely detailed foreground afternoon, and evening—are not be be mistaken paint qualities by the alien standards imposed
landscape. The middle ground of baroque for directly perceived landscapes that record, by a Constable or a Corot; for the great
landscape, the terrain that permits us to move like Constables or Monets, changes in light unknowns that obsessed his imagery could
uninterrupted from the nearest to the farthest and atmosphere; but are to be read rather as never have been rendered so still, so unworldly,
point, has disappeared, leaving a physically metaphors of the stages of life. So saturated, in so ultimate had Friedrich painted them with
static but spiritually active dialogue between fact, is Friedrich's art with a sense of symbolic the vibrant facture of his French and English
a lonely figure and some mystery beyond the meaning that even the most casual watercolour contemporaries who felt in nature the palpable
horizon. drawing—a view, say, of a picturesquely throb of life, not the impalpable nothingness of
It is a tribute to Friedrich's genius that he crumbling wall and gate that forces us to remain death.
was capable of creating from the most ordinary on the near side of a vast and luminous meadow— It was that void and its glowing rebirth that
facts of his daily experience the drama of a seems charged with a poignant drama; and still Friedrich envisaged in one of his most startling
symbolic, quasi-religious event. Having been more so, his occasional ventures into the painting religious paintings, the Cross in the Mountains,
born in the harbour town of Greifswald on the of those Alpine mountains he never actually saw commissioned in 1807 by the Count Anton von
Baltic, he was constantly aware of the movement somehow convey the symbolism of a desired Thun-Hohenstein for a private chapel in his
of boats, departing for or returning from the but unattainable beyond, the geological castle at Tetschen. Although expectedly_
day's catch, as well as the stirring of people equivalent of those infinitely distant sea conforming, in a commission, to some aspects of
working or waiting for them on the shore. For horizons viewed from the Baltic shore. traditional religious imagery, even here
almost any marine painter before Friedrich, Given his passionate need to invest the Friedrich interpreted the Crucifixion in a
such maritime activities would have been most secular categories of baroque painting surprisingly modern way. For one thing, he
turned into records of commerce, social bustle, with transcendental meaning, it is no surprise represents not the actual body of Christ on the
or the movement of light, clouds, and water. that Friedrich also made more literal attempts cross, but rather a man-made gilded Crucifix of
But for Friedrich, this coastal world, the very to convey the ultimate mysteries of life and a kind one might see on a pilgrimage route in the
fringe of a man-made society, could again be death through those Christian symbols that forest; and in this, Friedrich introduces that
reinterpreted as a metaphor of a place of had become so moribund in eighteenth-century modern concept of 'spectator Christianity' in
embarkation for godly and transcendental art and thought. But even in the domain of which the artist, instead of perpetuating such
realms. In some views of Greifswald, he would traditional Christian art, he expressed his traditional themes as the Virgin and Child or
rearrange the actual topography of this marshy modernity; for in fact his nominally religious the Nativity or the Resurrection, chooses rather

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