![]() ![]() As he explained, “When a landscape is covered in fog, it appears larger, more sublime, and heightens the strength of the imagination and excites expectation, rather like a veiled woman. To achieve this religious message, the depiction of mist was an important symbol for the artist. ![]() He often ‘invented’ his paintings by fusing together several sketches from different locations into one image, sometimes even using the sketches made by other artists to fulfill his vision. With these symbols he found a means of heightening the intensity of landscape to a level where it seems heavy with allegory. Gradually, his depictions of nature began to contain crosses, Gothic buildings and religious motifs reflecting his strict Lutheran upbringing. Born is 1774 in the harbour town of Greifswald, his first subjects were the wild Baltic coastlands of northeastern Germany. Locating and representing the moods of nature was Friedrich’s underpinning as an artist. The terms for this device is Rückenfigur, or figure seen from behind, a compositional device by which the viewer can more readily identify with the scene. We gaze out alongside him, a few paces behind perhaps, but still a companion in the moment. Like so many of paintings by the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, the images focuses on a person gazing out over nature. The sea also alludes to the bold spirit of sea travelers who explored new lands, conquering nature, exerting their will over it, daring to tread forth toward a fresh frontier, bravely going where no man had gone before. A violent, foggy sea is the harshest environment man could face, it could swallow you up in an instance and you would be gone forever without the slightest trace, lost for eternity to the treacherous waters. The environment of the painting was chosen to perfectly illustrate the order of man against a chaotic background. This gives the feeling that the sea so vast that it can’t be clearly observed, and also emphasizes the great vastness of nature compared to the minute blip of existence that is mankind. The waves and fog blur the line of the horizon, so it’s hard to tell where the sea ends and the mountains begin the fog also contributes to distorting the viewer’s depth perception. I touched on the spacing a little bit earlier. Gaddis (2004) felt that the impression the wanderer’s position atop the precipice and before the twisted outlook leaves “is contradictory, suggesting at once mastery over a landscape and the insignificance of the individual within it”. Dembo (2001) sympathised, asserting that Wanderer presents a metaphor for the unknown future. Gorra’s (2004) analysis was that the message conveyed by the painting is one of Kantian self-reflection, expressed through the wanderer’s gazings into the murkiness of the sea of fog. ![]() Wanderer above the Sea of Fog is true to the Romantic style and Friedrich’s style in particular, being similar to other works such as Chalk Cliffs on Rügen and The Sea of Ice. ![]() Wanderer in German can mean either “wanderer” or “hiker”. In German, the title is “Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer”. Some meaning of this work is lost in the translation of its title. Wanderer above the sea of fog analysis romanticism ![]()
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