Senses of Landscape by Sallis John

Author:Sallis, John
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ART050020 Art / Subjects & Themes / Landscapes & Seascapes, PHI001000 Philosophy / Aesthetics
ISBN: 9780810131088
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 2015-07-09T00:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 12.

Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, ca. 1818.

Oil on canvas, 94.8 × 74.8 cm.

Kunsthalle, Hamburg, On permanent loan from the Foundation for the Promotion of the Hamburg Art Collection.

Considered in formal terms, the figure of the wanderer constitutes the central vertical axis of the picture; the vertical format of the landscape corresponds to his upright posture. The line of his waist coincides with the midline of the picture, dividing it into upper and lower halves. Because the figure stands at the very center of the picture, governing both the vertical and the horizontal axes, the viewer’s gaze tends to converge immediately on the wanderer, and only secondarily does it extend toward the distant vista, though even then not toward some constructed vanishing point as in pictures composed according to the classical rules of perspective. Perhaps even more significant than the purely formal structure is the division into distinct layers. In the foreground there is the dark, clearly discernible, stably visible rock formation with the wanderer standing atop it. Beyond there is nature so obscured by the fog that only fragments are visible, and, still farther, there are mountains fading away toward an unseen horizon, their color merging with that of the sky. These colors, along with the presence of the fog, can be taken to suggest that the moment of the painting is quite early in the day, perhaps not long after dawn.

The green uniform worn by the wanderer is that of a forest ranger. There is in fact a tradition that identifies the figure as a forest ranger official named von Brincken, who served as a Colonel in the Saxon army when the rangers were called up to fight in the war against Napoleon. It is likely that von Brincken was killed in action some five years before Friedrich created The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. The painting thus incorporates a “patriotic epitaph” memorializing those who fought against the French, just as, in a number of Friedrich’s other paintings from this time on, the altdeutsch costumes signal the struggle against the conservative forces of the German aristocracy.13 The political import of his works is attested in a letter that the artist wrote to his countryman Ernst Moritz Arndt in 1814: “I am not in the least surprised that no monuments are being erected to mark either the great cause of the people or the high-hearted deeds of individual Germans. Nothing great of that kind will happen as long as we remain the vassals of princes. Where the people have no voice, they are also not allowed to honor and to have a sense of themselves.”14 In the letter he goes on to allude to his conception of a work that would memorialize one such hero. Yet, in The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog the fact that the figure is turned away from the viewer gives him a certain anonymity, a universality that extends the political import of the work beyond its memorializing of any individual hero to all those who had engaged in the struggle for a free, unified Germany.

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