Art History Today

Charles Hope on Giorgione

Good review by CH of the “In the Age of Giorgione” exhibition just finished at the R.A. I went a few days before the end- but I’m not sure if I’ll get around to a review. We’ll see…

On the LRB website- here.

Slides for Natural Aristocrats lecture.

1) Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818, oil on canvas, 98.4 cm × 74.8, cm, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg.

2) Caspar David Friedrich, Giant Grave by the Sea, 1806-07, Pen, brush and sepia over graphite, 645 x 950 mm, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Weimar.

3) Karl Joseph Stieler, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1828, oil on canvas, 78.0 x 63.8 cm, Neue Pinakothek, Munich.

4) Philipp Otto Runge Colour Spheres, 1809, copper engraving with watercolour, 225 x 189 mm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

5) Caspar David Friedrich, Evening, c. 1824, oil on cardboard, 20 x 27,5 cm, Kunsthalle, Mannheim.

6) Johan Christian Clausen Dahl, Cloud Study with Horizon, 1832, oil on board, 25 x 28 cm, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

7) Carl Gustav Carus, Morning Fog, c. 1825, watercolour, paper mounted on board, 20 x 26 cm, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

8) Carl Gustave Carus, The Goethe Monument, 1832, oil on canvas, 72 x 54 cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

9) Caspar David Friedrich, Self-Portrait, 1800, Black chalk, 420 x 276 mm, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen.

10) Caspar David Friedrich, Self-Portrait with Cap and Sighting Eye-Shield, 1802, Pencil, brush and ink, 175 x 105 mm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

11) Caspar David Friedrich, Self-Portrait, 1810, black chalk, 228 x 182 mm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

12) Georg Friedrich Kersting, Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio, 1812, oil on canvas, 51 x 40 cm, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

13) Christen Købke, Portrait of Frederik Sødring, 1832, oil on canvas, 42 x 38 cm, Hirschsprungske Samling, Copenhagen.

14) Christen Købke View of One of the Lakes in Copenhagen, 1838, oil on canvas, 134 x 179 cm, Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen.

15) Caspar David Friedrich, On the Sailing Boat, c. 1819, oil on canvas, 71 x 56 cm, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

16) Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at a Window, 1822, oil on canvas, 44 x 37 cm, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

17) Jan van Eyck, Madonna of Chancellor Rolin, 1435, oil on panel, 66 x 62, Museé du Louvre, Paris.

18) G. F. Kerstang, At the Mirror, 1827, oil on canvas, 46 x 35 cm, Kunsthalle, Kiel.

19) Caspar David Friedrich, View from the Artist’s Atelier: Left Window, 1805-6, sepia over graphite, 31 x 24 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

20) G. F. Kerstang, Caspar David Friedrich in his Studio, 1811, oil on canvas, 51 x 40 cm, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

21) Caspar David Friedrich, Self-Portrait with Supporting Arm, 1802, pen, Hamburg.

22) Caspar David Friedrich, Woman before the Rising Sun (Woman before the Setting Sun), 1818-20, oil on canvas, 22 x 30 cm, Museum Folkwang, Essen.

23) Caspar David Friedrich, Landscape with a Rainbow, 1809-10, oil on canvas, 70 cm × 102 cm, Museum Folkwang, Essen.

24) Allaert van Everdingen, The Draughtsman, etching, 1640.

25) Jan Luiken, Iris, etching, illustration from Christopher Weigelo’s Ethica Naturalis, 1700, Nuremberg.

26) Karl Friedrich Schinkel, The Banks of the Spree near Stralau, 1817, oil on canvas, 36 x 45 cm, Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

27) Philipp Otto Runge, The Hülsenbeck Children, 1805-06, oil on canvas, 131.5 x 143.5 cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

28) Philipp Otto Runge, The Lesson of the Nightingale, 1804-05, oil on canvas, 105 x 86 cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

29) Benjamin Robert Haydon, Wordsworth on Helvellyn, 1842, oil on canvas, 124.5 x 99 cm, National Portrait Gallery, London.

30) Philipp Otto Runge, The Small Morning and details, 1809-10, oil on canvas, 152 x 113 cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

31) Caspar David Friedrich, Landscape with Grave, Coffin and Owl, 1836-37, Sepia over pencil, 385 x 383 mm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

32) Philipp Otto Runge, The Great Morning and details, 1809-10, oil on canvas, 152 x 113 cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg.

33) Philipp Otto Runge Study to the Morning, c. 1809, Drawing, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

34) Guido Reni, Aurora, 1614, fresco, 280 x 700 cm, Casino d’ Aurora, Palazzo Pallavicini, Rome.

35) Raphael, The Sistine Madonna and details, 1512, oil on canvas, 265 cm × 196 cm, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden.

36) Franz and Joseph Riepenhausen, Raphael’s Dream, 1821, 99.5 x 119.5 cm, Poznan, Muzeum Narodowe w Poznaniuel.

37) Raphael, Madonna of Foligno, 1511, oil on wood, 320 x 194 cm, Pinacoteca Vaticana, Vatican City.

38) Johann Michael Wittmer, Raphael's First Sketch of the 'Madonna della Sedia,' 1853, oil on canvas, 99 x 75 cm, Royal Collection, Windsor.

39) Carl Gustave Carus, Raphael and Michelangelo, 1839, oil on canvas, 36.9 x 47 cm, Freies Deutsche Hochstift, Goethe Museum, Frankfurt.

40) Caspar David Friedrich, Evening Landscape with Two Men, 1830-35, oil on canvas, 25 x 31 cm, The Hermitage, St. Petersburg.

41) Caspar David Friedrich, The Cross in the Mountains (Tetschen Altar), 1808, oil on canvas, 115 x 110 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.

Natural Aristocrats: Friedrich, Runge & Nature. (8)

A Vision of Landscape in the Romantic Period

Joseph Leo Koerner has argued that there were several illustrious art sources that Runge used when creating his complex allegory of childhood in nature. [1] Firstly, Runge’s embodiment of the dawn in the Morning cycle may have been inspired by Guido Reni’s celebrated ceiling painting Aurora in Rome which in fact Runge mentions when theorising about the origins of landscape out of history painting. Secondly, for his series Runge may have extracted the putti or children who are at the bottom of Raphael’s famous Sistine Madonna which Runge saw in Dresden where it was relocated in 1753. Painted for the Benedictine chapel of Julius II, who probably commissioned it, the Germans regarded it as a painted vision which is not surprising since it seems to deny its picture plane and the traditional illusion of space.[2] A legend in eighteenth-century Germany grew up around the idea of ‘Raphael’s Dream’, namely that the Sistine Madonna could only be finished after the painter had received a vision from heaven which was given concrete form when the German Riepenhausen Brothers painted their impression of how Raphael might have been inspired to paint his masterpiece (above). As Belting observed, “the legend of ‘Raphael’s Dream’ transformed a classical painting – one that possessed the clarity of ancient art- into the chief witness for the romantic aesthetic.”[3] A key idea in the romantic period is how religious art succeeds to a new incarnation of painting in which beauty and the emotions of the spectator become more important than the doctrinal message that the picture conveys. In the words of Koerner, “for Runge, the Sistine Madonna stands at the end of the tradition of Christian history painting and at the start of a new saeculum of art called landscape.”[4] Supposedly, Runge worked from the putti at the front towards the clouds, a juxtaposition which would enable him to apprehend the possibility of landscape through the melting together of the religious symbolism and natural phenomena in the Sistine Madonna. In other Raphael works like the Madonna di Foligno which has a comet in the background, we also see invisible cloud children surrounding the Virgin, but this fusing of the metrological and theological would have to await the coming of the German romantic artists before it could become visible in the combination of history, allegory, and symbol present in such paintings as Friedrich’s Cross in the Mountains which inaugurated a new kind of art in the romantic era.

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[1] Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich, 62-63.

[2] Hans Belting, The Invisible Masterpiece, (Reaktion Books, 2001), 50f.

[3] Ibid, 58.

[4] Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich, 63.

Natural Aristocrats: Friedrich, Runge & Nature. (7)

Romanticism & the Child in Nature

In his De Rerum Natura, the ancient writer Lucretius states the child “lies naked upon the ground, speechless, in need of every vital support, as soon as nature has split him forth with throes from his mother’s womb into the regions of light”[1] This description closely fits the allegorical painting The Small Morning (1809-10) by Runge which shows a bared, vulnerable child exposed to the dawn light who in the picture is symbolised by the goddess Aurora. Runge was obsessed with images of childhood; in addition to the eight canvases that form this series a few years previously he painted The Hülsenbeck Children who are shown next to three sunflowers thus emphasising their link with the natural world. The child has long been a symbol of romanticism, and not just within the German Romantic Movement but all over Europe. Wordsworth’s previously mentioned poem “The Rainbow” contains the line “The Child is the father of the Man.” Why this fascination with the concept of the child in early nineteenth century art, poetry and natural science? Though it is known how images of children in the form of the classical “putto” appeared in the renaissance and baroque periods, the subject of the origins of childhood iconography in the romantic period has only been investigated by a few specialists in German romantic poetry like M.H. Abrams. To him the state of childhood in romantic culture should not be viewed as a regressive condition, or even a return to the state of infantilism; as he observes, the playwright Schiller argued that the child “describes not only what we have been, but also anticipates where we are going” which matches Wordsworth’s idea of extending childhood into adulthood and reversing the relationship of parent and offspring.[2] Novalis himself spoke of a “spiral return” which he equated with the condition of the child which grows with the unfolding of nature, which may explain why Runge compares The Hülsenbeck Children to flowers acted on by the sun.[3] Different stages of childhood here correspond to the various rates of growth of phototropic plants and flowers. This link between infant minds and the phototropic nature of plants is found in Wordsworth, thus further confirming a connection between concepts in Germanic art and the English nature poets.[4]

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[1] Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Bk V, 222.

[2] M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, 380.

[3] Ibid, 183-187 for the “romantic spiral.”

[4] Wordsworth, The Prelude Bk V, 350-3: “To manage books, and things and make them act on infant minds as surely as the sun/ Deals with a Flower.”

Natural Aristocrats: Friedrich, Runge & Nature. (6)

Intimations of Immortality in the Landscape.

The German literary romantics comprised a group of individuals, men like Ludwig Tieck, the Schlegel Brothers, and Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, better known as “Novalis.” One of their governing ideas was that God was the author of two books- the Book of Scripture and the Book of Nature which could be read- to the initiated- as easily as the Holy Bible.[1] These individuals were known to Friedrich and his art cannot be appreciated without understanding the ideas these men held about art and nature which almost certainly influenced his art. The influence of the German nature poets and natural scientists was not confined to Germany however, but was felt by English counterparts such as Coleridge and Wordsworth. Often, Friedrich’s paintings appear upon the covers of books of romantic poets like Wordsworth’s “The Prelude” which is one of the most famous sustained meditations on mental growth and emotional response in the presence of nature. One could imagine Friedrich’s Landscape with Rainbow (above) as the perfect visual equivalent of Wordsworth’s lines in the poem “The Rainbow,” - “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky,”[2] and as Koerner says, Wordsworth and Friedrich seem to be intellectually and aesthetically compatible since he connects Wordsworth’s intimations of immortality vouchsafed to the weary traveller through the landscape poems such as “An Evening Walk” (1793), episodes in “The Prelude” 1799, 1805, 1850), and “The Excursion” (1814) with the rückenfigur principle.

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[1] In the words of Schlegel in 1798: “For my own part, the goal of my literary projects is to write a new Bible, and to wander in the footprints of Mohammed and Luther.” Cited in Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich, 31.

[2] “My heart leaps up when I behold/A rainbow in the sky:/So was it when my life began;/So is it now I am a man; /So be it when I shall grow old, Or let me die!/The Child is the father of the Man; /And I could wish my days to be/Bound each to each by natural piety.”

Natural Aristocrats: Friedrich, Runge & Nature. (5)

Between Studio & Landscape.

In Kerstang’s At the Mirror, a woman stands in a room while looking into a mirror to arrange her hair, almost in imitation of a classical motif found in artists like Bellini who perfected the image of the beautiful nymph looking into a glass. However, Kerstang’s room itself is clearly modelled on a contemporary source: Freidrich’s views of his own studio which show austere rooms with windows opening out to the world. This is not surprising as Kerstang knew Friedrich and painted two views of the artist in his studio with windows. Kerstang’s woman at her coiffure is not strictly a rückenfigur since we see her face through the mirror which serves to reverse the reversal because the viewer is granted access to the face of the rückenfigur through the agency of the mirror. Instead of mirrors, Friedrich favours windows like in the Woman in her Studio which shows a woman with her back to the beholder leaning out of a window through which we see the large mast of a boat and an orderly group of trees in the distance. Here the aperture suggests a window on the world, perhaps in imitation of the Albertian idea prevalent in the renaissance, especially as the casement of the window is gridded like a perspective device. But in the renaissance emphasis was on the figurative, not the accurate or scientific representation of the natural world which was usually rendered in a schematic and thinly described manner. The studio represented a space of artistic creation, but it was not Friedrich’s favourite location since he yearned to go outside it to be inspired by nature, as is suggested by another self-portrait where the artists ceases from drawing to look with melancholy out of the window where nature is waiting. Alternatively he satisfied those cravings by remaining in his studio physically and dissolving its solid walls through art by combining his rückenfigurs with the natural world. The transition from studio/interior rückenfigur to nature is achieved in the Woman before the Rising Sun (above) where the walls of the studio fall away to leave a glorious picture of a woman stretching out her arms to the welcoming rays of the dawn, almost a pantheistic paean to the beauty and majesty of nature. The significance of the rückenfigur becomes clearer here if we accept that the impression is conveyed of the viewer outside the picture looking over the shoulders of a person who is looking out over the landscape. This increases the intensity of our encounter with the landscape since we are invited to share the ecstasy of the rückenfigur in their enthusiasm of the natural world. “Behold!” the rückenfigur seems to proclaim. [1]

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[1] Ibid, 194.

Natural Aristocrats: Friedrich, Runge & Nature. (4)

Seen from the Back: Friedrich’s Rückenfigur

If the self-portrait gives out to the world while striving to conceal something of the artist’s private essence, then the paintings with individuals with their backs to the spectator shun the world completely and show their back to the beholder. One of the most conspicuous compositional devices in Friedrich’s art, the Rückenfigur immediately marks the painting as a work by Friedrich, but from where does this astonishing convention derive? As Koerner rightly says, the figure that has its back to the spectator wasn’t Friedrich’s invention; it can be seen in early renaissance artists like Giotto, though renaissance theorists like Alberti advised figures that looked out at the viewer, not away.[1] In Northern renaissance art, Jan van Eyck showed two figures low down looking across a parapet in the Madonna of Chancellor Rolin. However, it seems more likely given Friedrich’s appetite for landscape that his rückenfigur derives from representations of artists (with their backs to the viewer) sketching out in the wilds of the countryside like in the Dutch artist Allaert van Everdingen. And there are emblem books whose iconography seems to resemble Friedrich’s, e.g., a large rückenfigur reaching out towards, as if to feel, a large rainbow in the firmament in Weigelo’s Ethica Naturalis of 1700 (above).

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[1] Ibid, 193.

Natural Aristocrats: Friedrich, Runge & Nature. (3)

Seen from the Front: The Face of Friedrich.

In a series of drawn self-portraits done when he was young Friedrich enacted the process of simultaneously observing and sketching. Enact is used here because the black chalk self-portrait of 1800 done in the style of 18^th century French engraving shows the artist dramatizing his encounter with himself, with the world as audience. What we witness is the struggle to study the face while recording it, almost at the same time, an occupational hazard for any artist painting himself. This awkwardness in drawing the face is seen by Koerner as indicative of a “struggle between his [Friedrich’s] public, visible, portrayable face, and a hidden energy legible only in the gesture of the gaze.”[1] Another drawn self-portrait at Hamburg shows Friedrich in outdoor clothes with an improvised visor over his right eye and a small canteen hanging from his waist. Not the image of an invalid, but a representation of Friedrich as a landscape painter. The next drawn self-portrait done at the height of his fame after the controversy of the Cross in the Mountains shows a powerful, expressive look that seems full of the wild marginality of the romantic hero, or as Koerner says the tragic hero who managed to turn scientific, empirical views of nature into tragic vistas inhabited by symbols such as crosses, fir trees, wrecked ships etc. The man who was described by the French sculptor David de Angers as turning landscape into tragedy uses light and shadow, expressive physiognomy, and a general feeling of uncouthness to convey an untamed power that emanates not only from the body but from contact with nature which is equally covered over like the hirsute draftsman. Wether these drawings are accurate portrayals of the artist Friedrich working in his studio at his easel is difficult to say. Recorded accounts in both words and images of Friedrich’s appearance while working convey conflicting testimonies: some describe Friedrich working in a travelling cloak with nothing underneath; but two paintings by Kersting show Friedrich dressed in trousers and jacket (above) conforming more to a respectable image of the artist in his studio, albeit without the fashionable flourish of other painters like Købke’s portrait of Frederik Sødring in his studio. Friedrich’s rough cloak probably re-appears in the Monk by the Sea thus aligning himself with the “romantic sensibility,” though wether these clothes worn on landscape campaigns should be seen as signifying penitential “self-denial” remains a subject for debate.[2]

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[1] Ibid, 83

[2] Ibid, 189.

Natural Aristocrats: Friedrich, Runge & Nature. (2)

Friedrich’s Early Training.

A tension between following an academic training and responding emotionally to the motif would characterise Friedrich’s early career. Taking breaks from art classes, the artist walked on the sea shore imbibing nature through his senses. This interest in his natural surroundings would grow in Freidrich as he struggled to find his own identity as an artist at the various institutions where he trained. Born in the north German region of Mecklenburg, Friedrich’s family eventually moved to Greifswald, a port on the Baltic. Trained by the university’s drawing instructor, Quistorp, the young Friedrich benefited from his tutor’s art collection which contained a plethora of old masters like Holbein (the Elder), Palma Vecchio, Gossaert, Elsheimer, van Dyck, van Ostade, Teniers, Lebrun and Hackert. Thus, as Koerner says, the provincial training of Quistorp was countered by knowledge of the main European masters.[1] After this early training Friedrich enrolled at the Copenhagen Academy of Art in 1794, the “Renaissance of the North” where a bewildering smorgasbord of styles and influences awaited him: English Gothic revival, Norse mythology, ancient classical monuments, the dramas of Shakespeare, and the cloudy atmosphere of the lays of Ossian.

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[1] Ibid, 92.

Natural Aristocrats: Friedrich, Runge & Nature. (1)

Classicists & Naturalists.

In an exhibition at Weimar in 1805 the writer, scientist and polymathic intellectual Johann Wolfgang von Goethe awarded the painter Caspar David Friedrich a prize for a pair of sepia drawings. Despite being an ardent classicist, and perhaps in deference to the new breed of artists like Phillip Otto Runge and Friedrich, Goethe loosened the conditions of the annual competition which was reserved for classical subjects only. Author of a famous travel book on Italy and the classical play Iphigenia in Tauris, one might have expected Goethe to have been intolerant of these resolutely anti-classicists with their insistence on placing untrammelled romantic expression above the classical restraint of the Academy, but Goethe was sympathetic to these natural aristocrats who found their ideas in the mountains, valleys, forests and wild scenery of northern Europe rather than the sculpture galleries. Goethe shrewdly perceived Freidrich as a naturalist rather than a classicist, and therefore asked him to do some cloud studies based on the meteorological scheme developed by Luke Howard, an English natural scientist. In his late twenties Howard wrote the “Essay on the Modification of Clouds” which was published in 1803. Though the “cloud man” inspired John Constable, Friedrich rejected Howard’s system and therefore declined Goethe’s offer because he was not interested in the classification of clouds, only in using the sky as a metaphor for the infinite. In other words Friedrich wanted to retain the sense of mystery and vagueness (in all senses) that clouds conveyed.[1] Goethe would fare better with Carl Gustave Carus (above) who combined both science and art in one individual. A physician, psychologist, natural scientist, this artist polymath from Leipzig painted in his spare time including a picture of Goethe’s monument. He also wrote a glowing testimony to his friend Friedrich insisting on the uniqueness of the painter’s art.

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[1]Joseph Leo Koerner’s Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (Reaktion Books, 1990), 226. In the preparation of this lecture I have drawn largely on this book, one of the best on Friedrich and German romanticism.