Romanticism in Germany
Friedrich, Abbey among Oak Trees Caspar David Friedrich, Abbey among Oak Trees, 1809 or 1810, oil on canvas, 110.4 x 171 cm (Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin)
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- We're in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin
- and we're looking at a Caspar David Friedrich's
- The Abbey in the Oakwood.
- It's a large painting, and it was one of a pair
- that included "The Monk by the Sea."
- This is a very somber image and it really is
- a perfect example of the way Friedrich used landscape
- in order to represent issues of human life and
- of the Divine.
- That's right, and in this painting we see
- the ruins of an abbey, an old abbey
- and a procession of figures entering this ruined abbey,
- carrying a coffin.
- And so immediately we have a sense of the passage of time,
- of the transience of human existence...
- We're also looking at, it seems, the dead of winter,
- and perhaps it's sunset.
- If you look at the remnant of architecture that's left
- you have this, first of all, this very forlorn sense
- from the ruins themselves.
- You see this old lancet window that's fallen into disrepair.
- No glass remains.
- And you have a real sense of the grandeur of
- the original space, but now what's left is just
- the futility of human experience, the futility of human effort.
- And what we see is that nature is eternal, but what man
- creates is transient.
- You have the monks themselves going through their
- ancient ritual of burial.
- But you see the cemetery that surrounds them in the snow
- is not well tended, it's haphazard, and it seems to be, itself,
- falling into disrepair.
- The abbey refers back to the Medieval tradition, but that's
- now fallen away.
- Older than that, are the oak trees,
- which might have represented, for Friedrich,
- the Druidic traditions, the pre-Christian traditions,
- these truly ancient oaks, gnarled, and terrifying
- in their silhouettes, but that speak of a tradition,
- as witnesses, that are even older than Christianity.
- And then beyond that, the crescent moon, and the sky,
- when you were speaking, that's the nature that I was
- looking at that is permanent,
- that is trans-historical, that moves beyond even
- the growth and death of the trees.
- Certainly of the architecture of Man's efforts.
- The moon having no sense of the cosmos, even beyond
- the seasons of the Earth.
- That's right, and so you have this sense of human time,
- you have this sense of nature's time,
- and then you have this sense of the time of God's space.
- And in fact, if there's any optimism in this image,
- it is that moon.
- It is the faintest crescent, and it might wane even more
- and become a New Moon, but then it will regenerate
- and there is this possibility for rebirth.
- You mentioned that it's the dead of winter,
- but spring will come.
- And so even if it seems quite distant now, in this sort of
- bleak twilight, there is this sense that there will be renewal.
- So we may have a suggestion of resurrection
- in the cycles of the moon, we have the crosses that are
- a part of the cemetery, we have the cross that forms part of
- the ruin of the abbey, and that suggestion of resurrection.
- I think what's so interesting about Friedrich is that
- he's imbuing a landscape with this very,
- very serious meaning, almost the way that, in the past,
- people have looked to the iconography of
- Christian paintings, Friedrich is looking for modern language
- with which to express these trans-historical human feelings,
- contemplating our role in the universe, and trying to make
- sense of all those layers of time that you referred to before.
- That's exactly right. Friedrich is finding a new way of
- representing these eternal issues, and it makes sense that
- he would have to, because this is now the beginning of the
- 19th century. Friedrich is now living in a rational culture,
- and the idea of using the iconography of the Renaissance,
- or even of the Baroque, would feel implausible.
- It wouldn't make sense.
- And so Friedrich, this artist who was trained in Copenhagen,
- who grew up in Greifswald, which was then part of Sweden,
- on the Southern coast of the Baltic,
- is looking towards the very extreme, cold
- Northern lanscape, as a way of expressing
- these ideas of the eternal.
Be specific, and indicate a time in the video:
At 5:31, how is the moon large enough to block the sun? Isn't the sun way larger?
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