The use of nostalgic elements is recurrent in his paintings: mist and fog, dead trees, dramatic light effects, ruins, a boat sailing away from the beach (an evocation of the myth of Charon, the ferryman of the netherworld), bleak cemeteries, among others. The idea of death, oftentimes reasserted by the symbolic use of pictorial elements, is an intended alliteration, and the only path to redemption. The gloomy atmosphere of his paintings stems from a deep religious education - based on Lutheran precepts - and a life marked by painful losses of loved ones. Such a sublime harmony contrasts with the absence of this relationship in the world of mankind, and this tension is heir to the ambivalence of the romantic reflection.įriedrich’s work evidences deep traces of German Romanticism: a high sensitivity towards nature the belief in the correspondence between nature and mind the passion for the equivocal, the indeterminate, the obscure and the far-off (objects immersed in fog, a distant fire in the darkness, the fusion of clouds and mountains) the solipsistic celebration the emphasis on death (Koerner, 2009). In this ontological poetics that elevates landscape to the realm of the transcendental, we find roots of an absolute Hegelian idealism: nature as an aesthetic experience capable of leading us to unity. In Friedrich, the consciousness of an unattainable and elusive absolute is echoed in Romanticism’s infinite nostalgia - man finds himself as a privileged beholder when confronted with the silent and enigmatic nature. From this introverted and solitary subjectivity emerges a sentimentality concurrent with the “(…) credit of sublimity, mystery, unknown, infinity, which are the very categories of the romantic, for Novalis, who met him personally” (França, 2006: 67). His predisposition towards melancholy reveals an idiosyncrasy shaped by the morphological coolness in which he operates, and impels his asceticism to a confrontation with a freedom of creation “compromised” by his inner understanding. The romantic concept of intimacy and tendency towards infinity announced by the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) unquestionably overlaps any limiting stylistic associations.
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