Very best identified for his atmospheric landscapes that includes contemplative figures silhouetted towards evening skies and morning mists, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840) got here of age along a German Romantic philosophical motion that noticed nature as an natural and interconnected complete. The naturalists in his circle believed that observations concerning the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms may result in conclusions approximately human lifestyles. A lot of Friedrich’s ceaselessly-lost sight of later {art work|artpaintings} mirror his engagement with those philosophical concepts thru a focal point on remoted shrubs, bushes, and rocks. Others revisit in advance compositions or iconographic motifs however subtly metamorphose the in the past specific human figures into the herbal panorama.
On this revelatory ebook, Nina Amstutz combines contemporary visible analysis with wide interdisciplinary analysis to research the intersection of panorama portray, self-exploration, and the lifestyles sciences in Friedrich’s mature paintings. Drawing connections among the artist’s anthropomorphic panorama paperwork and latest discussions of biology, anatomy, morphology, loss of life, and decomposition, Amstutz brings Friedrich’s paintings into the bigger discourse surrounding artwork, nature, and lifestyles within the nineteenth century.