Caspar David Friedrich and Iconographies of Religious Feeling

It may be unhelpful to think of Caspar David Friedrich—the ‘man who discovered the tragedy of landscape’—as a landscape artist. He did of course paint a number of works that can only be described as landscape paintings but these seem more or less to follow on from the work of the Danish landscape painter Christian August Lorentzen (1749-1802), who taught Friedrich at the Danish Academy in the 1790s. Nevertheless the paintings by Friedrich which are primarily landscapes are not why Friedrich is interesting as an artist and relate to what is important in Friedrich as an artist only insofar as they can be related to other parts of his work. Friedrich seems to have seen landscape, or the tradition of landscape painting, essentially as a vehicle for the communication of ideas, or rather feelings, about something beyond and above landscape. Robert Rosenblum has written: Because Friedrich…. Imposed upon everything he drew and painted an implicit or explicit sense of supernatural power and mystery in nature, it becomes difficult to categorize his various works as either religious or secular in character. They are in fact both….