Friedrich

Friedrich lived during a period of profound political, cultural and intellectual change in Europe. Romanticism emerged in reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment and placed greater emphasis on emotion, imagination, spirituality and the power of nature. The Napoleonic Wars and the expansion of French power across the German states also contributed to a growing interest in northern European and German cultural identity. Friedrich, born in Greifswald in Swedish Pomerania and later settled in Dresden, became one of the central figures of German Romantic landscape painting. His spiritual approach to nature was influenced by the religious culture of his time and by the Romantic belief that the natural world could reveal a deeper spiritual reality. Mountains, forests, mist, the sea, ruins and the sky in his paintings are therefore more than physical elements: they become symbols of human existence, mortality, contemplation and the infinite.