The Approach To Sublime In Landscape Painting

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

This thesis takes the form of a comparative study between J. M. W. Turner (1775 –1851) and the German landscape painter, Casper David Friedrich (1774 –1840), and how they engaged with the aesthetic category of the Sublime in their paintings during the Romantic period. In the visual arts the sublime tends to be associated with the period of roughly 1750–1850 when a new sensitivity to landscape was first developed in the work of Romantic painters, which found most expression in the art of J.M.W Turner and C. D. Friedrich. This is a cross-cultural study comparing the response to sublime of the two most notable artists of the English and German Romantic landscape painting.

This thesis examines the various ways in which J. M. W. Turner and Caspar David Friedrich engaged with the concepts of sublime, and in particular will try to examine which aspects of the notion of the sublime are treated similarly, where they deviate, and how that reflects in their work. I will examine, more particularly the work within the depiction of mountainous landscapes, and I will compare two images of Turner’s first trip to the Alps, and Casper David Friedrich’s famous painting the Wanderer… of 1818. The aim of this comparative study is to find how they illustrate the experience of the sublime in their work and what are the similarities and the differences.

This study considers the history of the sublime, as it was a key term in understanding nature at that time, before and after the appearance of the philosophy of aesthetics. It asks why this idea came into fashion in the second half of the 18th century, and uses this as a background in order to discuss how both artists approached the sublime. Moreover, it will provide brief historical context of the events that took place, as a result of which the Romantic Movement appeared in Western Europe.

To answer the questions both primary and secondary researches have been carried out to inform this study. The primary research includes visits to exhibitions to support this discussion. Main visits include Tate Liverpool Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. The exhibitions that I have visited are: Turner, Monet, Twombly, and Constable, Gainsborough, Turner and the Making of Landscape, which both included works by Turner. The exhibition at the Royal Academy (Fig. 1,2), was particularly of great interest, as its aim is to show the landscape's development in late 18th and early 19th century in England as a new art form, which coincides with the question in chapter one in this theses. The Royal Academy collection explores the rise of the British landscape painting, modelled on 17th century Italian, French and Dutch masters of landscape, and the emergence of the aesthetic categories of the Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque, and how Turner engaged with these aesthetic categories from the Sublime and Picturesque to the Romantic. [1] This study uses also literature that is mostly from secondary sources of information.

In chapter one: ‘What was the historical context of landscape painting and why did it come about at this particular time?’ I will discuss how and when landscape status changed and why it became a popular genre during the Romantic period, and some of the artists that influenced Turner and their work. Here I will refer to some of the woks exhibited in the RA. This chapter will also acknowledge the major political and economic events that happened in Western Europe that cause the appearance of Romanticism.

In Chapter two, I will trace the origin of the term ‘sublime’ and the philosophers who explored this concept, in order to understand the arguments that I will make further. This chapter will try to answer the question: In what way did Turner develop the sublime in his work in relation to the Swiss Alps trip? It will also refer to the artists most influential for Turner in his development of the notion of the sublime.

Chapter tree will follow the same theme of the sublime in relation to Friedrich’s depiction of mountain scenery. This chapter will discuss Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime and their influence on the German landscape painting and Friedrich in particular. I will refer also to the artists Friedrich was most inspired by in his early years of his career.

In chapter four, I will compare the work discussed in the previous two chapters, referring back to the images examined. I will focus on both artists’ exploration of the mountain landscape and some of the similarities and the differences between them in relation to the sublime. In order to understand the differences between their works, I will refer to Timothy Mitchell’s article where he discusses the reasons why the Alpine mountains were of such interest at the time.

CHAPTER 1

What was the historical context of landscape painting and how and why did it come about at this particular time?

This chapter explains the shift from the descriptive way of painting to the communication of visual experiences and the approach to sublime that marked off the beginning of the Romantic period. This is the time when Romantic artists first asserted the supreme importance of landscape in Western Europe, and its function began to take a significant transformation in its process of development. This chapter discusses the transformation which took place in the aesthetic categorization of landscape during the 18th and early 19th centuries in Britain and some of the artist that influenced Turner and their work observed at the exhibition at Royal Academy. Thus it will provide a brief historical background of the Romantic period in Britain and Germany respectively.

The depiction of the real landscape of Britain is dates from the early 1740s, with Thomas Smith’s (1720-1767) picturesque prints of the natural wonders of the Peak District (Fig. 3, 4), displayed at the RA, which presents British landscape scenery, rather than a topographical record of places or everyday life science common in Dutch and Flemish paintings. [2] The prints are mostly from the Royal Academy’s collection and are made after the most popular artists collected in Britain, in the middle of the 18th century Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) and Claude Lorrain (1604/5-1682) (Fig. 5, 6, 7), who pioneered landscape as a form of imagery worthy of being on its own. They all spent most of their lives in Italy, exploring the landscape painting in relation to biblical and mythological figures. These 17th century collections were important for the British romantics, and in particular Claude Lorrain’s classical style, had played later major role for Turner. [3] 

Their paintings became synonymous with the picturesque in landscape, and this new concept of Picturesque was defined by Reverend William Gilpin (1724-1804) in which different types of landscape were categorised according to compositional rules. In his theory he explains that:

"…the asymmetrical, the rough and the irregular appeal to the eye more than the uniform and the smooth." [4] 

In the search of such scenery, from 1760 onward artists began to travel to areas like North Wales, the Scottish Highland and the Lake District attracted to their panoramic views which fulfilled Gilpin’s picturesque formulae. [5] 

The two pioneers of landscape painting in Britain also presented at the exhibition of the making of landscape at the RA, Thomas Smith and Richard Wilson (?1713-1782) lived for some years in Rome and studied the works of the great 17th century Italian masters of landscape painting, and their sources of inspiration, such as mythical tragedy and the notion of ideal landscape. [6] 

Wilson’s The Great Bridge over the Taafe (1775) (Fig. 8) is a heroic example of history painting that had a lasting impression on Turner. [7] Wilson’s desire was to become the first artist to work exclusively as a landscape painter, and he sought to prove that landscape could not only compete with the intellectual seriousness of history painting, but that it could be history painting. This was achieved in 1817, when a new prize for Historic Landscape was created by the Academy, after Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’s successful book, called Elements de Perspective Practique, published in 1800, was arguing for this concept. [8] 

Artists and thinkers turned to direct experience of nature, to scientific and mystical study of the elemental world through direct observation, travelling, sketching and imagination, and nature was a whole new motivation to artists. Carl-Gustav Carus wrote in 1820 after meeting Friedrich, whose canvases deeply impressed him that:

"in contemplating the majestic unity of a landscape, man grows consciousness of his own littleness; feeling that all things have their being in God, he loses his small self in these infinite spaces and renounces to same extent his individual existence…But thus to sink oneself in nature is not a loss; it is a gain." [9] 

This period was the age of revolutions and the mental and spiritual life of Europe began to experience a historic and irreversible change. The early period of Romanticism is associated with the French revolution (1789-1799) and after that the Napoleonic War, which continued until 1815. Romanticism also witnessed the Industrial Revolution, which started in 1760 in England and shifted to the Continent in 1820, along with the new political and economic confusion in the background. It is not easy to define the dates of the Romantic period, however, the period considered being at its peak is from 1798 until 1840. [10] 

As a result of all that happened across Europe, during this period, a growing disillusionment with materialistic society was giving rise to a new appreciation of spirituality. This shift was often expressed through a reassessment of the natural world, as Turner sought to depict nature as a "divine creation, to be set against the artifice of human civilization." [11] Friedrich read early Romantic texts of von Kleist, Schubert and Tieck, but the most important influence on painting came from philosopher Schelling, who published between 1802 and 1805 that:

"…lying hidden beneath the surface appearance of nature is a spirituality waiting to be revealed by the painter and poet." [12] 

German Romantics used the period of French occupation to draw attention to the German people and to restore the national epic of Germany. The German artists were determined to create specifically German spiritual landscape and on purpose turned away from the Italian masters. They used simple geometric composition and spiritual concepts hidden behind pictorial techniques. The primary interest was in the contemplation of nature and searched to convey an emotional response to the natural world, reducing the importance of the figure.

Germanic Romantic painting did not developed naturally from the preceding period. It was deliberately in opposition to current aesthetics and beliefs. One of the major sources of inspiration for Friedrich and the Dresden school was the religious spirit of the Middle Ages embodied in the architecture of the Gothic Cathedral. Ruins served Nationalistic and Romantic ideals to rebuild the fate of the German people, as Grote says "the past was the living spiritual force" [13] for them. The new formed aristocracy was a result of the Age of Enlightenment, an intellectual movement preceding Romanticism that challenged the traditions set by the church, as it restricted the human reason. The Enlightenment, on the other hand, limited the creativity; therefore, Romanticism was partly a reaction against it. Romantics were also against the despotism of monarchs and slavery, which was widely practiced in the west part of the world.

A new historical awareness arose, as a result of the Napoleonic war and a growing distaste for industrialisation, and brought a fascination with Gothic and medieval period.

Artists of this period explored the natural world’s effects on mind, memory and emotion through painting, showing the power of imagination to transform the environment, seeing landscape from a subjective view point. However this is particularly in the effect of nature upon the artist when he is surrounded by it, preferably alone, in contrast to the usually very social art of the Enlightenment. Friedrich wrote in 1821 that:

"I must surrender myself to what surrounds me, unite myself with its clouds and rocks, in order to be what I am. I need solitude in order to communicate with nature." [14] 

Painters thus read the Carl-Gustav Carus (1789-1869) work Naturphilosohen. Carus was a physician and philosopher, a painter himself and a fried of Friedrich. He expressed in his writings and paintings the pantheistic conception of nature as ‘Mother-nature.’ [15] 

To conclude, in the late 18th century the Romantic Movement formed in Europe and landscape became a subject in its own right during that period. British landscape artists had been modelling the Italian old masters, in comparison to the German painters, who turned back to the German medieval and Gothic art. The strong belief and interest in the importance of nature was a result of the political, economic and religious changes at this time, which led to a rediscovery of the feeling, freeing oneself from the rules and restrictions imposed by society. The power of human reason was no longer primary: what mattered was the importance of imagination and the irrational combined with reason and the balance between reason and feelings.

CHAPTER 2

In what way did Turner develop the sublime in his work in relation to the Swiss Alps trip?

This chapter will recount the history of the sublime and how philosophers prepared the way for the aesthetic of the sublime based on categories of ‘overwhelming’ [16] , which were the core activity of the landscape artists at that time, as well as how Turner approached this idea and who were the artist that influenced him in his early career. There are many aspects of the notion of the sublime, but what I am going to be dealing with in this chapter is the use of the sublime in Turner’s exploration of the relationship between man and nature at this period.

Turner painted all the styles of landscape composition including historical, architectural, mountainous, pastoral and marine. He exhibited his works under different categories such as epic, pastoral, picturesque, sublime, in fact he combined them in one picture. (Fig. 9) [17] Turner painted sublime sea, skies and moods of the weather, as element of the composition, but here I am going to explore particularly his paintings of the mountainous scenery in the Swiss Alps.

Looking back before the birth of aesthetics in the mid-18th century, the ‘sublime’ term is historically developed from Greek and Latin terms, used as noun and adjective, respectively, which caused ambiguity in the usage of the concept latter with the adjectival employment. [18] Nevertheless, what is more important is to "preserve absolutely the operational and critical sense of the concept historically attributed to it." [19] 

The theories of the sublime derived from the classical text Peri Hypsous, variously translated as On Elevation, On Greatness, or On the Sublime, formally attributed to Cassius Longinus, who thought to have lived in the 3rd century, now attributed to Longinus or Pseudo-Longinus who lived in the 1st century. According to the critic William Vaughan the ancient thinker Longinus considered that aesthetic pleasure could be experienced not only as beauty but also as a more invigorating experience called the ‘Sublime’ and associated with perfect forms that suggest the experience of the divine.

On the other hand, Edmund Burke, an Anglo-Irish statesman, looked at these ideas in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756). He designates sublime a category that opposes beauty:

"…the beautiful settles us in the world, the sublime dazzles and bewilders by transgressing form and confusing reference." [20] 

Burke argued that attracting objects are beautiful and repellent objects "such as excessive size, darkness or infinite extension" [21] are sublime, but both can be pleasurable.

This awakening of strong emotion was explored in literature, painting and the appreciation of natural scenery in the mid-18th century. English romantic poets had used the word sublime in the sense of representing a device for persuading through the emotions. In time, sublime emerged in all the arts. [22] Many writers were engaged with Nature and the landscape in their poetic works. In the poems of James Thomson, [23] for example, were loved by Turner, according to Grigson. [24] English landscapes were painted and exhibited with one or another text that referred to Thomson’s famous poem The Seasons published between 1726 and1730. The Seasons and its long passages aimed to evoke the terror of the destructive forces of nature, such as storms and volcanoes, and these terrible aspects of nature helped to show the greatness of the creator. According to Grigson:

"Nature in Thomson’s poems is not far short of a religion, not far short of that pantheism which lucks underneath the developed landscape and poetry of 1790-1930" [25] 

The main aim for the Romantic artist was to show the weakness of the human. The subject of the relation of Romanticism to nature is comprehensive. Previously, during the Enlightenment rural landscape settings were enormously idealised, then the Romantic impulse to enjoy and ponder over Mountain passes had just educated sensitivity to emotion, and the notion that nature could be morally involving.

Turner made his first sketching tour in Britain in 1792 and explored the new fashionable concept of the sublime, in which imagery that produced feelings of awe, fear and horror identified powerful forms of artistic expression. Between 1794 and 1797, Turner other artists were employed by Dr. Monro, as Finberg cites Farington who said that:

"They were chiefly employed in copying the outlines or unfinished drawings of Cozens, etc., of which copies they made finished drawings." [26] 

These were John Robert Cozens’ (1752-1797) drawings from his unfinished seven sketch-books from tours in Italy and Switzerland made in 1782-1783, capturing the feelings and the features of a place. [27] As Vaughan writes, "No other artist of his generation perceived landscape so closely’ as him. In developing J. R. Cozens’ work, Cozens [28] senior play a major role. (Fig. 10) Vaughan explains that he is best remembered for A new Method of Assisting the Invention of Drawing Original Composition of Landscape (1785) where he listed sixteen formulae under the title Descriptions of the Various kinds of Composition of Landscape. [29] This ‘practical training,’ as Finberg wrote, continued for three years and gave ‘noticeable confidence’ in Turner’s own work.

In 1802 Turner also visited Switzerland and used these aesthetic and compositional principles of natural sublime, which can be seen in watercolour titled The Great Falls at Reichenbach, in the Hasli Valley, Switzerland (1804) (Fig. 11), for example, and also in St. Gotthard, the Devil’s Bridge (1804) (Fig. 12). As with Cozens the Alps inspired in him a sense of the sublime of the natural world. The art critic Charles Sala explains that Turner:

"…sought to define new relationships, new concepts that expressed one of the leading subjects of the Romanticism: the physical and the spiritual journey that provides the painter with a dramatically enhanced space elaborated both from his direct impressions and by the active participation of memory." [30] 

Like Turner, for J. R. Cozens it was not just a picturesque exercise, he was also interested in the "spiritual journey,", he emphasised the destructive power of nature and man as a tiny figure, as Sala points out, in one of his watercolours Entrance to the Valley of Grande Chartreuse, 1783 (Fig. 13) [31] 

Imagination was considered the ultimate faculty of the mind, opposed to the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason and necessary for the interpretation of the symbols in nature. The accounts of genius, and of the significance of imagination in aesthetics, are the keys to Romanticism, which determined the romantic originality of the work. In the early 19th century, these themes were analysed in Kant’s Critique of Judgement.

Romantic painters’ experiences of landscape merged with other experiences in their memory and imagination; they combined reality and symbol in their paintings, by collaging objects, and creating imaginative spaces to express moral judgement of an event, or political messages referring to the war against Napoleon.

"In a sense, this relationship between landscape and event remained the dominant preoccupation throughout Turner’s career, though it deepened into more basic investigation of experience and representation." [32] 

To conclude, Romantic artists used the epic of nature as an expression of the sublime, through direct sensory experience and this created a new, more serious style of landscape painting. Their approach was preoccupied with high-minded aesthetic concepts and sublime subject matter. This opportunity to experience the terrible awe in nature of the alpine scenery Turner used as an expression of the sublime in his watercolours, by depicting elements of vastness and danger, to emphasise the theme man subordinate to nature. It could be said that the new fashionable concept of the sublime, explored in all arts, in which imagery that produced feelings of awe, fear of horror were identified as powerful form of artistic expression.

Visual impression and mental and emotional reflection.

Here I am concerned with artistic representations of the sublime in landscape painting, in particular through the work of T. and Friedrich over the Romantic period.

man’s understandings of the world is an example of how in his landscape paintings

exploring the relationships between man and nature.

CHAPTER 3

In what way did Friedrich develop the sublime in his mountain scenery?

This chapter follows the theme of the sublime in relation to Friedrich, including some of the artists that influenced him in his early period, in order to understand how he developed his approach of the sublime. I will also discuss Immanuel Kant’s aesthetics of the sublime, which were responsible for the reflective mood in the visual arts in Germany. I will focus particularly on the sublime in Friedrich’s mountain scenery and more closely on his famous painting the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.

While at Copenhagen Academy Friedrich studied Dutch landscape painting in the art galleries of the Danish metropolis, and as Wolf points out, he was inspired by his teacher Jens Juel’s (1745-1802) "carefully composed landscapes." [33] Juel’s Landscape with Northern Lights, 1790 (Fig. 14) is an attempt to paint the Aurora Borealis, showing sublime sky upon a scene of a gate, and a wanderer resting by the road. The art critic Joseph Leo Koerner writes that Juel’s Northern Light would have demonstrated to Friedrich that the sublime:

"can be present in landscapes neither exotic nor Antique…must be invoked subjectively, not as attributes of setting or event, but as simply the transformation, through painting, of how we see." [34] 

Koerner points out some of Juel’s devices that Friedrich used later in his paintings, such as the use of barriers, for instance, bushes and stone, thus the radical reduction of mid-ground and the complication of foreground through darkness. Juel’s landscape art derives partly from 17th century Dutch painters like Aert van der Neer, and partly from Swiss masters like Johann Ludwig Aberli, according to Koerner.

In particular, one of the Dutch masters Friedrich knew was the painter Jacob Ruisdael (1628-1682). In his painting Jewish Cemetery (Fig. 15) Ruisdael transforms a picturesque scene of ruins into something far more personal and disturbing. This incorporation of the beholder into the viewing subject and the landscape’s symmetry and arrangement, Koerner fines common in Friedrich’s Bohemian Landscape with Two Trees (Fig. 16) and also in Bohemian Landscape with Milleschauer, (Fig. 17) both 1810. [35] These symmetries in Friedrich’s work express the analogue between Gothic architecture and the German forest, reflecting the religion and the culture linked originally to the Christian Middle Ages in Germany, and explored in Goethe’s essay on the Strasbourg cathedral (1773). [36] 

Friedrich moved to Dresden in October 1798 and with Philip Otto Runge was moved by a determination to create a specifically German spiritual landscape and express the need to let the inner world unfold.

Romantics were concerned with their sensory experience…well aware of the close link between perception and inner being, which Immanuel Kant (1724 –1804) acknowledged in his Critique of Practical Reason. He claimed that the qualities we recognize in nature are ones that are inherent within us, but also the contemplation of nature can provide the deepest moments of self-discovery. Like Kant the Romantics could find in such experiences the knowledge not just of a moral, but also of the Divine. [37] 

This positioning of a contemplating figure is seen in another painter of the Dutch Golden Age pictures that Friedrich would have known Allaert van Everdingen (1621-1675). Everdingen’s The Draughtsman, 1640 (Fig. 18) represents the operation of drawing from nature, and the figures appear in a symmetrical pairs or alone contemplating a sublime view, dominating the natural scene with their presence, "defining landscape as primarily the encounter of subject with world." [38] 

In Germany, Kant published another aesthetic theory Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, in 1764, influenced by Burke’s work, where he wrote that the sublime was of three kinds: the splendid, the noble and the terrifying. [39] After that, he established in his Critique of Judgment, 1790, that there is a qualitative difference between feelings of the Beautiful and Sublime, explaining that Beautiful is bound to the tangible world, and the sublime is boundless. Kant gave examples such as:

"Towering oaks and lonely shadows in a sacred wood are sublime," "day is beautiful, the night is sublime," and "Beauty charms, the Sublime moves" [40] 

He identified two different kinds of sublime: (1) the mathematical, in which the reflective judgment is occupied not with measuring an object but with recognizing, "in our imagination a striving toward infinite progress and in our reason a claim for absolute totality"… and (2) the dynamical, in which one confronts the difference between human limitations as natural creatures and the nonsensuous standard of reason that enables us to find, "in our mind … a superiority to nature even in its immensity." [41] 

The mathematical sublime involved the recognition that "we can never have a first or fundamental measure" and he suggested that this recognition could lead not simply to scepticism about the usefulness of measurement but to a pleasure in the mind's production of its own insatiable demand for a measure that could be enlarged to achieve a totality. [42] 

Friedrich, like Schelling and the other philosophers of Romanticism, considered the visible and tangible phenomena of nature to be a manifestation of the invisible and ineffable, like shadows of God. [43] Progressively, in study after study, his landscapes appear as fragments of the monologue of a lonely man dealing with the fundamental questions of life, and in particular the relationship between Man, Nature and God. [44] Participating in a quest as Sala writes (Sala, p.85) Friedrich’s landscapes speak a similar belief in this transcendental unity. By expressing the essential dynamics of mountain formation, Friedrich was simultaneously revealing part of God.

Literary influences Tieck and Schlegel played a great part throughout the movement and were responsible for a reflective mood in the pictures. (Grote, p.37)

Some of the aspects of the sublime he paints are the infinite, the vastness of nature, the darkness, the grandeur, divinity of landscape, and obscurity in the representation of landscape. This point has been made by Burke, mentioned in chapter two, who suggested that these feelings of terror are stimulated by attributes of the sublime in nature, andcan only be drawn by obscurity. In his notes Friedrich wrote:

"…landscapes wrapped in fog seem more vast, more sublime; fog stimulates the imagination and reinforces expectation, like a woman dressed in veils. The eye and the imagination are generally more attracted to the hazy distance than to what may more clearly be seen close up." [45] 

Friedrich locates sublime, "not in the object itself, but in its subjective effect on the viewer," [46] according to Koerner’s analyses of Friedrich’s system the distant objects in the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818 (Fig. 19) are not sublime, it is their obscurity as objects of the viewer’s gaze that fills them with power. Koerner points out that this is what Kant in his Critique of Judgement (1790) discussed, placing the sublime within the observing subject, rather than in objects themselves. He wrote that sublime:

"is contained not in anything of nature, but only in our mind, insofar as we can become conscious of our superiority to nature with us, and thereby also to nature outside us…sublimity can be attributed merely to our way of thinking…" [47] 

The contemplating figure is the mediator between our experience of the scene and the landscape fragments. For Kant, sublime in art occurs at the moment…when the mind seeking to comprehend its subject falls and attains thereby an institution of a transcendent order. (Koerner, p.100)

Friedrich uses the elimination of the middle-ground to create the effect of a sudden emergence, and in some cases, the elimination of the foreground was a pictorial ploy that tended to destabilize the gaze, to create an uncertainty due to the absence of cues as to the point of view adopted in the composition.

"What the newer landscape artists see in a circle of a hundred degrees in Nature they press together unmercifully into an angle of vision of only forty-five degrees. And furthermore, what is in Nature separated by large spaces, is compressed into a cramped space and overfills and oversatiates the eye, creating an unfavourable and disquieting effect on the viewer." [48] 

Another technique was the "montage" and joining of natural elements which did not usually coexist in the same space and which created an effect of atmospheric paradox conductive to mystical experience. Last but not least, there was his tendency to use a particular perspective in which there was either an excess of definition in the background area, and a sharp precision in the foreground accompanied by the pronounced dematerialization of objects in the distance.

Despite all his originality and strong personality, however, Friedrich did not stay far from the mainstream of the Great Germanic tradition. He admired Albrecht Durer’s great precision in rendering natural details with a graphic technique that was both incisive and nervous.

In conclusion, Friedrich’s primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension." Another point of view from the aesthetic of the sublime is the experience of transcendence… in the 22nd Fragment from Friedrich Schlegel’s Athenaeum he writes:

"…One could say that the sense for fragments and projects is the transcendental component of the historical spirit." [49] 

CHAPTER 4

How they differ in the approach to the sublime in relation to their explorations of the mountain scenery?

In this chapter, I will make a comparison between Turner’s and Friedrich’s versions of the mountain scenes, discussed in the last two chapters. These motifs were used by both artists who searched for more meaning and new relationships between man and nature. I will draw out the similarities and differences in their representation of the sublime in their paintings, thematically and stylistically. Here, I will consider Timothy Mitchell’s article Friedrich's Der Watzmann: German Romantic Landscape Painting and Historical Geology, and his scientific explanation of why mountains scenes were painted at this time, and specifically the alpine mountains, in order to explain both artists’ intentions, and the differences in their approach to the sublime.

So far, chapter two referred to Turner’s paintings from his first tour of Switzerland in 1802, The Great Falls at Reichenbach, in the Hasli Valley, Switzerland and St. Gotthard, the Devil’s Bridge (See Fig. 11 and 12), and in chapter tree to Friedrich’s most famous paintings Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. (See Fig. 19) Both artists spent most summers visiting different sites to make on-site studies, so these examples of mountainous scenes are selected for the purpose of this comparison study, and in particular the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, as a common ground that combines and illustrates the main similarities and differences between the two painters.

This particular subject, the spectacle of the Alps is, according to Sala, closely related to that of the Dresden School and to Friedrich in particular. According to Sala, this is the point where Turner and Friedrich meet, and after that diverged in their approaches to rendering the light. Turner begins to study various aspects and expressions of nature, and turns to more chromatic analysis of light, which became the prime element in his paintings that transformed the landscape, whereas in Friedrich’s work "light had a symbolic function linked to Christianity, and he used it as means of definition and construction." [50] 

Turner’s alpine paintings offered viewers of the experience of danger, grandeur and horror in nature, as well as a spectacular of visual entertainment. The sublime derives from the sublime power of nature, whereas Friedrich renders the sublime in a more complicated way, conveying meanings in a numerous layers.

The figures in Friedrich’s paintings appeared reduced in size, but in the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, it is enlarged and placed in the centre to emphasise the act of contemplating. There are many interpretations of the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog that have been suggested by art critics and Timothy Mitchell adds another one that derives from the scientific theories of the mountains formation that seems to explain not only why Friedrich was interested in this subject, but also why Turner and other artists, philosophers and scientists were.

Mitchell’s analyses focus on Friedrich’s two alpine landscape paintings Der Watzmann, 1825 (Fig. 20) and Die Hochgebirge, 1824 (Fig. 21), and provide an explanation how Friedrich represented the ideas of geognosy [51] in these alpine scenes and also in the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog Friedrich "declined to visit the Alps himself," [52] as he was determine to use specifically the nature of the landscape of his homeland. However, he is believed that he listened to Carus’s description of his trips to the Alps and studied his drawings of geological formations and peaks that Carus made. In the two Alpine paintings mentioned above Friedrich constructed mountain sceneries that constituted from the Alps Mountains that he studied and mountains from completely different regions in Germany that he had observed himself. In the case of the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog the mountain scenery was also made up to serve his carefully intended purposes.

"Friedrich’s choice of originally separate forms strengthens and intensifies the experience of God in Nature..." [53] (Mitchell)

As Mitchell writes that is what makes Friedrich’s work sublime and eternal. Although, at first sight, Friedrich’s substitution of a composed image derived from drawings done at completely different sites, leads to the conclusion that Friedrich had no interest in geological manifestation, this was not the case, in fact he was interested in the geognosy theory. [54] 

One aspect of the theory is that mountains are shown as the source of fresh water, and this is illustrated not only by Friedrich, but Turner’s images The Great Fall of the Reichenbach, in the Valley of Hasle and St. Gotthard, the Devil’s Bridge, also refer to this water cycle, as well as Ludwig Richter’s Der Watzmann (Fig. 22) and Joseph Anton Koch’s Schmadribachfall (Fig. 23) paintings, who are shown in the Mitchell’s article.

A compelling motivation behind Friedrich’s paintings was an interest in illustrating one particular aspect of the geognosy theory, illustrated in the Wanderer….., and that was the discovery of the granite and it’s connotations. Granite was a mineral that formed these mountains. Mitchell quotes Carus:

"…where we probe the nature of minerals we find in the deepest regions of the earth which Mankind has been able to penetrate and in the examination of the highest peaks, which tower above all other ranges, one and the same substance, one and the same structure… granite." [55] 

Goethe also reflected on this discovery, referring to the granite as foundation of our earth, "…upon which are fashioned all the various remaining mountains." [56] Goethe uses as a symbol and evidence of creation in his essay Ueber den Granit written after 1784, where he wrotes:

"Sitting on a high, bare pinnacle and surveying a wide expanse, I can say to myself: ‘Here you rest directly upon the ground which reaches to the deepest places of the earth." [57] 

This quote illustrates Friedrich’s painting to some extended. Thus he adds religious symbol to it, using the symmetry in the mountains arrangement indicates intention to place religious experience of this spectator "on the secure grounds of science." [58] In the Christian symbolism mountain is the place where heaven and earth meet, the goal of the mystical quest. (S.p.222) artists in a search for a new way to depict the spiritual dialogue between man and God in nature (S.p.129). Carus speaks about this invisible whole formed by God, Man, and Nature and Friedrich landscapes evoke similar belief in this transcendental unity. The underlying idea is that the mountain is the allegory of God, an equivalent to God’s presence, and the valley is the locus of man’s earthy journey which always ends on death. He illustrates the deepest conviction that Man and Nature move to the same underlying rhythms and laws, which God has produces in Nature and Man a creation essentially and inextricably fused.

Overall, both artists were intrigued by the dimensions and the power of nature, and that triggered the attempts into the infinite where the spectator experience fear and fascination in the face of the implied infinity. It could be said that the paintings by Friedrich and Turner share one central ingredient: they make references to the predominant theory of the origin and the purpose of the mountains. Not only do these paintings indicate knowledge of such a theory, but the paintings in part intended to illustrate distinct aspects of this theory. For Turner, the figure does not play a central role, although he added tiny figures in St. Gotthard, the Devil’s Bridge, only to emphasise the inferiority of man to the greatness of nature, whereas Friedrich’s mountains landscapes representations are deeper and more spiritual. In the case of Friedrich’s Wanderer it is not clear, as geognosy offered view of the mountains that is ideal for this subordinate role of man to nature. As Mitchell writes that in some works Nature was seen to of value only insofar as it served some human needs. Another possibility is suggested from the Dresden artist Ludwig Richter (1803-1884) (see Fig.), when as a student in Rome in 1824 he noted that:

"For the first time I am going to venture into the romantic field, where and nature dominate equally, each giving meaning and interest to the other." [59] 

CONCLUSION