Caspar David Friedrich, "O Monge junto ao Mar", 1809-10
A magnificent thing it is, in infinite solitude by the sea, under a sullen sky, to gaze off into a boundless watery waste....and so I myself became the Capuchin monk, the picture became the dune, but that across which I should have looked with longing, the sea, was absent completely. Nothing could be sadder or more discomfited than just this position in the world: the single spark of life in the vast realms of death, the lonely center in the lonely circle. The picture with its two or three mysterious objects lies before one like the Apocalypse, as though it were thinking Young’s Night Thoughts, and since in its uniformity and boundlessness it has no foreground but the frame, the viewer feels as though his eyelids had been cut off....I am convinced that, through his powers, a square mile of Prussian sand, with a barberry bush and a crow beruffled forlornly in it, would have the effect of an Ossian or a Kosegarten. Yes, were such a painting made with its own chalk and water, the foxes and wolves, I believe, would be set howling by it, which is doubtless the strongest praise one could lavish on this kind of landscape...”
Heinrich von Kleist, “Feelings before Friedrich’s Seascape,” Berlin Abendblätter, Oct. 13, 1810 (Art Journal, Spring 1974, P. Miller, p. 208)
posted by Anónimo on 18:56
