Csornay Boldizsár - Dobos Zsuzsa - Varga Ágota - Zakariás János szerk.: A Szépművészeti Múzeum közleményei 97. (Budapest, 2002)

The Year 2002

Luise as an ordinary woman without regal attributes in an unpretentious though highly characteristic drawing, Carl Philipp Fohr drew his fellow-students in Heidelberg very much in the vein of an enthusiastic cult of friendship. 2. Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge Friedrich and Runge were both Protestants who had intensely personal, pantheistic views of man and his relationship to nature. They remained true to their origins and made the closely circumscribed worlds of northern Germany and the adjacent islands of the Baltic their special domain. Friedrich spent much of his career in Dresden while Runge lived there for two years, and spent the remainder of his short life mainly in his native Hamburg. Neither ever travelled outside Germany. In his highly theoretical art, Runge sought to find allegorical equivalents in nature for traditional Christian iconography. His investigations ranged from the detailed and specific renderings of flowers and leaves in his exquisite paper cutouts, to the ambitious cosmological program of his cycle of paintings, The Four Times of Day. Friedrich painted and drew the landscape of his native Germany and abandoned the subjects of myth and ancient history that filled the pictures of the Neoclassical painters. Nevertheless, he elevated his landscapes to the level of history painting by investing them with symbolic content. His works convey deep religious feeling. Friedich developed a personal language of naturalised landscape symbols, whether mountains or trees, Gothic ruins, church spires, tombs, or crosses, through which he meditated upon such broad themes as life and death, rebirth and redemption. Friedrich executed numerous pencil studies. He was concerned with recording spe-