Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818)
"What is wonderful always goes together with a sense of dismay."
-Longinus on the sublime
From Harold Bloom's The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life
"What is wonderful always goes together with a sense of dismay."
-Longinus on the sublime
From Harold Bloom's The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life
This is one of my favorite sublime paintings. Friedrich is a German Romantic painter of the 19th Century and this painting for me, capture perfectly the idea of Sublime; at least as far as the art movement was concerned. The part I have come to associate sublime with is beauty derived through terror. This painting, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, has the man atop a cliff with presumably a vast space beneath him, it is terrifying because he could fall to his death but it is beautiful and majestic because of the fog that expands and encompasses the land in front of him.
I chose to start my blog with this painting and not a text we have for the class for a few reasons, one of the easiest to articulate is that I got caught up in reading The Anatomy of Influence and have not delved into Stevens with both feet yet. Also, I see myself as the wanderer of the painting and the fog this class. It is vast, expansive and a bit overwhelming at the beginning and it will not be until I leave the cliff and jump into the material that I will be able to form some, at least slightly, cohesive posts.
For some reason this picture by Friedrich reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra". I am sure it is the cover of that book by some publisher somewhere out there. Lucretius also reminds me of Zarathustra, perhaps it is that they share an objective.
ReplyDelete