ABSTRACT
In 1818, during the early German Romantic period, the artist Caspar David Friedrich created his now familiar oil painting, The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. This work depicts a young man in a black coat in the foreground standing on a rocky precipice, his back turned toward us. He is bracing himself with a walking stick against the wind that blows his hatless hair in tangles. Stretched before the wanderer lies a fog-shrouded landscape composed of rocks and shapes of trees in lowland plains, faded mountains in the far horizon of clouds, and perhaps very far away—one can’t be sure, maybe it’s just more fog—an ocean. About this painting, the historian John Lewis Gaddis (2002) wrote,
The impression it leaves is contradictory, suggesting at once mastery over a landscape and the insignificance of an individual within it. We see no face, so it’s impossible to know whether the prospect confronting the young man is exhilarating, or terrifying, or both. (p. 1)
