Art: “Winter Landscape with Church” by Caspar David Friedrich

 

 

Kerstin, started a conversation at our “Catholic Art” folder at our Goodreads Catholic Thought Book Club on this painting. Discussion on this painting starts at Comment #10.

Kerstin Commented:

Every year subscribers of the devotional Magnificat get a new bookmark. It is the size of a small postcard with a picture of fine religious art on one side and a short reflection on the other. In past years these reflections have been written by Bishop Robert Barron. I want to concentrate on the picture chosen for this year. It is the main part of a painting by the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and the title of the painting is Winter Landscape with Church. It is a deeply contemplative painting, and while the main part is on the bookmark, it is only in seeing the entire painting that I noticed the crutches left behind in the snow.

This is a painting worth discussing. There are so many layers to ponder. What do you see? What is your interpretation?

Madeleine Replied:

Impressive and striking painting. The church, the rocks, the trees--there's a connection there, but the crutches take my reflection elsewhere--lots to think about. It's poetic, something to think about with a pencil. I've been considering subscribing to Magnificat, but there are so many things on my plate I fear it will sit in my paper pile too many days. It is a beautiful magazine, though!

Casey Replied:

The Crucifix, the rock, the trees, the snow, the cold, the material. In the distance, through fog and darkness, a Church. Can we get there from here? On crutches? Is there a path? Is there even land? Or an abyss? Show me the way, Oh Lord.

 

I notice, too, the sources of light. Sunlight appears to be shining from behind us. But there seems to be another, softer, gentle, sunrise light behind the Church. A different kind of light. A heavenly light?

 

Also see the way the trees mirror the Church imperfectly. Natural and beautiful but not fully ordered as the spires are. The Church on Earth mirroring the heavenly church?

My Reply to Casey:

Yes that has to be the most interesting part of the painting. The tree reflects the church.

 

I can’t say I’m a fan of this painting. If it wasn’t mentioned in the title I would not have taken the towers in the distance for a church. It looks more like a castle to me. I guess the connection is the natural religion of the trees is at the heart of church religion. Or maybe it’s saying that the natural religion is more prominent than church religion. I don’t know.

 

The crutches confuse. Was the person they belonged to swallowed by snow, saved, or just abandoned the crutches? Whichever, they are melodramatic. I don’t like them here.

Casey’s Reply to Me:

The owner of the crutches is praying against the rock in front of the Crucifix.

 

What I'm seeing is that we can't get to the Church of heaven on our own because of our weaknesses. We can only humble ourselves in the Church of earth and pray.

My Reply to Casey in Surprise:

Oh wow. I didn’t even notice him there. You can barely make him out. Well that changes things. I’ll have to give this more thought.

Frances Commented:

He’s left his crutches behind in an act of total abandonment to God’s will?

Kerstin Comment:

In the foreground everything is in focus. We can see the trees, rocks, the snow, the crutches, etc. These are things we can grasp and comprehend. In the background it gets foggy and misty. Above the mist floats the silhouette of a church. The eye is entering a mystical space, a space that's other-worldly, where realities exist that are not easily grasped nor comprehended. The bridge between the seen and the unseen, is the crucifix.

 

The trees we see aren't just any trees, but pine trees, the ones we use as Christmas trees. Visually they pierce into the mist and the tall one is at the same height as the church steeples.

 

There is also perspective, even though we see the tall pine tree at the same height as the church, the church is in the background, so we automatically know she is much bigger.

My Comment:

That man I didn't initially notice does make a big difference in understanding the painting. It is definitely a positive interpretation of faith within whatever precisely is the theme. I can't quite grasp the theme though. I do think there is some sort of allusion to Christianity existing within nature, and perhaps since the man blends so easily within nature is also part of that theme. But nature here isn't just a loving blessing from God. It's hard and cold and isolating. The man's smallness emphasizes our smallness. The crutches emphasizes our smallness and weakness and the need to rely on faith. I still think they are melodramatic. I can't even understand how that man walked to the spot in that snow using crutches. The trees (I think there's more than one bunched together) alludes to the cross and to the Tree of Life in paradise. I am now positive on this painting, but I can't say I love it!

Casey’s Reply:

It suffers from the fact that it is simultaneously didactic and opaque.

My Reply to Casey:

LOL, yes that is so true!

Kerstin Replied to One of My Comments:

Manny wrote: " I can't even understand how that man walked to the spot in that snow using crutches."

 

This is such a typical German landscape that I made certain assumptions ;-)

 

The crucifix depicted is called a "Wegkreuz" in German, literally meaning "path crucifix". They dot the landscape along country roads, farm access roads, walking paths, hiking trails, etc. mostly in regions that are primarily Catholic. They are placed by people or communities, not officially by the Church. Sometimes they have a bench too, so one can sit and rest. So in looking at the painting I automatically assume there is a country lane or walking path there now obscured by the snow. If you look on the left by the rocks and small pine trees there is a path or wagon rut.

Kerstin then posted some pictures of mountain crucifixes from Germany.

Kerstin Edit: The writing on the cross means "Lord stay with us"

 

 

Kerstin Comment:

Snow obscures the landscape. It obscures the terrain and the paths you travel. For country folk this hazard is all too real. Are you still on the path or off into the fields? Falling into a ditch or getting stuck in a snow drift? The snow symbolizes the unknown. We really don't know what is under our feet, what life throws at us. We have to have trust in God to keep us on the right path, to keep us safe, so we can enter Heaven, depicted as the Church above the mist.

 

The painting would work very poorly in a city setting. City folk still have a sidewalk under their feet even if covered in snow.

 

The crutches are a stand-in for technology, man's reliance on himself. The way we use crutches is to lean on them with our full body weight while we hobble along. Self-reliance without God makes us less than human, we can only limp.

 

The crutches also signify man's spiritual brokenness. We create our own devices to move along, but ultimately that isn't enough, we need Divine healing to make us whole.

My Reply to Kerstin:

I’m so glad you posted those pictures, Kerstin.  I was reminded of a travel essay by the novelist and poet D.H. Lawrence.  The essay is titled “The Crucifix Across the Mountains” and it’s collected in his Italian travel essays called Twilight in Italy.  Actually he starts his journey in Bavaria and eventually goes over the Tirol and into Italy.  But in “The Crucifix Across the Mountains” he stops to admire all these German crucifixes across the mountains.  You can read the essay here.  

 

Let me quote some pertinent sections.  Here he first comes across the crucifixes. 

 

The crucifixes are there, not mere attributes of the road, yet still having something to do with it. The imperial processions, blessed by the Pope and accompanied by the great bishops, must have planted the holy idol like a new plant among the mountains, there where it multiplied and grew according to the soil, and the race that received it.

 

As one goes among the Bavarian uplands and foothills, soon one realizes here is another land, a strange religion. It is a strange country, remote, out of contact. Perhaps it belongs to the forgotten, imperial processions.

 

Coming along the clear, open roads that lead to the mountains, one scarcely notices the crucifixes and the shrines. Perhaps one's interest is dead. The crucifix itself is nothing, a factory-made piece of sentimentalism. The soul ignores it.

 

But gradually, one after another looming shadowily under their hoods, the crucifixes seem to create a new atmosphere over the whole of the countryside, a darkness, a weight in the air that is so unnaturally bright and rare with the reflection from the snows above, a darkness hovering just over the earth. So rare and unearthly the light is, from the mountains, full of strange radiance. Then every now and again recurs the crucifix, at the turning of an open, grassy road, holding a shadow and a mystery under its pointed hood.

 

This leads to a sort of contemplation.

 

Whether it is singing or dancing or play-acting or physical transport of love, or vengeance or cruelty, or whether it is work or sorrow or religion, the issue is always the same at last, into the radiant negation of eternity. Hence the beauty and completeness, the finality of the highland peasant. His figure, his limbs, his face, his motion, it is all formed in beauty, and it is all completed. There is no flux nor hope nor becoming, all is, once and for all. The issue is eternal, timeless, and changeless. All being and all passing away is part of the issue, which is eternal and changeless. Therefore there is no becoming and no passing away. Everything is, now and for ever. Hence the strange beauty and finality and isolation of the Bavarian peasant.

 

It is plain in the crucifixes. Here is the essence rendered in sculpture of wood. The face is blank and stiff, almost expressionless. One realizes with a start how unchanging and conventionalized is the face of the living man and woman of these parts, handsome, but motionless as pure form. There is also an underlying meanness, secretive, cruel. It is all part of the beauty, the pure, plastic beauty. The body also of the Christus is stiff and conventionalized, yet curiously beautiful in proportion, and in the static tension which makes it unified into one clear thing. There is no movement, no possible movement. The being is fixed, finally. The whole body is locked in one knowledge, beautiful, complete. It is one with the nails. Not that it is languishing or dead. It is stubborn, knowing its own undeniable being, sure of the absolute reality of the sensuous experience. Though he is nailed down upon an irrevocable fate, yet, within that fate he has the power and the delight of all sensuous experience. So he accepts the fate and the mystic delight of the senses with one will, he is complete and final. His sensuous experience is supreme, a consummation of life and death at once.

 

He gives a beautiful description of the German peasant who took him up there.

 

The driver of the pack-horses is afraid. The fear is always there in him, in spite of his sturdy, healthy robustness. His soul is not sturdy. It is blenched and whitened with fear. The mountains are dark overhead, the water roars in the gloom below. His heart is ground between the mill-stones of dread. When he passes the extended body of the dead Christ he takes off his hat to the Lord of Death. Christ is the Deathly One, He is Death incarnate.

 

And the driver of the pack-horses acknowledges this deathly Christ as supreme Lord. The mountain peasant seems grounded upon fear, the fear of death, of physical death. Beyond this he knows nothing. His supreme sensation is in physical pain, and in its culmination. His great climax, his consummation, is death. Therefore he worships it, bows down before it, and is fascinated by it all the while. It is his fulfilment, death, and his approach to fulfilment is through physical pain.

 

Then he tries to psychoanalyze the artistry of the crucifixes.  This is modernist literature after all. 

 

But the tendency of the crucifix, as it nears the ridge to the south, is to become weak and sentimental. The carved Christs turn up their faces and roll back their eyes very piteously, in the approved Guido Reni fashion. They are overdoing the pathetic turn. They are looking to heaven and thinking about themselves, in self-commiseration. Others again are beautiful as elegies. It is dead Hyacinth lifted and extended to view, in all his beautiful, dead youth. The young, male body droops forward on the cross, like a dead flower. It looks as if its only true nature were to be dead. How lovely is death, how poignant, real, satisfying! It is the true elegiac spirit.

 

Then there are the ordinary, factory-made Christs, which are not very significant. They are as null as the Christs we see represented in England, just vulgar nothingness. But these figures have gashes of red, a red paint of blood, which is sensational.

 

Beyond the Brenner, I have only seen vulgar or sensational crucifixes. There are great gashes on the breast and the knees of the Christ-figure, and the scarlet flows out and trickles down, till the crucified body has become a ghastly striped thing of red and white, just a sickly thing of striped red.

 

Of course Lawrence gets Christianity all wrong.  Or perhaps he takes liberties with meaning to express a point.  But some of what he says is somewhat ridiculous.  Here is his conclusion, which looks inward to his psychological state.

 

On a small mountain track on the Jaufen, not far from Meran, was a fallen Christus. I was hurrying downhill to escape from an icy wind which almost took away my consciousness, and I was looking up at the gleaming, unchanging snow-peaks all round. They seemed like blades immortal in the sky. So I almost ran into a very old Martertafel. It leaned on the cold, stony hillside surrounded by the white peaks in the upper air.

 

The wooden hood was silver-grey with age, and covered, on the top, with a thicket of lichen, which stuck up in hoary tufts. But on the rock at the foot of the post was the fallen Christ, armless, who had tumbled down and lay in an unnatural posture, the naked, ancient wooden sculpture of the body on the naked, living rock. It was one of the old uncouth Christs hewn out of bare wood, having the long, wedge-shaped limbs and thin flat legs that are significant of the true spirit, the desire to convey a religious truth, not a sensational experience.

 

The arms of the fallen Christ had broken off at the shoulders, and they hung on their nails, as ex-voto limbs hang in the shrines. But these arms dangled from the palms, one at each end of the cross, the muscles, carved sparely in the old wood, looking all wrong, upside down. And the icy wind blew them backwards and forwards, so that they gave a painful impression, there in the stark, sterile place of rock and cold. Yet I dared not touch the fallen body of the Christ, that lay on its back in so grotesque a posture at the foot of the post. I wondered who would come and take the broken thing away, and for what purpose.

 

I always loved Lawrence’s writing.  His prose rises to poetry, but one has to take his ideas with a grain of salt.  Sometimes they are downright baffling.  But he can capture a moment so well. 

My Comments to Kerstin:

Kerstin wrote: "The crutches also signify man's spiritual brokenness. We create our own devices to move along, but ultimately that isn't enough, we need Divine healing to make us whole."

Oh! I didn't think of that. Yes, that does fit

 

Kerstin wrote: "I think a strong theme is Trust in God."

Yes, but there has to be more. There is the whole nature element that has to be included in the theme. The trees reflecting the church is such a strong motif that it has to be part of the theme somehow.

My Reply to Casey:

Casey wrote: "Kerstin wrote: "I think a strong theme is Trust in God"
Even more specifically, I think it is the realization that Trust in God is all there is."

It certainly man against nature with God to as the refuge.

Casey’s Reply:

Why do you say "against?"

 

What I'm seeing is a man who has reached the limits of nature while still being contained within nature. I don't see evidence of battling nature or some such thing.

My Reply to Casey:

Good point. But nature does seem harsh, the rocks, the snow, the vast space. It must have taken some effort for him to get there. But I don't know. Like you said before, the meaning is opaque.

Kerstin Comment on the D.H. Lawrence Essay:

How interesting! Yes, D.H. Lawrence gets some things wrong. For one, the wooden crucifixes are hand-carved, not factory made - at least the old ones. Today with modern laser cutting who knows! But my hunch is people don't want factory made, they want the real thing - at least for this purpose. There are fewer and fewer artisanal shops who do it, but there also is a pride of passing on the art and the culture of woodcarving as it is practiced in the Alps.

 

Drawing the locals as fearful is overdrawn as well. I would say they are watchful and cautious and they have respect of the nature of the landscape they live in. The mountains are dangerous places. We are in awe of their grandeur and majesty, but you have to keep your wits about you where you tread. There are the constant dangers of rockfalls, wash-outs, etc.

 

I know exactly where Lawrence travelled, I've been through the Brenner Pass into Italy many times. It is an ages-old roadway to traverse the Alps. Today it is a four-lane highway, and you go up, up, up for many miles. You pass underneath many terraces specifically built to protect the road from rockfalls and avalanches. Here and there you get to see the old road leading up to the pass, and it is treacherous indeed.

 

I find it interesting that Lawrence doesn't want to touch the corpus of the broken crucifix. Somehow he knows it represents something sacred.

###

In summary, I think everyone made good points.  There is the theme of faith amidst nature, the smallness and feebleness of man to make it alone without faith, and I particularly liked Kerstin’s observation that the crucifix is a bridge from the natural foreground to the misty, mystical other world.  Perhaps it’s not that opaque after all.  The Wegkreuz photos and the D.H. Lawrence essay put into a German folkloric perspective the crucifix in the middle of nowhere.