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We're in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin

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and we're looking at a Caspar David Friedrich's

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The Abbey in the Oakwood.

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It's a large painting, and it was one of a pair

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that included "The Monk by the Sea."

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This is a very somber image and it really is

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a perfect example of the way Friedrich used landscape

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in order to represent issues of human life and

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of the Divine.

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That's right, and in this painting we see

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the ruins of an abbey, an old abbey

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and a procession of figures entering this ruined abbey,

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carrying a coffin.

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And so immediately we have a sense of the passage of time,

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of the transience of human existence...

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We're also looking at, it seems, the dead of winter,

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and perhaps it's sunset.

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If you look at the remnant of architecture that's left

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you have this, first of all, this very forlorn sense

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from the ruins themselves.

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You see this old lancet window that's fallen into disrepair.

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No glass remains.

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And you have a real sense of the grandeur of

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the original space, but now what's left is just

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the futility of human experience, the futility of human effort.

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And what we see is that nature is eternal, but what man

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creates is transient.

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You have the monks themselves going through their

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ancient ritual of burial.

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But you see the cemetery that surrounds them in the snow

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is not well tended, it's haphazard, and it seems to be, itself,

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falling into disrepair.

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The abbey refers back to the Medieval tradition, but that's

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now fallen away.

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Older than that, are the oak trees,

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which might have represented, for Friedrich,

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the Druidic traditions, the pre-Christian traditions,

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these truly ancient oaks, gnarled, and terrifying

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in their silhouettes, but that speak of a tradition,

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as witnesses, that are even older than Christianity.

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And then beyond that, the crescent moon, and the sky,

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when you were speaking, that's the nature that I was

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looking at that is permanent,

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that is trans-historical, that moves beyond even

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the growth and death of the trees.

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Certainly of the architecture of Man's efforts.

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The moon having no sense of the cosmos, even beyond

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the seasons of the Earth.

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That's right, and so you have this sense of human time,

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you have this sense of nature's time,

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and then you have this sense of the time of God's space.

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And in fact, if there's any optimism in this image,

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it is that moon.

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It is the faintest crescent, and it might wane even more

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and become a New Moon, but then it will regenerate

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and there is this possibility for rebirth.

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You mentioned that it's the dead of winter,

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but spring will come.

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And so even if it seems quite distant now, in this sort of

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bleak twilight, there is this sense that there will be renewal.

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So we may have a suggestion of resurrection

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in the cycles of the moon, we have the crosses that are

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a part of the cemetery, we have the cross that forms part of

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the ruin of the abbey, and that suggestion of resurrection.

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I think what's so interesting about Friedrich is that

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he's imbuing a landscape with this very,

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very serious meaning, almost the way that, in the past,

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people have looked to the iconography of

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Christian paintings, Friedrich is looking for modern language

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with which to express these trans-historical human feelings,

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contemplating our role in the universe, and trying to make

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sense of all those layers of time that you referred to before.

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That's exactly right. Friedrich is finding a new way of

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representing these eternal issues, and it makes sense that

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he would have to, because this is now the beginning of the

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19th century. Friedrich is now living in a rational culture,

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and the idea of using the iconography of the Renaissance,

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or even of the Baroque, would feel implausible.

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It wouldn't make sense.

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And so Friedrich, this artist who was trained in Copenhagen,

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who grew up in Greifswald, which was then part of Sweden,

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on the Southern coast of the Baltic,

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is looking towards the very extreme, cold

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Northern lanscape, as a way of expressing

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these ideas of the eternal.