WEBVTT 00:00:04.735 --> 00:00:06.730 We're in the Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin 00:00:06.730 --> 00:00:08.819 and we're looking at a Caspar David Friedrich's 00:00:08.819 --> 00:00:10.382 The Abbey in the Oakwood. 00:00:10.382 --> 00:00:13.285 It's a large painting, and it was one of a pair 00:00:13.285 --> 00:00:15.495 that included "The Monk by the Sea." 00:00:15.495 --> 00:00:18.744 This is a very somber image and it really is 00:00:18.744 --> 00:00:21.486 a perfect example of the way Friedrich used landscape 00:00:21.486 --> 00:00:25.285 in order to represent issues of human life and 00:00:25.285 --> 00:00:26.974 of the Divine. 00:00:26.974 --> 00:00:29.118 That's right, and in this painting we see 00:00:29.118 --> 00:00:31.744 the ruins of an abbey, an old abbey 00:00:31.744 --> 00:00:36.786 and a procession of figures entering this ruined abbey, 00:00:36.786 --> 00:00:38.489 carrying a coffin. 00:00:38.489 --> 00:00:40.512 And so immediately we have a sense of the passage of time, 00:00:40.512 --> 00:00:43.762 of the transience of human existence... 00:00:43.762 --> 00:00:46.999 We're also looking at, it seems, the dead of winter, 00:00:46.999 --> 00:00:49.081 and perhaps it's sunset. 00:00:49.081 --> 00:00:51.851 If you look at the remnant of architecture that's left 00:00:51.851 --> 00:00:54.739 you have this, first of all, this very forlorn sense 00:00:54.739 --> 00:00:57.066 from the ruins themselves. 00:00:57.066 --> 00:01:00.502 You see this old lancet window that's fallen into disrepair. 00:01:00.502 --> 00:01:01.951 No glass remains. 00:01:01.951 --> 00:01:04.850 And you have a real sense of the grandeur of 00:01:04.850 --> 00:01:07.683 the original space, but now what's left is just 00:01:07.683 --> 00:01:11.513 the futility of human experience, the futility of human effort. 00:01:11.513 --> 00:01:16.884 And what we see is that nature is eternal, but what man 00:01:16.884 --> 00:01:19.267 creates is transient. 00:01:19.267 --> 00:01:22.269 You have the monks themselves going through their 00:01:22.269 --> 00:01:23.500 ancient ritual of burial. 00:01:23.500 --> 00:01:26.417 But you see the cemetery that surrounds them in the snow 00:01:26.417 --> 00:01:30.596 is not well tended, it's haphazard, and it seems to be, itself, 00:01:30.596 --> 00:01:32.184 falling into disrepair. 00:01:32.184 --> 00:01:35.720 The abbey refers back to the Medieval tradition, but that's 00:01:35.720 --> 00:01:36.988 now fallen away. 00:01:36.988 --> 00:01:39.666 Older than that, are the oak trees, 00:01:39.666 --> 00:01:41.890 which might have represented, for Friedrich, 00:01:41.890 --> 00:01:44.731 the Druidic traditions, the pre-Christian traditions, 00:01:44.731 --> 00:01:49.185 these truly ancient oaks, gnarled, and terrifying 00:01:49.185 --> 00:01:51.955 in their silhouettes, but that speak of a tradition, 00:01:51.955 --> 00:01:55.165 as witnesses, that are even older than Christianity. 00:01:55.165 --> 00:01:58.601 And then beyond that, the crescent moon, and the sky, 00:01:58.601 --> 00:02:01.433 when you were speaking, that's the nature that I was 00:02:01.433 --> 00:02:03.151 looking at that is permanent, 00:02:03.151 --> 00:02:05.999 that is trans-historical, that moves beyond even 00:02:05.999 --> 00:02:08.652 the growth and death of the trees. 00:02:08.652 --> 00:02:10.748 Certainly of the architecture of Man's efforts. 00:02:10.748 --> 00:02:14.749 The moon having no sense of the cosmos, even beyond 00:02:14.749 --> 00:02:16.802 the seasons of the Earth. 00:02:16.802 --> 00:02:19.679 That's right, and so you have this sense of human time, 00:02:19.679 --> 00:02:21.929 you have this sense of nature's time, 00:02:21.929 --> 00:02:24.601 and then you have this sense of the time of God's space. 00:02:24.601 --> 00:02:27.880 And in fact, if there's any optimism in this image, 00:02:27.880 --> 00:02:29.321 it is that moon. 00:02:29.321 --> 00:02:32.570 It is the faintest crescent, and it might wane even more 00:02:32.570 --> 00:02:35.116 and become a New Moon, but then it will regenerate 00:02:35.116 --> 00:02:37.313 and there is this possibility for rebirth. 00:02:37.313 --> 00:02:39.150 You mentioned that it's the dead of winter, 00:02:39.150 --> 00:02:40.649 but spring will come. 00:02:40.649 --> 00:02:44.132 And so even if it seems quite distant now, in this sort of 00:02:44.132 --> 00:02:47.815 bleak twilight, there is this sense that there will be renewal. 00:02:47.815 --> 00:02:51.336 So we may have a suggestion of resurrection 00:02:51.336 --> 00:02:55.412 in the cycles of the moon, we have the crosses that are 00:02:55.412 --> 00:02:59.571 a part of the cemetery, we have the cross that forms part of 00:02:59.571 --> 00:03:03.771 the ruin of the abbey, and that suggestion of resurrection. 00:03:03.771 --> 00:03:07.037 I think what's so interesting about Friedrich is that 00:03:07.037 --> 00:03:10.751 he's imbuing a landscape with this very, 00:03:10.751 --> 00:03:15.262 very serious meaning, almost the way that, in the past, 00:03:15.262 --> 00:03:18.421 people have looked to the iconography of 00:03:18.421 --> 00:03:23.061 Christian paintings, Friedrich is looking for modern language 00:03:23.061 --> 00:03:27.629 with which to express these trans-historical human feelings, 00:03:27.629 --> 00:03:31.297 contemplating our role in the universe, and trying to make 00:03:31.297 --> 00:03:35.237 sense of all those layers of time that you referred to before. 00:03:35.237 --> 00:03:38.763 That's exactly right. Friedrich is finding a new way of 00:03:38.763 --> 00:03:41.154 representing these eternal issues, and it makes sense that 00:03:41.154 --> 00:03:44.280 he would have to, because this is now the beginning of the 00:03:44.280 --> 00:03:47.400 19th century. Friedrich is now living in a rational culture, 00:03:47.400 --> 00:03:50.985 and the idea of using the iconography of the Renaissance, 00:03:50.985 --> 00:03:53.482 or even of the Baroque, would feel implausible. 00:03:53.482 --> 00:03:54.579 It wouldn't make sense. 00:03:54.579 --> 00:03:58.149 And so Friedrich, this artist who was trained in Copenhagen, 00:03:58.149 --> 00:04:01.252 who grew up in Greifswald, which was then part of Sweden, 00:04:01.252 --> 00:04:03.234 on the Southern coast of the Baltic, 00:04:03.234 --> 00:04:06.498 is looking towards the very extreme, cold 00:04:06.498 --> 00:04:08.788 Northern lanscape, as a way of expressing 00:04:08.788 --> 00:04:10.917 these ideas of the eternal.