GERMAN ROMANTICISM AND THE SPIRITUAL PAINTINGS OF CASPAR DAVID FRIEDRICH
As with Spain, the key to German Romanticism is the presence of Napoléon’s “liberating army” on German soil. While much of Germany was loyal to the French emperor, especially the city of Dresden, the roots of German identity, which created the modern German nation, stem from this occupation by a foreign power. The expression of “German-ness” originate in the Romantic era with the rise of a unique German poetry, aesthetics, philosophy, and the visual arts. There are important similarities between American transcendentalism and German pantheism, a way of expressing the spiritual in an age of Enlightenment. The best know painter of the German feeling for the land was Caspar David Friedrich whose seemingly benign landscapes were also patriotic statements of a German artist.