Caspar David Friedrich
This image contains two dark, bold trees in the foreground that your eyes are drawn to when you first look at the piece. However, the trees lead you in to the ruins of the monument in the centre of the background. The ruins are accompanied by surrounding trees and gravestones. There is a contrast between the dark, murky trees and the pure white snow that covers the ground.
This piece was made using oil on canvas and I believe that this image’s lack of colour evokes a mysterious mood. By doing this Caspar Freidrich has created a somewhat tense and uncomfortable atmosphere.
This piece is of a monastery graveyard in Berlin. The monastery was destroyed in the air raids of World Wor II. All that remains of the once grand abbey is a ruined nave, perhaps of the church. Now used as a cemetery, the trees have surrounded it, but unlike the earlier version, here the trees add majesty and grandeur as they stand like tall pillars around the sacred precepts, rather than intrude upon it as in the earlier version. And the gravestones have been converted into monks, processing into the church. The church is no longer there, and neither are the monks. So the painting is a reflection upon the transistorizes of all earthly things. One could also interpret the picture in a spooky sense: the monks are ghosts haunting their former monastery, and the shadowy bleakness of a winter day makes them almost seem present.
Caspar David Freidrich created ‘Monastery Graveyard in the Snow’ in 1818/19 in Berlin. However the piece was destroyed in 1945.
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