GESTICULANDO EL INVIERNO

Christa Zaat

Caspar David Friedrich (German painter) 1774 - 1840
Eiche im Schnee (Oak in the Snow), 1820s 
aka Eichbaum am Tümpel im Schnee
oil on canvas
44 x 34.5 cm.
Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne, Germany

While the majority of German artists lived in Rome, particularly in the early nineteenth century, or undertook extended visits to Italy, a few still managed to resist the pull of the South. One of these was Caspar David Friedrich, who studied in northern Germany and Denmark, and then, apart from a few trips within Germany and Bohemia, chose to settle in Dresden and never left it. Friedrich dedicated himself almost exclusively to painting landscapes, but his main objective was not the depiction of natural phenomena. The exact observation of nature was merely the basis for his symbolic content, which used the medium of landscape to contemplate the human condition and man's relationship with nature and with God. Friedrich's small painting, Oak in the snow, is based on accurate observation, and yet the image of the gnarled oak tree also has symbolic significance.

The oak is a symbol of the pre-Christian world. The fallen branches denote the meaningless of heathen existence, while signs of spring in the melting snow and the blue sky herald new life in Christ.

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Caspar David Friedrich (September 5, 1774 – May 7, 1840) was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation.[2] He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his often symbolic and anti-classical work seeks to convey a subjective, emotional response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that, according to the art historian Christopher John Murray, directs "the viewer's gaze towards their metaphysical dimension".

el dispensador dice:
no toques el árbol de buena madera,
no toques el árbol de mala madera,
el futuro depende... de que sus raíces no mueran.
JULIO 01, 2016.-