Caspar David Friedrich

I adore the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, the nineteenth century German romantic. They have a mystery and Gothic intensity to them which seem to invest nature with a sense of power and foreboding. When people are depicted they appear diminished and unimportant, almost as if civliization and the created world itself were equally unimportant.

Arnold Böcklin, Mythology and Death

Arnold Böcklin, the nineteenth century Swiss symbolist, is another of my favourite painters, though he is not quite as technically proficient and awe-inspiring as Casper David Friedrich. Böcklin specialised in subjects with a mythological theme in the main. He also had an obsession with death, nowhere better expressed, perhaps, than in The Isle of the Dead, possibly his most famous painting, and his self-portrait with a skeleton in the background playing the violin.

Meeting Michelangelo

Most people going to Rome will want to visit the Sistine Chapel, accessed through the Vatican Museums. If one intends to pay proper respects to Michelangelo it is important to find out exactly when the Museums open and get there an hour or so beforehand. Now, once in, make straight for the Chapel, ignoring all of the wonderful distractions on the way; these can be admired later. Inside the Chapel, and hopefully alone, one can stand in silent awe before The Last Judgement, long before the twittering crowds arrive. :))

Melancholy and Mystery of a Street

There is, for me, something deeply unsettling about the paintings of Gorgio de Chirico, particularly those of his so-called ‘Metaphysical Period.’ They are full of sun and light, beautiful studies of the streets, loggias and piazzas of Italian cities, places like Turin, where Nietzsche, the artist’s favourite thinker, completed his best work. But there is something more, a deeps sense of melancholy and threat, in places almost completely devoid of people. This sense of the sinister, the sense that something terrible is about to happen, is nowhere better illustrated than in his Melancholy and Mystery of a Street. Who is the figure in the background, the shadow, waiting for the little girl, playing on her own? Is it someone she knows? Is it something else? One’s sense of foreboding is heightened, never to be released.