A bareheaded man stands dramatically on a rocky outcrop, supported by a walking stick and staring into an alarming vista of jagged crags, scrubby trees, and mountaintops hidden in menacing fog. Painted around 1818, Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog is nothing less than a Wertherian statement of communion with the divine as well as a passionate veneration of the natural world and the spiritual awe it inspires.
Friedrich’s most famous painting is one of the keynote images of German Romanticism—an end-of-century movement that challenged the Enlightenment’s embrace of rationality and science. It also contains a hidden meaning, something of a secret fashion statement. As with many of Friedrich’s paintings of the period, the human subject is wearing a historical clothing style known as Altdeutsche Tracht (old German costume), whose knee-length jackets and baggy trousers were intended to recall the glory years of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, in the early 1500s. In the early 1800s, as Europe emerged from the carnage of the Napoleonic Wars, the adoption of these clothes signified a protest against centuries of imperial rule in Germany’s city-states and principalities. This was the heroic age of liberal nationalism to which Romanticism was perfectly aligned. “As long as we remain serfs to princes,” Friedrich himself wrote in 1814, “nothing great will ever happen.”
