77 3 Caspar David Friedrich Willow Struck by Lightning | 19 March 1812 Pencil, wash, watercolour on wove paper, 260 × 355 mm | Prague, Národní galerie, inv. DK 463 (G 660) 4 Caspar David Friedrich Mountain Landscape with Figure (Schmiedeberg Ridge) | 13 July 1810 Pencil, 260 × 360 mm Kunsthalle Mannheim, inv. G 445 (G 622) 5 Caspar David Friedrich Landscape Studies 9–12 May 1808 Dresden Sketchbook of 1807–1812, sheet 10 | CAT 97 (G 564) vanishing point].”7 Looking at Friedrich’s drawings, one wonders what exactly this ground line is supposed to mark. It can be found in his works from an early date and is often accompanied by the word “Vorgrund” (foreground), which also features in the German translation of Valenciennes (fig. 3).8 In Valenciennes’s treatise, it plays an important role because it is from this line that the distance to any buildings the artist wants to depict is measured. The distance, he states, should be three times the width of the buildings, for it is only from this distance that they would appear correct in perspective.9 Friedrich’s use of the ground line is a little different, although he, too, employed it as a marker of distance. It marks the line from which the artist has recorded the various elements/objects in the drawing – which is no different from Valenciennes – but Friedrich used it as the baseline for his system of rendering distances and spatial relationships, which his simple outline drawings could not in themselves convey. A case in point are his views of landscapes bordered in the distance by serried ranks of mountain ranges. While the overlaps of the silhouettes make it clear which mountains are closest to the viewer, they provide no clue to the distance between the individual ranges. Friedrich elucidated their spatial relationship with numbers decreasing from front to back (figs. 4, 5).10 3 4 5
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